If You Obsess Over Whether You Are Making The Right Decision, You Are Basically Assuming That The Universe

If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.

Deepak Chopra (via creatingaquietmind)

I love myself when I am laughing… and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.

Zora Neale Hurston, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing… And Then Again: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (via wordsnquotes)

I automatically assume people won’t like me, so I don’t talk to them unless they approach me first. I can’t become a part of a crowd because I can’t get past that feeling that I don’t belong.

Stephanie Kuehnert, Ballads of Suburbia  (via wordsnquotes)

You know what? It’s okay to be ace and also a prude. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. I don’t like sex jokes or sex scenes. I don’t wear makeup or show a lot of skin. I’m society’s definition of a prude. But does that make my asexuality any less valid? No, and it doesn’t make yours any less valid either.

My sophomore year of college, I had to take this class called Honors Human Sexuality. Which was a strange kind of class to wander into because you had a dozen kids: nerdy enough to be top of their class, getting scholarships just for doing their homework, but also who were willing to have completely honest, frank discussions about sex. (What I’m saying is, it was awesome.) So our first day, the professor went through this list of intimate acts, and wanted to know what we believed qualified as sex. She said kissing, we said no. She said oral, there was some controversy. She said anal. And one– one singular girl, in the corner of the room, said no. And god, with that one word, I could tell you her whole life’s story: I could tell you about the Bible Belt, Southern Baptist home, the “your virginity is a gift you give your husband.” I could tell you about the pushy high school boyfriend, the First True Love and how he said things like “blue balls is a medical condition” and “no, this is totally six inches” and “baby, baby, anal doesn’t count as REAL sex.” The tragedy here is not her ignorance, or her warped perception of human sexuality. The real tragedy is the education system that failed her– the way female sex drive is treated like a myth or a side-effect of heterosexual marriage, the way the clitorus is left un-labeled in high school text books or how I learned the word vulva on the internet. It’s the society whose obsession with sex can only be rivaled by it’s shame of it. How there is no right way to have a body: virginity treated as prudishness, promiscuity treated as lack of moral compass. In a world where boys talk about losing respect for the women they sleep with and yet never lose respect for themselves, it is not her fault that she didn’t understand what she was getting into. When she stumbled over her explanation that she thought anal counted as sex in gay couples, just not heterosexual ones, it made my chest ache. She was putting up parameters, working in clauses all so that what she’d done wouldn’t fall under the terrifying title of Real Sex. Because growing up under the Lone Star State of Abstinence Only turns the freedom of choice into a heavy burden where we are taught how to say no but not how to say yes– where women are valued by the state of their bodies. Did you know you can’t even pop a hymen? That it’s a muscle and it stretches and if you bleed the first time, you’re not supposed to? That stained sheets are not a rite of passage or a sign of purity. To every teenaged boy who’s ever bragged about how tight she was, here’s the part where I tell you that when she is aroused everything lubricates and loosens, she was only that “tight” because you have no idea how to turn her on. (Which is not something to brag about.) It is unacceptable that someone could make it to college—two decades of their life– without getting the bare bones basics of sexuality. And no, fear tactics and wait-until-marriage don’t count as an education. We can’t be so caught up in shaming sexuality that we neglect to teach how to express it safely. Because if Abstinence Only really works? Then I guess anal isn’t sex. It’s just cardio.

HONORS HUMAN SEXUALITY by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.

Timothy Leary (via wnq-anonymous)