Things that give me hope
How self-belief drives my outlook
Warm weather gives off a hope that lower temperatures steal.
Unless I’m on the slopes.
I continue to head out to the bars, believing somehow they’ll be a good time. But they are draining; I think the only thing worse is homework.
It’s not just that I don’t much like staying up late anymore, or that I don’t like spending the money I make during the week on what is, in essence, poison, or that I prefer not waking up with a hangover.
It is that, in my experience, the social atmosphere at drinking establishments is utterly hopeless. There is no depth, no substance, no connection. The music is not only indiscernible and insufferable but loud enough to incite some permanent hearing loss.
We all want to meet someone—as in romantically—in the midst of some great conflict, or at least, in a bold sort of way (certainly not on a dating app).
It’s like we’re looking for a sign from the universe . . . That this isn’t like everything else. This will take you out of your mundanity.
We don’t want the future to be an already laid-out concrete sidewalk that’s been walked a hundred million times already. We don’t want to spend every single night on the couch eating ice cream.
There’s just something so boring about the way most people meet these days.
We’ve largely come to prefer convenience. Nobody wants to put themselves on the line anymore. We just want to open a dating app or get drunk at a bar. We want it to be easy.
What good is romance if it’s easy?
And hey, I’m not exempt from this critique. Because save for the few times I’ve embarrassed myself in a failed attempt to get a number, I’ve not made a habit of being bold.
But I’ll tell you what: I’ve experienced few greater feelings than the moments after I put my ass on the line.
And I think the more foreign these risks become, the less I feel I’ll ever encounter that great conflict.
I’m sitting in this cafe right now, and just about every single person in line is on their phone.
It’s not a hit; it’s just an observation.
I tend to apply how I feel in any particular moment to my entire life. As in, how I feel now is how I’ve always felt and will always feel. If I’m living well now, then I’ve always lived well, and the bad times were worthwhile because they brought me to these good times. And if I’m living poorly now, then my life has always been a tragedy, and the good times were just, unbeknownst to me at the time, fleeting.
Emotions muddy our worldview. It is a superpower to not let your lenses be colored by how you feel.
I’ve not always been so good at this, and I think it would do me well to learn how to simply look at my emotions rather than embody them because while they do signal things, they can be very misleading if misinterpreted . . .
To be led by signals is to be a follower, not a forger.
The sense that life hasn’t started, or that it’ll never start, or that you’re waiting for something to happen—something good—reflects some lack within.
And while I once thought this lack stemmed from the past, I now know it stems from a disbelief in the present.
Because we only feel this way when we feel incapable . . . When we don’t believe in ourselves to go out in the world and do what we must.