cracking wise
Let's get drunk and fight.
"Most of the gay men I know didn’t come out to themselves until their late twenties. There’s not a how to book for gay teens about how to navigate romance and adulthood etc, often they’re taught a different playbook (Repress, internalize and wish to be invisible so not to disappoint or draw attention). There’s not really a mechanism in place that socializes gay people to even know what to expect with relationships because while straight adults can and often do go to their friends and family for advice or validation its not often the case with gay people due to social stigma."
"Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people."
10 Ways to Simplify your Life
1. Don’t try to read other peoples’ minds and don’t expect others to be able to read yours. Communicate if it is important to you.
2. Don’t expect to be friends with everyone. We all are different – and we all like different things. Instead, invest your time in a few good friends. That’s all you really need to feel happy and fulfilled.
3. Create a budget and live within your means. Accruing lots of debt will only cause you to feel stressed.
4. Kill off the monster of jealousy – and only compare yourself with yourself.
5. Organize your clutter and get rid of excess stuff. It will leave you feeling calmer, and will save you lots of time!
6. Stay on the sidelines and don’t get drawn into pointless scenes and dramas in other peoples’ lives (unless it’s a crisis – and you know you ought to help).
7. Finish what you’ve started - and then do something else.
8. Treat every person you meet with respect, and err on the side of being gentle and kind.
9. Accept that there are things that you can’t change or control – and focus on those things that you can change or control.
10. Admit when you were wrong, then say you’re sorry, and move on.
How to be Unhappy
1. Complain all the time (It will make you miserable and drive your friends away.)
2. Bury your head in the sand and deny that you have problems (Avoidance won’t make your problems disappear!)
3. Constantly compare yourself with others (You’ll always feel inferior if you compare your weaknesses to others’ strengths.)
4. Allow yourself to continually worry about the future. (Most “what ifs” never actually happen.)
5. Keep hanging out with people who put you down (That will totally destroy your self-esteem).
6. Keep on doing things you dislike or hate. (You only live once – and we each have different gifts – so it’s crucial that you try to invest in what you love.)
7. Get involved, and stay, in relationships that are bad for you, and which make you unhappy. (You’ll end up hating and devaluing yourself, and convincing yourself that you can’t have more than that.)
8. Try to change others instead of yourself (We can’t change others – we can only influence them; but we do have the power to change ourselves.)
9. Be a people pleaser. (We can’t make others happy all the time. Also, when you give up your power you feel worthless inside.)
10. Look for your worth and value in “things” (Stuff can’t satisfy us or bring true happiness.)
"The more you document your own life, the more you check in, you tweet, the more you post photos of what you did last night, the more you do all of this stuff, or even in my case, the more you listen for little lines of dialogue that can make their way into stories, the more you photograph moments, in a way, the more you start to step out of those moments, and if you do that too much, you become a spectator to your own life."
How to Overcome Emotional Numbness
Emotional numbness is where we experience mild to severe feelings of detachment – so it’s hard for us to access normal feelings any more. This includes both negative and positive emotions as you can’t decide to shut just one feeling off. Common causes of emotional numbness include different stresses or traumas … from receiving bad news … to being in an accident … to recovering from the death of someone close … to a relationship breakup … to feeling deeply humiliated or ashamed. So how do you overcome emotional numbness and live with emotional integrity again?
1. The first thing to do is to choose to respect and allow all emotions – no matter what they are. Also, try and grasp the fact that suppressing your emotions will likely lead to heartache and problems later on (as they’ll possibly resurface at inappropriate times.)
2. Try and understand that feelings and actions are two very different, and unrelated, things. That is, you can still feel angry without becoming violent – so don’t assume your feelings will affect your actions, too.
3. Try to figure out the message behind intense emotions. Are you angry because you’ve been hurt, used or abused? Are you sad because deep down you feel that you’ll never find true love - as you can’t believe that anyone will love you for yourself?
4. Take that risk – and find the courage to ask someone for help. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know that there are those who genuinely love you like – like a true and caring friend. The important thing is not to try and isolate yourself, and to make the extra effort to prioritise self-care. You need other people to help you work through this.
5. Seek professional help if the symptoms persist. There are excellent counsellors and therapists out there who have the training and skills to help you to get free – so you can live a more fulfilling and normal, healthy life.
