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Let me tell you how the world becomes better. The world becomes better when good people like you look at themselves and decide what kind of life they want to live, and what they’re willing to do to make it that way. This does not mean you need to fight more. It means you need to find ways to fight less. Sometimes, our immediate response to the way the world is, is anger, and the world is the way it is, because sometimes our immediate response to it, is anger.
“Show me the fix, the thing you did to make yourself whole, before you were broken. Where is the God of everything that heals? Can you pray to him?” (What you feel is not brokeness, it is the desire to love yourself how you were meant to be loved.
In your head, in the dream, you are both the monster and the person the monster is chasing. You are your fear and your love and you are the embodiment of all the things you feel. Only you hold you back, or push you forward.*
*Sometimes, when we’re awake, the monster is still there. Maybe we can’t see him as clearly, maybe he’s not as obvious as he usually is, but he’s there, somewhere, saying: “You are not good enough. You do not deserve to be loved the way you want to be loved. Something will always be wrong with you, no matter how much you try and fix yourself. You will always be looking for something you cannot find.” And our gut reaction when we hear the monster say these things, is to run. But if we are the monster, and the person being chased, then we need to stop running because we cannot run away from
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*If I’m honest, sometimes I feel like we’ve been trying to find each other in every life before this one, and this is as close as we’ve ever gotten. And I know now that we have to try again because we fucked this up. Maybe we won’t even be born on the same continent next time, or the time after that, and we’ll just spend those lives searching for something we can’t find, miserable for reasons we will never understand. Until we get to try again. Until we somehow find each other in another life.
Go find a pen that only writes good things about you, go find the paper that hears it, go find the person who loves you for who you are and wouldn’t change a single hair on your body, go find the God of good deeds in the tips of a flower’s petals, go find the God of good conversation at the edge of a tea mug, go find yourself in the strange place where all things live, go find a way to be like dust in light, suspended above the carpet, go find a new way to be that doesn’t make you feel like you’re trying to be anything at all.
There is a special kind of sadness that can only be found in the confusion between who you think you are and who you think other people want you to be.§
Not everyone wins the lottery, but everyone who does bought a ticket. To live the life you want, you have to be brave and buy the ticket every single day.
“You should know: I kept every ticket. Because I want to remember every good place we went. Even if the movie was horrible. Even if the concert started late and it rained. Even if the train took us somewhere we were never meant to go. I want to remember.”
Surely, if love is a storm then all you need to do is be brave and get in a boat. But you should know, the best people can’t be found on any map.
You hurt me. You were meant to be kinder than you were. You were meant to be better. And I was owed more than this. And you let me down, when I thought you were the only one who wouldn’t.
But I will throw everything that hurts to the ground and leave it where it lies. But I will carry on, despite the world. But I will become what I needed. Because I am, and I will, and I can. And so, I forgive you.
Because I owe myself better.
