What if they came back loving? What if they came back in love. What if the necromancy worked and you cheated death and it's everything you've ever wanted, but now they love you in a way they never did before and you cannot know if that is because they finally know the lengths you are willing to go for them, or because something in this deathless magic bound their soul to yours to guide them home and it left them no. choice.
Learning to internalize the message above, but art is in all of our bones. If you feel afraid to create art because it won't be "good enough," it's worth it to explore why you feel that fear. Creating art is one of the basic impulses of people, and if you want to create art, then you absolutely must.
a big lesson for me was learning that most things are not as fragile as I’d believed. missing a class, or turning in a bad assignment, won’t instantly destroy your professor’s opinion of you. accidentally saying something harsh won’t make your friend want to end the friendship. it takes work to repair these things - it takes effort and research and sometimes a sincere apology - but you can do that because they’re not irreparably broken. what you’ve worked to build, in academia and in relationships and in life, is stronger and more enduring that your mind may teach you to believe. don’t let imagined fragility lead you to giving up
the thing about saying “violence against [fascists/pedophiles/etc] is always justified” is that people immediately begin to expand their definition of who counts as a [fascist/pedophile/etc] to include people they personally don’t like, in order to justify violence against them, whether or not they are actually a [fascist/pedophile/etc] or whether they are actually doing harm (or are very likely to do harm) to others. the solution to dealing with the fact that [fascists/pedophiles/etc] exist in society should never be to go looking for a reason to do violence, or to train yourself to treat violence as a reflexive action.
you know those extended elemental charts that go like fire, water, earth, air, light, darkness, etc. and always throw in something that's technically already covered by the others, like ice (water) or metal (earth) or isn't technically an "element" but sounds cool (mind, soul, time). well i think that flesh should count as its own distinct element in this configuration too.
Help, I'd forgotten how clear Matt makes it that Essek is surprised but also openly touched when Jester takes the time to craft a parasol for his comfort.
It's so clear, in retrospect, how those carefully constructed walls he'd made had begun to tumble all the way down.