Here's Some More Unsolicited Adult Advice As Someone In Her 30s Who Knows There Are A Lot Of Twenty Somethings

The emotion expressed...

Like it captured the hope and nostalgia I feel every new years. Even when I pretend it's just another day

Franz Theodor Aerni - Fireworks on Castel Sant'Angelo (1875-80)

"If roses could talk, they would not boast of their beauty, because they know that they have always been beautiful."

-Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.

“No matter how attractive a person’s potential may be, you have to date their reality.”

— Mandy Hale

Sometimes love isn't grand gestures or daily phone calls

Sometimes love is when my mother comes home from visiting family 7 hours away. Where I couldn't go. Because, because car ride are too much and I'm sick.

She comes home and tells me of my whole family crying about me when they were leaving. Wishing they could do something

Maybe love is when my cousin gifts me fabric and patterns because she knows I love sewing. Even if I can't right now.

Perhaps love is my aunt gifting me rolls of leather and upholstery fabric and 3 kilos of cherries for the same reason.

Love might be another cousin crying, wishing my mother to tell me she thinks about me every day but doesn't have the words.

These people, my blood, that never felt like family or close. That are so far away in the world and in life.

Perhaps life is in those small moments. And way more people care for you than you think. Even if you have no clue. And thought they'd abandoned you long ago.

Another good thing to come from this bummshit journey :)

People care, we are all just as awkward and lost for words. Give others the grace to be as awkward as you think yourself to be. They might surprise you

Shoutout to people with Functional Neurological Disorder

Shoutout to people with functional tics

Shoutout to people who have dystonia

Shoutout to people with Psychogenic non-epileptic seizures

Shoutout to people with paralysis and or weakness

Shoutout to people with tremors

Shoutout to people who shut down/unresponsive episodes

Shoutout to people who have walking difficulties

Shoutout to people who have numbness

Shoutout to people who have speech problems

Shoutout to people with vision problems

Shoutout to people with hearing problems

Shoutout to people with memory loss

Shoutout to everyone with FND

Today was not a great day. I've just realised that some friendships that I've been trying really hard for a really long time to make them work, just don't. They stopped working somewhere along the way and I, in my foolishness, I thought their intentions were good like mine and I thought they cared as much as I did. I've been blind. I didn't see that they had already made up their mind to not trust, to not care, with their hearts closed. Maybe I forced some things, I try too hard and I care too deeply and I have all this love inside of me, I just have to find the right people. Maybe we are just acquaintances now, and that's ok, maybe it's just a phase, stagnant or declining friendship, but whatever it is I hope I will find someday some people who will reciprocate.

I usually drink cocoa when I'm sad, but I'm not sad, my mind is clear and writings helps, it's the cycle of life, the making and the breaking, the seasons and the death of things.

I have been ripped from the life I was building for myself once again. The dreams, the places I was getting to know, the people I was meeting, the future I was walking towards are gone.

My own body is fighting me. And my brain often times does not work. Without my brain, and ideas and dreams, who am I?

For my mother always described me as a Tsunami. Try to stop a Tsunami, is how she'd describe me when I'd had an idea. These days I feel like little more than a puddle.

These days are also the days that I unexpectedly get to spend months with my family. I get to go to my brother's graduation. I'm not halfway across the continent.

These days I get to enjoy my mother's cooking. I get to tell her more about out who I've become. And I find out about her.

These days my father, who has never been good with words, and who never actually wanted children, offers to pay for my motorcycle license once I feel better. If it helps, he says, I'll gladly pay for it.

These days, when my legs shake and I can suddenly barely walk, my dad will grab me. Hold me up. And pretend to dance with me through the living room.

These days I will be laughing so hard I cry. Instead of bawling my eyes out.

I do that too, sometimes. Because it's. Not. Fair.

But these days, and these moments would've never happened were I not sick.

It'll get better. And even if it doesn't, I can still make a happy life for myself

Im.. Soft 🥺🥺🥺

cr. 

As a blue collar woman, I could love nothing more

My new favorite hobby is weaponizing my Mom Friend status against my male coworkers, of which there are a surplus because I am A Woman in The Trades. It's hilarious to me. I have been the Mom Friend my entire life and working construction means I've expanded my territory from Mom Friend to Site Mom by virtue of always knowing where things are and also having pain meds and general life advice if you need any. Do you know what happens when you are so aggressively mom-shaped despite not even being 30? All the young guys I work with have subconsciously put me in the mom category of their brains. Do you know what that means? I live and work in the American South. These guys have been raised both socially and culturally to Respect All Mom Figures and I've snuck myself into that classification like a cuckoo in the nest. Like, listen, I can take it and dish it out with the best of them and I'm "one of the guys" 97% of the time, but I have my limits. If they're being dicks to each other and I'm tired of it all I gotta do is look really disapproving and scold them with some classic Mom-isms and it will stop them dead in their tracks. It's a total short circuit of their brains. Not one of these guys has withstood my telling them "manners are free and it costs nothing to be kind." Sometimes I just give them a look and say "Really?" in that tone of voice all moms use when they're completely fed up with you and it makes them straighten up in 10 seconds flat, guaranteed. It's psychological warfare of the highest order. One time I jokingly pulled out a "I'm so disappointed in you" after hearing this barely 18 year old tell some story about being obnoxious in an online game voice chat and it was very obviously a joke but somehow it rattled him so much AT WORK that he later told me he stopped doing it. It's a perfect storm of factors and literally all of them are in my favor. Should I care more about not enforcing gender stereotypes, especially in such a male-dominated field? Probably, but let's be real, the power has completely gone to my head.