I'm Not Ready For A Relationship. I Need This Time Alone.

hi any life advice for 21yo

Don't date thirty-year-olds until you are at least 25.

Having a glass of water for every glass of alcohol will give you a 50% reduction in hangover viciousness.

Bad people will use your willingness to be quiet as a weapon against you. If someone's being awful to you and trusting you'll be quiet to keep from making waves, surprise them.

There is no physical object in the world that is worth as much as your honor.

Honor is not the same as dignity. Retaining one sometimes means leaving the other aside.

Don't have any sex you don't want to have; have as much as you want of the sex that you do, whether that's a lot, a little, or none at all. Nothing you can do to your own body is immoral, unless you're doing it as an act of self-punishment.

Food is morally neutral. You do not have to earn the right to eat calories. Fat and sugar keep your brain from eating itself.

Learning to sit still and breathe--in, in, in, hold, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out--can give you five feet of clear space around yourself in a maelstrom.

Find out how to make three good meals: A comfort meal you can make for just yourself relatively easily, a fancy meal you can use to wow a date, and a meal you can feed a bunch of people. All the other cooking can come later, but you can build a community on those three meals.

If you ever get to the point that things are so bleak you can see no other way forward but to die, make any other choice. If that means leaving everything you own and being a beach bum, or quitting your career, or taking up or leaving a religion, or deciding to bicycle across the country, so be it; living means more chances, dying means everything stops and you don't get to see any more interesting things. As you have not yet seen all the things that can interest you, it is better to live.

Why did you open that door

I'm not in love with him

Why can't I stop thinking.

About him, about what could've been, about what we have

I'm not in love with him. We were at 14. But not now.

Until we admitted that we both sometimes winder about what could've been. Whay could've been had we met later in life. What could have been were he not in a relationship now.

Those thoughts were pushed far away, every time. Now they are here. The lingering moments. The split second we hold on closer when we hug.

I broke his heart at 15. We weren't in good places and needed to grow and heal. We couldn't do that together. It took him four and a half years to get over. To stop wishing it were different. And still, he was there for me when we started talking again.

He was the one I texted when I woke up in the hospital. He was the one cheering me on when I made the smallest steps in my recovery. He made me realise what I was missing, in both my last relationships.

Even when I had no intention of being with him.

And now...

I don't know if we would work out. If we would be happy. Yes, it would be easy to fall into. We've known eachother so long. But there are so many conversations we never had. We didn't cross that line. We still haven't.

And we won't.

Because he is in a relationship. And he says he is happy and building a future with her.

If he's truly happy, then I am happy for him

The last thing i want to do is hurt him

And I'm not walking into heartbreak eyes wide open.

Besides, the relationship we do have is so dear to me. I love him as a person.

But I'm not in love with him. And at that I shall lay it to rest

So, dear hypothetical parallel world, take good care of us. He may always be my "what if"

As a blue collar woman, I could love nothing more

My new favorite hobby is weaponizing my Mom Friend status against my male coworkers, of which there are a surplus because I am A Woman in The Trades. It's hilarious to me. I have been the Mom Friend my entire life and working construction means I've expanded my territory from Mom Friend to Site Mom by virtue of always knowing where things are and also having pain meds and general life advice if you need any. Do you know what happens when you are so aggressively mom-shaped despite not even being 30? All the young guys I work with have subconsciously put me in the mom category of their brains. Do you know what that means? I live and work in the American South. These guys have been raised both socially and culturally to Respect All Mom Figures and I've snuck myself into that classification like a cuckoo in the nest. Like, listen, I can take it and dish it out with the best of them and I'm "one of the guys" 97% of the time, but I have my limits. If they're being dicks to each other and I'm tired of it all I gotta do is look really disapproving and scold them with some classic Mom-isms and it will stop them dead in their tracks. It's a total short circuit of their brains. Not one of these guys has withstood my telling them "manners are free and it costs nothing to be kind." Sometimes I just give them a look and say "Really?" in that tone of voice all moms use when they're completely fed up with you and it makes them straighten up in 10 seconds flat, guaranteed. It's psychological warfare of the highest order. One time I jokingly pulled out a "I'm so disappointed in you" after hearing this barely 18 year old tell some story about being obnoxious in an online game voice chat and it was very obviously a joke but somehow it rattled him so much AT WORK that he later told me he stopped doing it. It's a perfect storm of factors and literally all of them are in my favor. Should I care more about not enforcing gender stereotypes, especially in such a male-dominated field? Probably, but let's be real, the power has completely gone to my head.

To simply enjoy warm summer days. Enjoying the shimmering of the sun on a lake. Laying in the moss. The smell of blueberries in afternoon shade.

Pulling on a warm sweater at the campfire when the night finally cools down. Millions of stars above. The rustling of an owl.

Just be, just exist. Romance with myself. Magic in books and warmth all around.

Motherfucking peace and magic. Someday I'll find my way back to it

I want motherfucking magic in life. I want romance. I want peace. I want beauty and softness. I want love and warmth.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.

“A traveller I am, and a navigator, and everyday I discover a new region within my soul.”

Khalil Gibran

this will be the year I finally convince everyone to abandon New Year's resolutions in favour of Yule Boasting, the clearly superior tradition

I have been ripped from the life I was building for myself once again. The dreams, the places I was getting to know, the people I was meeting, the future I was walking towards are gone.

My own body is fighting me. And my brain often times does not work. Without my brain, and ideas and dreams, who am I?

For my mother always described me as a Tsunami. Try to stop a Tsunami, is how she'd describe me when I'd had an idea. These days I feel like little more than a puddle.

These days are also the days that I unexpectedly get to spend months with my family. I get to go to my brother's graduation. I'm not halfway across the continent.

These days I get to enjoy my mother's cooking. I get to tell her more about out who I've become. And I find out about her.

These days my father, who has never been good with words, and who never actually wanted children, offers to pay for my motorcycle license once I feel better. If it helps, he says, I'll gladly pay for it.

These days, when my legs shake and I can suddenly barely walk, my dad will grab me. Hold me up. And pretend to dance with me through the living room.

These days I will be laughing so hard I cry. Instead of bawling my eyes out.

I do that too, sometimes. Because it's. Not. Fair.

But these days, and these moments would've never happened were I not sick.

It'll get better. And even if it doesn't, I can still make a happy life for myself