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“Every poem I have ever written is trying to get close to the people I have lost, and is failing.”

— Sam Sax - “Written to be Yelled at Trump Tower During a Vigil for The NEA”

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“Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

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Stay close to the things that make you feel alive. Listen to your favorite song on repeat. Watch the sunset. Fall asleep to the sound of rain. Build a pillow fort. Let the sunshine from the window pour over you. Gaze up at the stars and count as many as you can until you lose count. Binge your favorite t.v. show. The smell of old books, daytime moons, that feeling of deja vu, thrift shops, long car rides. It’s the little things in life that make everything worthwhile. And when you feel like you wanna give up, when you feel so alone that the aching in your chest won’t go away, when you convince yourself that you don’t matter, try and remember this: There are so many foods you have not tasted. Books you haven’t read. Songs and albums you have never heard and fell in love with. Words you never even knew existed. Spices you have never smelled. Cities you have never explored and gotten lost in. People you have never met. Maybe you don’t love yourself. Maybe you hate the way you look. Maybe you’ve said something you shouldn’t have. Maybe you miss someone. Maybe you’ve lost someone. Maybe it feels like the world is against you and that you can’t do anything right and that it would be better off if you just disappeared. You are here right now. That’s all that matters. What you have done, what you have said, what you have felt, it doesn’t matter. Your mistakes, your fears, they do not define you. You are alive. You are still standing. Your heart’s still beating. The sun still shines in the morning. The rain still falls from the sky. The flowers still bloom in the spring. The world goes on, despite everything. You have survived through everything you have ever went through, gotten over every hurdle they have placed before you. Don’t give up now.

fabuliz, writing prompt #64: write 5-10 things you can do to better your mental health. (via wnq-writers)

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I keep wondering, how many people do you need to be, before you can become yourself.

Iain Thomas, I Wrote This for You (via books-n-quotes)

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Women are perceived as too talkative because how much they talk is measured not against how much men talk, but against an ideal of female silence.

Gender Stereotypes: Reproduction and Challenge, by Mary Talbot. (via besha-98)

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The Thing About Trauma

It’s not as easy as being Something That Happened to You, a package you opened once.

You will wake up in a new ZIP code, have to wander your way home, carry a few of the things you love to this new place you live in now.

& so you buy throw pillows. You put up twinkle lights and have a big celebration, point at the open windows and tell everyone who has ever seen you crying,

look,

look how I have not caged myself, look what I have made out of two paint buckets and the blessing of my still-here body,

but, of course, trauma leans into the bar cart. Spills a drink on the new rug. Breaks off the door handle on his way out.

Trauma sends you letters, without warning, for the rest of your life, usually disguised as something else— 

a medical bill, maybe, or a box of photo albums packaged up by your father, just so you remember trauma knows exactly where you live— who did you think built the house?

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I find it so ironic that I built an armor to defend myself against pain and sadness, only to find out that the armor itself was forged out of it. The same armor fortified and hardened my walls, and now I am screaming and nobody can hear me.

xwaysi  (via wnq-writers)

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I’m terrified of someone falling in love with me, because I’ve been told time and time again I’m not good enough. I just don’t want to disappoint.

maddicierra775  (via wnq-writers)

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1. Last year the doctor told me that this kind of sadness is inherited. That they have discovered that sometimes it skips a generation. That the darkness inside me did not grow from nowhere it came from somewhere. I thought to myself, that there is a reason why I have always thought my heart was an attic where I hid pieces of myself. Pieces no one ever wanted. 2. The first boy I ever chose to show this sadness to decided to take it from my attic heart and planted it inside my soul instead. It was easy for him. My soul was a garden I showed him too soon. And he decided that meant he was allowed to take anything he wanted to. 3. Every man who has dared to love me since, has stared at this dark ivy covered soul like it is a haunted house, and I have never tried to explain the thing I have always known. Because men do not have to learn how to open their own selves and lock themselves up again. They are taught to be themselves and the world will accept them better that way. We are taught to break our bodies to be loved. We are taught to confuse sex and love. 4. I knew a girl whose father left her and she took all of her love for him and ate it to comfort herself. People joked how she lived in the kitchen. No one saw her tears when she ate. 5. A friend once told me that she locked herself inside the closet when her parents fought because her father beat her mother and she wished herself into the wood, just so she knew what it was like to be an inanimate object that couldn’t hear or feel anything. 6. My mother told me, that it is the way of the world for girls to grow into women by locking secrets inside themselves. Till now I still imagine every woman I have ever met as a big beautiful house. Full of secret rooms, hiding places, once filled with innocent laughter and joy. Now slightly sad and forgotten because of all those lost places inside them full of secrets.