6. Be patient within yourself. It’s likely to take time – as you will need to learn to trust, and take some barriers down, so you can be yourself again (and that is often hard to do when you’ve experience hurt and pain).
Do you tend to put up walls?
Many people find it hard to trust other people so they put up walls instead of trying to build connections. This can also lead to social anxiety and numerous problems in relationships. People who fall into this category display many of the following traits:
· They see others as being unconnected, different and separate from them.
· They constantly worry about what other people think of them – and they expect to be judged in a negative way.
· When they meet someone for the first time, they obsess over creating the right impression rather than forming a meaningful connection.
· They hold back from sharing their thoughts, views and anything personal about themselves until they feel really safe with people they don’t know.
· They are slow at giving others their trust. They will only do this once the person has proven to them that they are worthy of being given that trust.
· They are slow to warm up to people, and slow at feeling comfortable and at ease around them.
· They tend to present a false front, and wear a mask, when they’re around other people. This is different from how they act when they’re on their own (or when they’re with close friends and family).
· They tend to see the world as a cold, unfriendly place where you constantly have to watch your back – as people are malicious, are likely to hurt you, will take advantage of you, or rip you off.
· Because of that, they constantly question others’ motives and intentions – as they can’t be sure that they won’t do them any harm.
"Some will love you for who you are; others will love the mask you wear."
6 Types of Loneliness
There are 6 main types of loneliness:
1. Interpersonal loneliness: This is the result of losing a significant, or intimate, relationship.
2. Social loneliness: This is where a person is on the fringes of a group, excluded from a group, or is actively rejected.
3. Cultural loneliness: This is where a person belongs to a different culture and feels that they don’t fit, or belong, in the new culture.
4. Intellectual loneliness: This is where a person feels intellectually, or educationally, out of synch with their peers, their family or their social group.
5. Psychological loneliness: This is where a person has experienced a trauma that separates them out from others around them. That is, it’s something other people can’t fully understand.
6. Existential or cosmic loneliness: This is an isolating loneliness experienced by a person who is facing death.
Early Relationships, Not Brainpower, Key to Adult Happiness (Science Daily)
via Science Daily:
Social connection is a more important route to adult well-being than academic ability.
Positive social relationships in childhood and adolescence are key to adult well-being, according to Associate Professor Craig Olsson from Deakin University and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia, and his colleagues. In contrast, academic achievement appears to have little effect on adult well-being. The exploratory work, looking at the child and adolescent origins of well-being in adulthood, is published online in Springer’s Journal of Happiness Studies…
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK
You guys.
I’m really upset that Dr. Drew has become so ridiculous. My parents never spoke to me about sex because they just assumed that I wasn’t having it. (I wasn’t.) But I learned a lot about sex and relationships and condoms and how to protect myself emotionally and physically and “safe words” and sexual abuse and the pill from staying up on Friday nights flipping through Sassy and listening to Loveline when I was 13.
And to think that Dr. Drew was the most sex-positive person I knew at 13. Crazy.
On the point of relationships.
What’s the point of relationships? If the initial high is temporary and then you stick together until you hate each other so much that you cheat or break up, then what’s the point? Is there ever a time when people find someone they really love?
The human condition is a fun ride, but don’t ever forget that we’re all just a bunch of talking meat wrapped around a sack of warm shit programmed to eat, sleep, and fuck.We’re social animals with a biological imperative to reproduce. That’s it. That’s all. Love is a neurochemical response with a shelf life long enough to perpetuate the species.
And hey, I don’t wanna hear you complaining about it either, because quite frankly, you’re one lucky motherfucker to have air in your lungs and the opportunity to be confused by it at all.
The last breath you just took is one more than a hundred billion human beings who came before you will ever get to take again, and one day, the last breath you just took will be the last breath you’ll ever take.
That day is the point of relationships, that day when you cease to fucking exist, because it’s guaranteed, my friend. This shit all ends, so cram as much love, joy, and shout-it-from-the-rooftops happiness as you possibly can into whatever time you can make for yourself.
Meet as many interesting people as you can. Make as many friends as you can. Fall in love as many times as you can. Fuck if it hurts sometimes. You’re one of the lucky ones who’s still breathing.
All we have in this world is relationships with other people. At this stage in our evolution, nothing else matters.
need this on my blog.
(Source: dearcoquette)
