have not healed from the things that happened/did not happen from six months ago. just because the year is ending it does not mean your grief is too.
don't have any "fun" NYE plans to ring in the new year. this life is yours to live across days and months and years, and you can celebrate days other than the ones heavily marketed and shoved down your throat to shroud you in severe FOMO.
have no resolutions or goals for 2024 laid out in elaborate lists or shared on social media or with your friends. you are braving through this life trying to do your best every day and hold the fort and so of course you know, deep down you know what is needed from you for you going forward and of course you are going to work in that direction. good luck love.
have not become a "better" version of yourself by any of the tangible or conventional measures. that kind of bettering is mostly to serve others, not yourself.
are not happy with yourself/your life as it is now. you're a work-in-progress, remember? and if you're progressing in a direction you do not like, then it's time to change the blueprints and the strategy.
take time off social media around this time to protect your mental health and whatever little joy you have managed to keep.
don't want to spend too much time reflecting on how this past year went and doing various forms of 2023-wrapped. again, it's your life. you can also revisit this year in memories and pictures and feelings whenever you'd like. it's not like you don't still visit 2012, 2017, and 2022, right?
feel disconnected from your friends, family, lover. I know this is "ideally" a time to be celebrated with your loved ones. but life is not ideal, is it? it's just life. and if right now you are not feeling the love, the joy, or just don't have the headspace or social energy to engage , that's alright.
are finding comfort in simpler things like a TV show from the 90s or that book you first read at sixteen or that slice of strawberry cake or a random post like this you come across.
don't feel hopeful, encouraged, or excited for 2024. given everything that's happened in the last couple of years, on the macro and micro level, it's only natural for you to feel weary as well as wary. when the good things happen, when the healing happens, when things begin working in your favour over time, you will automatically feel all those things. it's okay if until then you choose to be neutral.
I love you so much I hope we get reborn as housecats who sleep together like puzzle pieces
on shame and yearning (pt.2)
Blythe Baird, from If My Body Could Speak; “The way I was taught to love”
[Text ID: “Half daughter, / half apology, all fire and the wrong kind of love.”]
Me trying to explain to my parents that the fact that I can taste oranges in my dreams proves that all sensations live not in the organs but in an eternal pool of imagination available to us all and that personal reality is not fixed but based on the truths that we select and appropriate
a love where people inspire each other to live (studio ghibli love)
The Farewell (2019)
All I need is for someone to gently cup my face and tell me I'm not as doomed as I feel.
It’s almost as if nobody wants to admit that they might not be prepared to do the work it takes to love somebody. And it can be laborious. To be intimate with someone who is flawed (which is the standard) requires us to expose our own flaws. We don’t talk about the heavy responsibility of that. We don’t talk about how we’re too lazy or too cowardly sometimes. We instead accuse love of being elusive. It isn’t. It is omnipresent. It asks us to be better people. And sometimes we flat out refuse.
I want to finish university in three years and I want to be 20 and move to Boston or Cambridge or Rome. I want to have a house of my own, one that I can call home. I want a wishbone drying on the windowsill of my kitchen, just in case I wake up and realize I’ve chosen wrong. I want to brew coffee in the morning and drink it in the expensive china my mum bought when I was 16. I want to dye my hair blonde at 19 and dye it again at 20 because I want to be okay with not being those blondes who always have fun. I want a navy blue or an emerald green or a tangerine orange sofa to lie on, on the nights the bed feels too heavy and the kitchen floor feels more cynical than I do. I want a pink wall and a yellow one. I want there to be a candy bowl on the center table, always. I want to wear slip dresses and long, heavy boots under big coats. I want to like my flushed nose and red cherry-stained lips. I want to get a million little tattoos. And a piercing or two; or four. I want to love but god, love is a phantom that dances just beyond my reach.
“you’re so sensitive” i was born with a poet’s soul. bitch