Nikita Gill, The House Inside Her (via meanwhilepoetry)

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Today, I miss you I miss you like the desert miss the rain. My heart became a barren land when you left and I’ve been yearning for your love to bring back the life in me. Today, you are my oasis. I miss you like how I miss the moon when the night’s too cloudy. I look up every now and then just to get a glimpse of its beauty but I can’t find any. Something inside me knew the moon was there but the heavy clouds preparing to cry has hidden it. It’s there but out of reach. Today, you are my moon. I miss you like how a person looks for a shade on a hot summer day. It’s looking for an umbrella while trying to ignore the burning sensation on one’s skin. You endure the pain. Today, you are my umbrella. I miss you like how I keep on missing the the signs that you’re not coming back. They were right in front of me but I still can’t see it. Missing you felt like trying to understand the secrets of the universe. It was a hopeless case but I still try. It was ignoring all the bad and holding on to the little good. Today, you are my sign. Today, I miss you. It’s painful. It’s sad. It’s desperate. It’s coming up for air only to drown instead. It’s gazing outside the window of a hotel room wishing you’re here knowing you can’t be here. It’s a contradiction. It’s a shame. Because no matter how many times I tell myself you’re not coming back, a part of me still clings to the 1 percent that you would. Today, I miss you. Today, you are my 1 percent. But tomorrow, well tomorrow’s a different story.

marvel-at-the-night-sky  (via wnq-writers)

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Ways to Love Yourself 1. Know yourself You cannot love someone you don’t even know. 2. Accept that you have strengths and weaknesses. You have skills and problems. Do a SWOT Analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) of yourself if you want but remember, opportunities and threats are external. You don’t have control over them. But you can use your strengths and improve on your weaknesses, both of which are internal, to handle the external. 3. Disliking certain things about yourself is normal. That gives room for improvement. Improve. Don’t be lazy and choose the path of self loathing. 4. Forgive yourself Understand that making mistakes is the way to grow. If you hadn’t fallen on your bum a couple hundred times you would have never learned to walk. If as a baby after one fall, after one mistake of breaking something, you would have decided to just sit in the corner and never try again, you would still be sitting there with the broken pieces. Don’t do that. Learn from your toddler self. Get up. And the only way you can do that is by forgiving yourself. 5. Accept that as of now you do not love yourself. Lying to yourself won’t eventually lead you to believe it as the truth. Lying to someone you love is not a way to love them. 6. Disregard what others say about you. So much of the good and bad they tell you really has more to do with themselves; their mindset and mood, their motives and interest. Don’t let people fill in blanks for you. That won’t lead to a happy ending, it won’t lead to a story you can call your own. 7. Be patient with yourself, be kind. Being hard on yourself is a really stupid thing to do. It isn’t productive, it isn’t one bit effective and it is completely unnecessary. 8. Discard the idea that you are breakable. Reject the concept that someone can leave you broken. They can hurt you, yes and they can cause you an immense amount of pain but they cannot break you. You aren’t made of glass. Give your cells a little more credit. Give your heart a little more of it too. 9. When you realize that the grass is greener on the other side, don’t draw up plans to ruin that grass or come up with a way where you can camp on it and abandon your own grass. Instead, take a trip to the shop to buy some fertilizer and tend to your own grass. Upskill yourself constantly. 10. Learn new things. Invest time and energy in things that interest you.You didn’t learn to play piano in school but always wished to? Who said there is an age limit. In most cases the saying, ‘it is never too late’ stands absolutely true. 11. Look yourself in the mirror. You can admire or just observe. Look into your eyes. Look at your reflection. Just look. Have a see in what’s inside. Don’t look away. Have the courage to see the truth. 12. Spend time with yourself. Buy yourself flowers if flowers are what you love. Don’t wait to meet the right person to do the things you always wanted to. Go star gazing, skinny dipping. Solo travel. Do whatever you want to and can. Write your future/past self a letter. Cook yourself a meal. Buy yourself some ice cream. Click goofy selfies. 13. Learn to accept compliments. Be graceful. All you have to do is say ‘thank you’. And please don’t feel the immediate need of returning the compliment. You don’t always have to give when you get. Especially when you don’t really have anything to give. A ‘thank you’ and a smile are more than enough. 14. Learn to be okay in silence. The voices in your head? They terrorize you, I know. But trust me, they go away. They go away if you face them. There are no demons in your head. These are just echoes of your fears and insecurities. Listen to them. Breathe deep. Know that they are weak. Face them head on. And then ask them to leave. 15. Accept your body. However it is or it isn’t. It has accepted you in every possible way. Accept it and see how it accepts you even more. Accepting doesn’t mean not changing something that you can in a healthy way. It only means that your love is unconditional. Your love is whole. And that is the only way to love yourself. Wholly.

creatingnikki  (via wnq-writers)

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they ask me how i could possibly believe in a hell, but not in a heaven. and i never manage to say much, aside from 'how could you not? we live in hell. we've never seen a heaven.'

•rnb• @neuroticnevaeh