Aspiring to Inspire

for as much as studyblr may have its faults, it’s a pretty sizable online space that tells young girls that the absolute coolest thing you can do is be smart and work hard and believe in yourself and i think that’s pretty great

This! all of this! writing is like trying to heard cats.its frustrating but also a blast at the same time.

Some people can't wrap their mind around doing a thing because you enjoy the process, not just so you have something you can use to milk money out of other people.

there are an awfully lot of people out there who don't want to be writers they want to have written.

Stephen King used to talk about how he didn't remember writing Cujo because the cocaine had done most of the work, and to be honest, that was the best anti-drug PSA I ever received. Don't do drugs, kids, or you'll forget doing the thing that makes you happiest in the world world.

the epic highs and lows of things that don't really matter to anyone but you

you don't owe anything to anyone but also you owe everything to everyone. maybe you were too harsh to that guy but maybe he crossed the line first and it would have been ridiculous to expect you to put in the effort that he clearly didn't care to match. maybe you overextended yourself for your friend and she wasn't reciprocating enough but maybe you were just being generous to someone in a tough spot and it was the right thing. all of your accomplishments are your own but you could never have done them without the aid of everyone else around you. no man is an island but the rest of the archipelago still doesn't get to tell you that you have to dress a certain way because otherwise it icks them out. idk man. this stuff is nuanced and has to be understood on a case-by-case person-by-person basis and you can't really make grand sweeping statements about it in the space of a social media post. figure it out for yourself.

formative years? aren’t they all?

at some point you have to realize that you actually have to read to understand the nuance of anything. we as a society are obsessed with summarization, likely as a result of the speed demanded by capital. from headlines to social media (twitter being especially egregious with the character limit), people take in fragments of knowledge and run with them, twisting their meaning into a kaleidoscope that dilutes the message into nothing. yes, brevity is good, but sometimes the message, even when communicated with utmost brevity, requires a 300 page book. sorry.

Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being." — Robert Anton Wilson