Follow Your Dreams At A Sustainable Pace

follow your dreams at a sustainable pace

"Love and sex make us human"

Wrong. Most animals fuck. Some reproduce without a partner. Then there are some that can choose not to fuck (like those that remain in their pride or family and forfeit the right to mate in exchange for safety).

Definitely a lot of them love. In their own way or even our way. Like... so many birds mate for life. Humans only wish for that marriage success rate...

Love and sex don't make us human. The absence of them doesn't make us human.

You know what makes us human?

COOKING.

Humans are the only creatures in existence to cook their food. To have a culinary culture. To purposefully change the molecular structure of their sustenance for fun, art, and pleasure.

So, in a way, at the root of it, is pizza over sex and romance.

Pizza makes us human.

🍕

Cute little ears, too!

im just saying, i would be able to see an arctic fox if there was one nearby. i know what an animal looks like

Another thing I've noticed working as a children's librarian is like... kids get so Paralyzed By Choice and the adults in their lives never really register why. Like, for example, we have little scavenger hunt sheets in the children's section and when a kid completes it, they get to pick out a cute eraser from our prize basket. We also have a little toy prize chest as part of our "1000 books before Kindergarten" challenge for when kids complete 100 books--and kids will spend minutes carefully picking through everything while their parents are shooting us anxious looks like "sorry they're taking so long! I know this is silly and it's completely ridiculous that my child is taking so long to choose between a bath toy and a cube puzzle because these are cheap and arbitrary objects! Hurry up, Harper! Just pick something! You're embarrassing me!!" But in the kids' perspective, they already have so little control over what objects come into their lives, and in this case, the object represents labor and effort on their end, so of course they feel they must choose very carefully. I've always been an anxious and indecisive person, so it's striking to see how being rushed really doesn't help that and really only makes it harder for kids to figure out what they want.

I’m about to save you thousands of dollars in therapy by teaching you what I learned paying thousands of dollars for therapy:

It may sound woo woo but it’s an important skill capitalism and hyper individualism have robbed us of as human beings.

Learn to process your emotions. It will improve your mental health and quality of life. Emotions serve a biological purpose, they aren’t just things that happen for no reason.

1. Pause and notice you’re having a big feeling or reaching for a distraction to maybe avoid a feeling. Notice what triggered the feeling or need for a distraction without judgement. Just note that it’s there. Don’t label it as good or bad.

2. Find it in your body. Where do you feel it? Your chest? Your head? Your stomach? Does it feel like a weight everywhere? Does it feel like you’re vibrating? Does it feel like you’re numb all over?

3. Name the feeling. Look up an emotion chart if you need to. Find the feeling that resonates the most with what you’re feeling. Is it disappointment? Heartbreak? Anxiety? Anger? Humiliation?

4. Validate the feeling. Sometimes feelings misfire or are disproportionately big, but they’re still valid. You don’t have to justify what you’re feeling, it’s just valid. Tell yourself “yeah it makes sense that you feel that right now.” Or something as simple as “I hear you.” For example: If I get really big feelings of humiliation when I lose at a game of chess, the feeling may not be necessary, but it is valid and makes sense if I grew up with parents who berated me every time I did something wrong. So I could say “Yeah I understand why we are feeling that way given how we were treated growing up. That’s valid.”

5. Do something with your body that’s not a mental distraction from the feeling. Something where you can still think. Go on a walk. Do something with your hands like art or crochet or baking. Journal. Clean a room. Figure out what works best for you.

6. Repeat, it takes practice but is a skill you can learn :)