Hey There, Noodle...

10 Benefits of Having a Cat (Illustrations by Lingvistov)

(via bl-ossomed)

The past three months have been an enormous, suffocating gel of the exact same sentence - ‘oh, you must’ve been so scared travelling to the other side of the world as a young eighteen year old girl!’. No. You know what is petrifying though? The thought of graduating at eighteen and looking towards my peers for guidance, following them down paths so well trodden that they may as well be raging canals of will-less wanderers. Being washed back into the suffocating abyss of education without passion, connection, thirst. Spending my youth crying over B+ grades and friends who aren’t just that. Drinking away my scant money, and memory, and health; my body becoming a tangled wasteland of alco-pops and thick, jet black tar. Being scared to go out after dark because of the way my body curves and caves inwards; crevices that were once so sacred becoming just another thrill. Starting life with a five-digit debt hanging over my head. Being a slave to the system; the further into decade three, the more relentless the remarks of perfect child-bearing age, and 'surely you’ve got a partner by now?’, and awkward high school reunions - a sticky hall filled with overgrown kids with big titles and bigger paychecks and the biggest rocks dripping from their left hands. I don’t care if Dan’s become a top lawyer, or if Molly is a news reporter, or if Lily’s married a billionaire from the US. I want to say that I lived my life as my own - not for my friends, family, or society, but for myself. I want to outgrow my fear of telling people how great I think they are, and my fear of making something less than perfect, and my fear of failure. I don’t want to live a lie, I just want to LIVE 🌟

sunday is for switzerland, part five by manyfires on Flickr.