How I Miss The North

here's some more unsolicited adult advice as someone in her 30s who knows there are a lot of twenty somethings and teens that follow her: if you're trying to build a new habit you really want, and are struggling, you have to break it down to the smallest building block possible. If you're failing, you haven't thought small enough. I know it's possible to hear stories of people who just snapped into new life mode one day by "just deciding", but truly what's happening there is a confluence of events and experiences that force the brain into some sort of epiphany. You cannot will an epiphany. It'll never work. For most times of your life, you will need to build habits intentionally, and that means not working against yourself and to set micro goals. like laughably tiny goals. because once that easy tiny goal is met, you can build off it, tiny goal after tiny goal until you reach your big goal.

so for example, if you want to be a morning person that gets up at ass crack dawn so that you can work out, eat brekkie, shower, and get to work at a leisurely pace, and you're not that person because you will hit your snooze button 800 times, you have to get the big picture goal out of your head. think smaller. "I want to get up 15 minutes earlier than I normally do." If you can't do that, make it 5 minutes. "I want to cook breakfast every day" hell no too big. "I want to eat something, anything, before I leave the house" hell yeah, fantastic. When you go to the grocery store to make sure there are things in the house for breakfast, if you keep buying bagels and microwave sandwiches that you ignore, you gotta think smaller. SMALLER. What's something so easy to eat that you'll never say no to. Is it a yogurt? Is it a handful of grapes? Is it a hostess ho ho? is it hot cheetos? FORGET the big picture of the fantasy put-together woman preparing a full nutritious meal that you'd be proud to admit to. Think only of the smallest goal you can achieve. If you know you can't say no to an ice cream sandwich, put a ton of ice cream sandwiches in your freezer and have one for breakfast every day until it's so instilled in you that you gotta get up to eat something you can start diversifying.

It sounds like, from the lack of habit place, that must take forever. But really it doesn't take too long to form the habit once the discipline kicks in. the trick is that you have to give your brain something easy to become disciplined to. If it's too hard, think easier and smaller. No one has to know. Literally no one in the gd world has to know that for 4 weeks when you were 22 you had an ice cream sandwich for breakfast every day. who cares. If it gets you eating oatmeal with fresh fruit in a few months who cares. you did it, yay. smaller, easier. if you can't do it, think smaller and easier. smaller!! EASIER!!! You are not thinking smaller and easier enough. break your brain thinking how small and easy you can go. SMALLER. EVEN SMALLER, SIS.

Do you think the people who design modern sewing machines in plastic cases ever feel insignificant because of it? knowing that they're making machines with the lifespan of a dog when they could (if they'd been born a few generations earlier) be making machines with the lifespan of a Galapagos tortoise?

Sometimes love isn't grand gestures or daily phone calls

Sometimes love is when my mother comes home from visiting family 7 hours away. Where I couldn't go. Because, because car ride are too much and I'm sick.

She comes home and tells me of my whole family crying about me when they were leaving. Wishing they could do something

Maybe love is when my cousin gifts me fabric and patterns because she knows I love sewing. Even if I can't right now.

Perhaps love is my aunt gifting me rolls of leather and upholstery fabric and 3 kilos of cherries for the same reason.

Love might be another cousin crying, wishing my mother to tell me she thinks about me every day but doesn't have the words.

These people, my blood, that never felt like family or close. That are so far away in the world and in life.

Perhaps life is in those small moments. And way more people care for you than you think. Even if you have no clue. And thought they'd abandoned you long ago.

Another good thing to come from this bummshit journey :)

People care, we are all just as awkward and lost for words. Give others the grace to be as awkward as you think yourself to be. They might surprise you

'Valkyrie' by Edward Robert Hughes, c. 1915.

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE - W.B. Yeats

I don't want quick and easy.

I will wait for a love that moves mountains. One that I would go to the end of the world for.

A love that I would've gone to war for in earlier times.

Hold each other in silence and stillness. Ankor eachother down in hail storms. Dig eachother out of snowstorms.

A love that is fierce and passionate. But gentle and caring.

For you, I'll wait.

Until then, I will love myself.

hi any life advice for 21yo

Don't date thirty-year-olds until you are at least 25.

Having a glass of water for every glass of alcohol will give you a 50% reduction in hangover viciousness.

Bad people will use your willingness to be quiet as a weapon against you. If someone's being awful to you and trusting you'll be quiet to keep from making waves, surprise them.

There is no physical object in the world that is worth as much as your honor.

Honor is not the same as dignity. Retaining one sometimes means leaving the other aside.

Don't have any sex you don't want to have; have as much as you want of the sex that you do, whether that's a lot, a little, or none at all. Nothing you can do to your own body is immoral, unless you're doing it as an act of self-punishment.

Food is morally neutral. You do not have to earn the right to eat calories. Fat and sugar keep your brain from eating itself.

Learning to sit still and breathe--in, in, in, hold, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out--can give you five feet of clear space around yourself in a maelstrom.

Find out how to make three good meals: A comfort meal you can make for just yourself relatively easily, a fancy meal you can use to wow a date, and a meal you can feed a bunch of people. All the other cooking can come later, but you can build a community on those three meals.

If you ever get to the point that things are so bleak you can see no other way forward but to die, make any other choice. If that means leaving everything you own and being a beach bum, or quitting your career, or taking up or leaving a religion, or deciding to bicycle across the country, so be it; living means more chances, dying means everything stops and you don't get to see any more interesting things. As you have not yet seen all the things that can interest you, it is better to live.

Jane Austen // Nizar Qabbani

I'm not ready for a relationship. I need this time alone.

But I long for letters. For discussions about books. Museum visits and afternoons spent in bookshops

For cups of tea and hot chocolate while curled up watching the rain.

For silence, and stillness and holding in front of a fire. The fire wood that we chopped.

Learning and building together.

I want someone capable. Someone calm and strong. Someone caring and kind.

I long for someone that can quiet my mind.

Someone that can keep up with me. That challenges me. That can hold space for me.

I long for someone that will love me for all the wildness of my soul.

Someone not scared by all I have to give.

With him I won't need to be small and tame

To live life that softly. Ans to create that beautifully

Salvatore Postiglione (1861–1906), Dante and Beatrice (detail)