You Need A Rest. You Need Empty Moments In Which You Tolerate Your Anxiety And Circling Thoughts Until

You need a rest. You need empty moments in which you tolerate your anxiety and circling thoughts until they slow down and stop circling. You need slow, quiet activities that ground you and remind you to accept yourself in spite of huge obstacles and bad thoughts. You need to put solutions out of your mind for now, and engage in activities that have nothing to do with your ego. You need habits that strengthen your patience and focus, but also feel real and not arbitrary. You need to abandon your glorious future and build your imperfect present instead.

Ask Polly: “I’m Lazy, Reckless and Addicted To Social Media. Help!”

Mary Oliver, from "The Moths", Dream Work

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Obviously there are many things to dislike about adulthood but as someone who grew up in an abusive household for whom adulthood offered the only chance at an escape, it's incredibly important to me that i romanticize adulthood whenever possible because i know there are kids and teenagers like me out there who are seeing nothing but complaints about rent and taxes and the loneliness of living on your own and i know they're going to internalize all of that and assume it means that adulthood won't offer them the freedom and safety they've been dreaming of. So while i never want to minimize the difficulties of being an adult, i also want to highlight how incredibly nice it can be to finally have ownership of your life and your body and your time and money and food and everything else in a way that you never had before. You can choose when you wake up! You can choose what you have for breakfast! You can choose when to go to sleep or if you want to (inadvisably) stay up all night watching tv in the living room! In the living room! You can choose what to watch! These are little things, but they are worth taking pleasure in, and they are worth looking forward to.