Just Because Most People Do Something Does Not Mean That You Have To. If Your Heart Is Guiding You To

quotes that help me survive:

“You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in middle of the suffocating dust.” — Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly

this tumblr text post:

“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” — Mary Oliver

From an interview with Kazu Makino:

Instructions On Not Giving Up, Ada Limon:

And this poster by Yumi Sakugawa

“You have to believe, in your heart, that even if you don’t work hard and exercise and think positive thoughts and make new friends and march triumphantly into the future, you are still enough. You will always have bad days. Being broken doesn’t make you a loser. You can crumble, and you will still be enough. Make that your religion moving forward. You are here to feel this moment. You are not here to become someone better. You are not here to impress or compete. You are not here to prove yourself. You are here to savor this life. Let down your guard. You are already enough. Believe it.” — Heather Havrilesky

“The first feminist gesture is to say: “Ok. They’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but by how I see them.” -Agnès Varda

lyrics from the song Grow by The Oh Hellos:

“The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” — Mary Oliver

“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life--not someone else's life--water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Could things have gone any other way?

“I sit here alone, burning,”

— Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Yannis Stavridakis c. December 1917

being asexual with a lot of aesthetic attraction is like no i dont wanna fuck you im just gonna keep stealing glances and accidently walk into a door

Here’s a fun fact

Bet you haven’t heard this one before

Being asexual means you don’t experience sexual attraction.

It means that, and absolutely nothing else! I know! Crazy, right?

So that means, you can be asexual and have sex or not, fantasize or not, desire physical closeness or not, get married or not, have children or not, and absolutely none of that changes the fact that you’re asexual! Because you still don’t! experience! sexual attraction!

What a time to be alive!

Confessional // Sue Zhao

"Yes, Think" – Ruth Stone

Mother, said a small tomato caterpillar to a wasp, why are you kissing me so hard on my back? You’ll see, said the industrious wasp, deftly inserting a package of her eggs under the small caterpillar’s skin. Every day the small caterpillar ate and ate the delicious tomato leaves. I am surely getting larger, it said to itself. This was a sad miscalculation. The ravenous hatched wasp worms were getting larger. O world, the small caterpillar said, you were so beautiful. I am only a small tomato caterpillar, made to eat the good tomato leaves. Now I am so tired. And I am getting even smaller. Nature smiled. Never mind, dear, she said. You are a lovely link in the great chain of being. Think how lucky it is to be born.

hope girls grow up knowing that there are infinite ways of being a woman. hope girls grow up loving themselves for who they are.