mack smiles

i say yay outloud too like this isn't just my internet persona this is real me

just thinking about his dark materials and how lyra can read the golden compass perfectly as a child, but as she gains more experience — as she truly experiences the world and what it means to live and lose — her natural, effortless interpretation of the compass fades away. it’s not that she can’t read it, it’s that the pure childlike interpretation of it is buried under all these adult experiences. and how she has to then teach herself how to do it all over again, but this time not through instinct but study and diligence and critical thought. and how that’s a good thing because it means she actually understands it more deeply.

“Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s research tells us that emotions like awe and wonder do not just feel good in the moment. They literally broaden our thinking and build long-term psychological resilience. People who regularly experience awe are more creative, more connected, and less susceptible to the feeling that everything is about to fall apart. Awe is a biological reset button, and four humans went to the moon and pushed it for all of us, and your body knew what to do with that before you maybe had words for it.”

"Here’s what happened. Four humans got into a rocket and went to the moon, farther from Earth than any humans have ever traveled in the history of our species. And they were so good at it, so genuinely moved by it, and so articulate about what they were seeing and feeling, that millions of people who have been running on anxiety and dread for the last eleven years just stopped for a moment and finally exhaled."

sense of agency is a skill truly........ it takes work convincing yourself that you have to make moves if you dont want life to spontaneously happen to you instead of having some saying in what happens in it and if you have self destructive tendencies on top of that, it takes trust in yourself to almost blindly believe that it actually matters that you have power over your own life

the appeal of spike is that he is simultaneously an annoying ass leather wearing bad boy vampire and the most sopping wet lover boy loser failure this world has ever seen