i was told there’d be cake.

It’s ok to be lost in life and just not know not knowing what you’re passionate about, where you want to live, what you want to do, where you want to go— or what lies next. As a society, we standardize going to school, discovering a passion, getting a job, finding a partner, getting married, having kids, working hard to earn an honest living. but what about when shit just doesn’t go that way? You really don’t know. We end up not knowing where to start and we seclude ourselves. You feel as though you’re a disappointment to your family, as if you failed in life. You haven’t, it’s okay to not know, to be lost. You have your whole life ahead of you to figure things out. Patience truly is a virtue. There are no time limits on life. If you want it bad enough, life has a way of making it happen. There’s no need to rush, don’t let the world fixate the narrative of having all your shit together by a certain time. As long as you have goals and you are actively working towards them, you are on the right timeline. Therefore every moment really is the most important moment that's ever happened, including this one.

I don’t think that every villain in the world actually thinks they’re being a good guy, but I do think that everybody creates a value system that justifies the actions they’re taking, and and I think there’s a difference between those two things. Not everybody believes that they’re on the side of righteousness, but everybody has a way of justifying the actions they’re taking. Not every villain has to be a misunderstood hero, and in fact I think there are a lot of instances throughout history of people who were obviously doing the wrong thing and probably had an understanding of that on some level, but had some rationale or justification for it. A lot of villains in literature and media have these weird, Thanos-esque philosophies of what it is that they’re trying to do, and I think human motivation tends to come from more primal places than that. So a lot of the villains I write about can be brilliant or clever (and, in fact, probably should be), but their motivation tends to be primal. They wanna be rich, they wanna have power, they wanna live forever. There’s something deep down that is, when you break it down, not too complex. If you look at the real world, the people that are doing bad stuff don’t need complex motivations. They want to be successful, they want prestige, they want to be admired. They have a hard time accepting that other people can screw them over, so they beat them to it. Evil is no fun, though. I believe in the cliches and trivialities of it. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard.