Don’t be afraid to put too much of yourself into something and get hurt. Don’t be afraid to be the one who cares more. Don’t be afraid to be your loving, thin-skinned self. I recently heard an adage that advised people always to be the “crazy” one in a relationship, which I disagreed with because it’s weird and able-ist. Instead, I think if we want to find love, fulfillment and happiness, we need to stop caring what people think and care about being true to ourselves and validating our real emotions. Because if someone doesn’t like you for that, what’s the point? If you think you can’t do that, remember there was a time when people said landing on the moon was impossible, and now we’re roving Mars. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it allows us to explore a universe infinitely bigger than anything even our poets could have dreamed.
So we can spend so much of our lives worried if we’re reaching for the stars, whether we will get that job, if people think our writing is good, if that person at the bar will be as interested in us as we are in them or whether or not that guy will text us back. We can hide from the impending rejection that living in the world entails. Or we can choose to live in the world, enjoy all of the beauty and terror it has in store for us and cherish our limitless ability to care, no matter how much it hurts sometimes. Instead of focusing on our pain and rejection, we can love it for what it teaches us and think about how good it will feel when our earnest devotion and kindness is reciprocated, when someone embraces the gift of our whole heart for the beautiful bleeding organ it is. You’ll never know what’s inside it unless you find people willing to explore that another universe, just waiting to be discovered. As Arthur Russell once sang, this is how we walk on the moon.
- Nico Lang, Thought Catalog
Read more here.
No comments:
Post a Comment