You’re Responsible For Your Own Development. You Don’t Have To Wait Until Others Forgive Or Validate

“ Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”

Viktor E. Frankl, excerpt from ‘Man's Search for Meaning’

People need to realize that not everybody has the time to message back. People have lives outside of social media. Said person isn’t ignoring you they might just be busy.

There is nothing wrong with your body or your age. Capitalism, media and corporations want you to feel bad about yourself so you'll be a better consumer and customer and make them tons of money. Loving yourself and filtering the media you consume is the sweetest form of rebellion.

please make sure that wherever you’re at in life, you don’t treat it like a transitory period. don’t waste your college years wishing to already be graduated & have a job. don’t waste your single years wishing for someone to be in love with. if/when those things come, they will come in due time and they will be good. but there is nothing like looking back and feeling empty because you wasted literal years ignoring what you had because you were hoping for something better. while it’s important to better yourself and reach for your goals, don’t neglect the present because that’s where you are now and it’s your now that determines your future. 

me, closing document: this is awful and pointless

random commenter on ao3: this made me smile (:

me, opening document: guess i’ll write 50k more

“I don’t want to be happy. I want to have you by my side. To have you by my sadness and my depression. To have you. Your love. Your care. That is much much precious than happiness. I am a nothing and a no one. But I am everything in your hands. So hold me.”

— Mohammed Zarir, from a letter to T.M. (2020)

Don’t hold the younger you to the standards you hold yourself to today. You didn’t know as much. You were in a different headspace, with different things affecting and scaring you, facing challenges that seemed big at the time. Maybe you were even lonelier. What’s important is that you know better now, and you know more now. That’s something to move forward with, not something to curse the past with.

When things are coming up (new workplace, a trip, a presentation) they feel scary sometimes because you’re not ready for them. The biggest mistake you can make is to think that you not being ready is just a state you’re in forever, when in reality it’s often just a matter of time. If you’re afraid, try not to use it as an excuse but as an indication that there’s room for improvement. Until the time comes, figure out what you can do in preparation, where you can ask for help, what you can practice and improve. You are dynamic: you have the ability to grow into the version of yourself who, despite the fact that they’re still a little nervous, is ready for whatever’s coming.

Our minds are naturally really good at envisioning worst case scenarios and worrying about problems before they’ve ever happened. And since it comes from your own head, of course it’ll feel like truth. But the actual probability of something going exactly the way you think it will is very low. Next time you keep yourself awake with nightmares conjured up by your fear, try to think of it like this, “I cannot predict the future, much less in the state I’m in right now,” and trust that the reality of things will be much more indifferent (and maybe even much kinder) to you than you are to yourself.