A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.
this fucks me up every single time
I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.
After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.
She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.
Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.
The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.
The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.
Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.
I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.
no one tells you how much of life takes practice. not just writing, painting, running, singing, etc, but practicing how to make friends. how to make the right ones. getting practiced at how to be a good friend, a good sibling, a good person. practice identifying when people haven’t earned that. learning to recognize your right to rage and, eventually, how to offer mercy. so much of life is muscle memory, and i’ve begun to realize there are so many more parts of ourselves to flex and stretch and strengthen than those we’re taught in anatomy lessons
A lot of bad media, bad teachers, bad parents and society at large has convinced that if you don’t have your shit at least 70% together by the age 25 you might as well be dead. And it’s funny because a lot of these folks do not give us the tools to meet this deadline ourselves; it’s just expected to happen.
And most of those people didn’t/don’t have their shit together by that age, either. So many are in a phase where they think they have their shit permanently together and they have it figured out but a decade later they’re getting a divorce or changing careers or what have you and realizing that they didn’t actually have their shit as together as they thought they did.
So much of life is realizing there is no actual point at which you have your shit together and live happily ever after. You will have different amounts of your shit gathered and properly stored at different times, and just as you rein in a new shit one of the old ones will escape and run wild and that’s okay. Nobody ever has all of their shit permanently together, and you’ll be happier if you learn to appreciate the shit you do have together at any given time while not beating yourself up for the shit that’s not together. And maybe even to enjoy the process of getting it together when you can (sometimes that’s not possible, but sometimes it is). It’s that practice the OP is talking about. You’re always developing.
tips for what to do after a really long cry because you’re probably feeling all kinds of exhausted and drained and i don’t want that for you in the slightest:
take a shower and change all of your clothes even your socks and underwear. this is the first step to everything.
pour yourself a big, cold glass of water and drink it. all of it. once you’re done, get yourself a refill. this will boost u physically and emotionally instantly please trust me.
grab a snack, something light that you don’t have to wait to prepare. i recommend a pudding cup, a piece of fruit, yogurt, a popsicle, or some crackers.
get under the covers. turn on something - tv, a movie, music, anything distracting. or consider calling a friend or talking to anyone nearby, even your sibling the next room over!!
know that you are loved. you are important. you mean more than you know right now, more than you will maybe ever know. you are worth all the stars in the sky. you deserve to feel good.
please make sure you stay super hydrated afterwards if you can’t during. the body has a funny way of punishing you via headache for being sad and you don’t deserve that, so drink<333
Here’s the orbital period of our solar system’s 8 major planets (how long it takes each to travel around the sun). Their size is to scale and their speed is accurate relative to Earth’s. The repetition of each GIF is proportional to their orbital period. Mercury takes less than 3 months to zoom around Sol, Neptune takes nearly 165 years.
fuck this gifset do you know how long i sat here waiting for fucking neptune to drag its lazy ass into the frame
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