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My fingers keep twitching at the keyboard, I have an urge to write, to say something, but all I have is paragraph thoughts. I think of the movie A Thousand Words and wonder if I’ve used up all my good ones. I like to have full posts, to have a topic, a beginning, middle and end. Something to round off each week. But this week, there’s nothing, so I’ve instead pulled paragraphs from thoughts I’ve jotted down over the last few weeks. This is emotion driven writing gracing your Sunday. See you next week with better words.
I look up to people who are like sunshine. To the people who care and who stay messy-hearted when the world may not be kind to them. I root for the people who are doing whatever they can to make it to tomorrow, the people who face the scarred versions of themselves each day and choose not to let the bitterness consume them. I look up to the people who embrace the softness of themselves when they’ve been given every reason to stand firm. I look up to the people who choose hope over anything else, and to those who shout love from rooftops. And, I look up to the people who feel things intensely and let themselves be that way — who fight to be better, to heal, to believe in the goodness, even when it hurts. I respect it so much because I know how much courage it takes to be that person and everyday I’m trying to be that person.
I think that listening to yourself takes an immense amount of courage. And I’m trying to do more of it. And everyday it tells you how to be, how to look, how to feel, how to be good, how to exist, how to eat, how to do everything and anything. What we don’t ever do is encourage ourselves to listen to the warmth, to nurture the embers that are within you. It’s a very tiring thing to find a piece of solitude, a piece of quiet when you’re pulled in every direction, for you to hear your own needs, to care for yourself when so many other demand your time and energy. I think it’s brave to do what feels right for you, to take only your decision into account. And I hope you do more of it. The world doesn’t need more selfishness, but there are times when it’s needed and I hope you know that it doesn’t make you a bad person.
“Be sad, but get up.” What nobody ever tells you is that self care sucks. It does. You can never tell me different. It’s not face masks and hot baths, it’s begrudgingly admitting to yourself that you’re wallowing in self-pity and that you have to get up, and make that phone call you’ve been avoiding, and brushing knots of of your hair, and showering, and going through the motions of caring for yourself. Most of time it involves confronting and overcoming doing something you’ve been avoiding.
There’s a weird element to growing up and it’s that people get different parts of you. And you have to make peace with it. The truth is, we’re forever evolving, and the people we were at 14 are different to who we were at 17 and 23 and 27. We haven’t always been good, healed, working on being better, people. Sometimes our pain made us act out. Whether it was intentional or not, planned or not, our fault or not, those memories are still tied to the people’s lives we’ve impacted. Some versions of you destroyed people you cared about. Some versions of you helped people learn how to heal and grow. Either way, we all played different roles in people’s lives. The same way many others played different roles in our life.
I’m taking a break from myself. I'm saying maybe I no longer have to be a work in progress. Can I be a finished piece, right here, right now? Can this be it? Can I let the things that bother me flow right on past? I wonder if it’s doable. I wonder if this demanding need to self-improve has done the opposite, instead driving me over the edge towards insanity. I wonder if it’s okay to just binge TV, if I can accept myself sitting around for hours doing nothing. I’m telling myself it’s okay that I don’t make the bed till five o’clock, and that when the brain gets a bit busy, it’s fine that stupid memes are the answer to it. I know self-improvement is the new thing for us to latch onto, that choosing to accept yourself as is can be a red flag but I hope you know, that the you that obsesses over the little things and sometimes eats cereal for dinner, is a finished piece.