Friday 19 August 2016

Quotes from the last few months


I do this thing where I copy down quotes into my diary.  It breaks up all my constant ranting and leaves a passage where there are words written by someone other than myself for a change.


May

"For she was one of those happily created beings who please without effort, make friends everywhere, and take life so gracefully and easily, that less fortunate souls are tempted to believe that such are born under a lucky star." - Little Women (p279)

"My heart is constantly tethered between 'I need more routine and stability in my life' and 'I crave endless messy and honest conversations, getting lost in the middle of nowhere, falling deeply in love and travelling the world and living each day wildly, honestly and intentionally.' Forever caught between a strong mind and a fragile heart." - Unknown

"Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved." - Sherry Turkle

"While these internal revolutions were going on, her external life had been as busy and uneventful as usual." - Little Women (p385)

"#whitewashedOUT means being told as a kid 'you talk like a white person' and feeling guilty for being glad of it." - Lori M. Lee

"Well I'm glad I don't have to go and be with all those frightening people and think of things to say." - Little Women

"He was sea-dreaming.  Imagining things that would hurt him later.  Now, even." - The Winner's Kiss (p179)


June

"like when you draw a picture of a friend and it's almost right but not quite, and the face on the sheet gives you the creeps." - Never Let Me Go (p116)

"Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it.  People never notice anything." - The Catcher in the Rye (p10)

"The goddamn movies.  They can ruin you.  I'm not kidding." - The Catcher in the Rye (p113)

July

"It will happen to me as to them." - Thomas Mann

"The moment you admit to loving someone is the moment you admit to having a lot to lose." - Unknown

"Students think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan - never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers." - William Deresiewicz


August

"So when you look at yourself,
tell me, who do you see?
Is it the person you've been,
or the person that you're
gonna be?" - Greg Holden

Love,
M

Monday 15 August 2016

Self Absorbed

I feel as if I'm trapped inside this cloud of I's.  I I I I me me me me... the first person pronoun is swimming in the air around me; it's my whole world - and what I want to find out is if I'm the only one.  Is everyone else just as self absorbed as I seem to be?  Or is it just me?  Or is it just this generation?

And what about social media?  We're creating profiles to showcase ourselves, to effectively create a brand.  Like me, follow me - is external validation another way to feed our self absorption?  And I don't know about you, but I know that I stalk myself more than I stalk all other people put together.  Social media is this surreal, addictive world of narcissism, and when you sit back and think about it for a while, the reasons we have behind everything we do online are absurd.

It's not only online though... think about what happens when you talk to people.  Are you more concerned about what you say, or about what they're saying?  When they talk, are you busy thinking of your response, or are you actually listening?  How much do you talk about yourself?  I know that I fail in the selfless aspect of every one of these questions.  How did I appear today?  Do they like me? Do they?  Oh what I said there was so stupid.  This entire train of thought is stupid.

There's this girl who seems all cutesy and dog-loving and funny and all that, but lately I've gotten a little irritated every time she tells a story about some funny failure she had, or when she butts into a conversation and diverts it to being about herself.  She seems to over-dramatise everything for the sake of attention.  Like, you know those people who say they love something cute like Disney Channel and suddenly it becomes on the verge of an obsession and they're buying merchandise and continuously posting snapchat stories and diverting conversations so they can laugh about it and act all cute?  Or those people who, when they have nothing else to say, say things like "I'm dying" or "I'm having one of those days", and it happens almost every day.  Well, she does all these things  What worries me though, is that while I'm sitting here being annoyed by her, I'm prone to doing the exact same thing.  I'm prone to wanting to look a certain way and diverting conversations to myself and overdramatising things for the sake of attention.  A lot of people are.  Have people always been like this?

And then there's the whole inner self worth thing as well.  The other day we were discussing this girl who blatantly changes topics so that she can boast about how smart she is, or all the co-curriculars she excels at - and the question came up as to why she does that.  Sometimes having a big ego is a good thing, because it makes you feel as if you don't need other people.  You become immune to that feeling of exclusion and missing out, if only because you think you're too good for everyone else.  Maybe being self absorbed is another way of coping emotionally in society.

But when you stop thinking about how you're going to wear your hair tomorrow, what the next story you're going to tell is, or how hipster you are; you have more time to listen to other people's stories, read a book maybe, appreciate this thing we call the Olympics.  I've just been getting really distracted with all these really self-focused thoughts lately, and it's been detrimental to how big this bubble I live in is.  Right now it's very freaking small, and I think I needed to write this post to remind myself that it's time to expand it.

Love,
M