Live by Faith not by Sight

Carry around a water bottle to your classes. When you’re bored in class, you’ll drink from it, so it’s the best way to stay hydrated. Get a backpack with mesh side pockets to fit your bottle or buy a carabiner so you can clip your bottle to your bag. If you wear lipstick/chapstick/lip gloss, keep a bendy straw in your bottle so it won’t mess up your makeup.

Also carry around a bottle of pain killers (tylenol, advil, tums, etc.) so you don’t have to make frequent trips to the nurses office. Headaches, muscle aches, and stomachaches happen, so be prepared.

If you wear contacts, always bring your glasses to school with you (along with a glasses cleaning cloth).

Keep a small first aid kit in your bag as well (especially band aids).

It is perfectly okay to take a mental health day. If feigning a physical illness is what it takes to take a mental health day, do it. Your mental health is more important than trying to skirt around society’s stigma against mental illness.

If you wear a lot of makeup, bring makeup remover. Makeup runs on hot or rainy days, and sometimes it just needs to come off.

If someone calls you a hooker or a whore, be flattered. They’re saying that it looks like someone would pay to have sex with you. Take it as a compliment and move on, because there’s nothing wrong with looking sexy.

Wear deodorant. Please.

Don’t be afraid to eat lunch alone, but if you do, bring headphones. Eating alone is a lot easier if you can pretend that you’re in a movie or a music video.

so I’ve been in a relationship for 5 years now. And I see a lot of posts about how people think relationships mean having butterflies forever, your heart beating faster when they walk into a room, about cuddling together every night, legs intertwined, that you’d be so happy to live together you’d sleep on a double bed with each other every night.

And its not really like that, at least not to me.

You stop getting the butterflies when you live together. Your heart no longer speeds up when you see them, but instead, everything calms down. When youre in the room with them, you feel calm, and secure. When you cuddle them you feel your heart beat slow, and the sound of their breathing carry you towards comfort. It doesnt feel like a roller coaster anymore, it feels like home.

You don’t sleep curled up with each other every night, legs twisted between theirs so tight its hard to tell where yours begin and theirs end.

Instead, you sleep comfortably, side by side, sometimes facing different directions. But every night, you find yourself scooting backwards on the bed so you bump into them. You snuggle against their arm, or stroke their hair as they fall asleep. There are nights when my boyfriend, in his sleep, reaches around me and pulls me to him, like a child with his teddybear, like I am his comfort.

 In the wee hours of the morning before the dawn breaks, when the world is blue and you see through cracked eyes, you curl into their chest and inhale their scent before drifting back to sleep. 

Kisses aren’t always romantic and firey anymore. But there are so much more of them now. There are cold kisses when you’re eating ice cream in the summer, and sticky kisses over breakfast pancakes. There’s “im leaving now” kisses, and “one more kiss before you go” kisses. There’s sleepy morning kisses before work, when you don’t remember the alarm going off but instead the press of their lips against yours is what brings you into the day.

There’s kisses before sleep, and, you are so sweet with the things you do kisses. There’s kisses because you treat animals so tenderly, and I’m so glad i’m with you and not someone else kisses. There’s quick kisses in the aisles of the grocery store, when its loud and you gravitate together, when instead of having your own personal space and their own personal space, its both of yours together, and you step into their chest to take up less area together. 

You don’t always text each other with confessions of love and care like you used to, because that’s a given now, and you’ve moved on to quirky inside jokes about the life youve built together. You share looks of exasperation and amusement in public, your own little world against the outside one. 

Relationships aren’t always a fairy tale. They’re not always fireworks and sparks, at least, after the start.

But they are a quiet rhythm and hum of love and care. It’s not a fire in your soul, but one in your hearth, keeping you warm and comfortable, comforting you as you drowsily drift into sleep.