#advent advice

[probablymaybelline]

Advent Advice: Day 24

"Sometimes you don’t need advice from someone else, not really - you need to let yourself sit quietly and ask the real question, and let yourself give the real answer.”

-Rachel, “Three Things I’ve Learned About Dealing with Life from Giving Advice on the Internet”

[probablymaybelline]

Advent Advice: Day 23

“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.”

- “Ask Polly: Why Should I Keep Going?” by Heather Havrilesky

[probablymaybelline]

Advent Advice: Day 22

“Occasionally I’ll be sitting somewhere and I’ll be listening to someone perhaps not saying the kindest things about me. And I’ll look down at my hand and I’ll sort of pinch my skin to make sure it still has the requisite thickness I know Eleanor Roosevelt expects me to have.” -Hillary Clinton

[probablymaybelline]

Advent Advice: Day 21

Credit to @wehavesuchfun, on the juju of celebratory champagne after the 2016 election

You still have the right to celebrate. You can celebrate yourself, the ones you love, the women who uplift each other; you can celebrate the strength and bravery to stand tall while the world shows its dark ugly hate, and you can celebrate the vulnerability in expressing fear, in reaching out for help, in hands seeking other hands to hold. You can celebrate holding light amidst darkness and in knowing also that you cannot single-handedly fight the darkness. You can celebrate knowing you are loved and love and must love, that people have loved enough to try to displace hate.

You are allowed joy, even as you sorrow. You are allowed newness and freshness, even as an old world tries to desperately to hold onto its shitty terrible power. You are allowed your drink, and many more, and you’re allowed to weep and pour it out if you should choose. You decide.

[probablymaybelline]

Advent Advice: Day 20

From “Thursday, October 27th, 2016″ by Katie Coyle (on the birth of her daughter):

“You thought it was a good idea to bring me into this? I did. I don’t think you can go through what we did and go on to try again unless you really, really believe that the world is a place worth living in. It has racists and war and demagogues, but it also has dogs and autumn afternoons and Mad Men, and dancing to music from Fiddler on the Roof at your brother’s wedding, and eating dumplings with your best friend on a rainy day. It has the tiniest socks you’ve ever seen. It has the capacity for extraordinary good luck, wherein you meet a man and watch That Thing You Do! with him, marry him, have a baby, and watch the man hold the baby, and watch the baby smile at the man. The world has baseball and Hamilton and Barack Obama and Christmas.

And now it has Tessa, too.

[probablymaybelline]

Advent Advice: Day 19

Credit to @road-twitch

”I’m glad I’m learning this now before I made some incredibly life altering change - ‘If I marry someone/have a baby/buy a house/finish a whole 30, everything will be fine!’ NO IT WON’T! You’ll still do dumb bullshit like accidentally put your XBox remote in a bag full of cables that go with the stereo you sold, and now you have to go all the way to Manchaca to pick that so you can watch DVDs again. Your pores will always seem wide open and parched. You will always need extra strength deodorant. There is no cure for your stupid life so just embrace that stupidity!”

[probablymaybelline]

Advent Advice: Day 18

“Getting older is a hard thing to explain to anyone who hasn’t done it yet, which I don’t mean in a patronizing way, just a true one: it’s a strange thing to be in a position to know so much about what you could have done differently with no way to redo any of it. (Time travel into the past is theoretically possible but unlikely, as you may know already.) I don’t mean regret, that’s not the same thing, and I don’t mean I wish I could go back and give advice to my younger self, because my younger self would find my current self unfathomable–not insufferable, I don’t think (I hope) but also not likely someone my younger self could ever imagine growing into, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise. For a long time anger was what kept me alive and that’s not a thing I regret either, but I’d like to live for joy, too, the most fragile imaginable platform for survival in the world we live in now. Other things I am learning slowly as I get older: patience, and faith. Waiting for the right books to come around again, the right teachers, the right lessons for the person I am still becoming.”

— Sarah McCarry (via katiecoyle)

[probablymaybelline]

Advent Advice: Day 17

“Any relationship that could be ‘ruined’ by having a conversation about feelings, standards, or expectations wasn’t really firm enough anyway, so there isn’t much to ruin” 

Source: youngblackandvegan (via yepnstuff)