#life lessons
- How to flee an area fast
- How strategic partnerships work
- Overcoming a fear of needles
- Solubility rules and loads of chemistry
- How to stay safe
- How to help someone who has overdosed
- How business works (scared money won’t make money)
- How to hide things in very clever hiding spots
- How to trust people/How to not trust someone but not let them know
- How to say no
- How to cover tracks or other scars/discolorations
- Learning more about yourself/ your friends
- Exploring religions/conspiracy theories
-Getting the cold/flu just doesn’t bother you because nothing compares to withdrawal.
(This is in no way glorifying drug use, only me sharing my ideas and knowledge I’ve acquired through my addiction battle)
Please feel free to add to the list!
2016 has been a tough one, but I’m not ready to completely call it a bust. It has thrown a lot of crap and heartache at us, yes, but that doesn’t mean I would give up all of the experiences I had along the way. And yes, that includes the sucky ones. I have shared a lot of those experiences with you all this year with my vlog experiment, The Cate Morland Chronicles. You all saw me ecstatic, heartbroken, angry, afraid, embarrassed, fangirling, humiliated, and over the moon, blissfully happy. I made some great decisions and some really, really stupid ones. My grandma always said “You can’t have the rainbows without the rain.” It’s an old saying, I know, but now as I head into my adult life, that means more to me than ever. Life comes with its fair amount of suckage, but that’s what makes you even more grateful for its abundance of greatness.
By now, I think you all know that it turned out alright for me (okay, a little more than alright), but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to forget all those life lessons I picked up along the way. I’ve learned that as much as I may want to think the best of everyone, I’m sometimes going to be disappointed. At the end of the day, we are all just human. We are capable of hurting each other, either with full intent to do so or completely by accident. But I maintain my intent to give people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think I have it within me to become a full-blown cynic.
An instance where I didn’t give someone the benefit of the doubt was with The General and look how that turned out. Even though he and I suffered from a bit of a misunderstanding, I’m still aware that I shouldn’t have presumed the worst. Especially since I was presuming the worst just because it was the most dramatic and scintillating. I love my fandoms and I will always love The Mysteries of Udolpho, but it has as much bearing on my real life as The Cat in the Hat. (No matter how cool I think it would be to have a machine that cleans my house before Mom gets home.)
With those life lessons comes the decision to maintain the end of my vlog. I have loved sharing my life with you all, but frankly, I’m just too busy to continue. Duke is giving me more work to do to make up for the fact that I no longer get to write the Henry cover story for obvious ethical reasons. Also, Henry and I agreed that we want to keep to ourselves. (But maybe you’ll see him pop up in the pages of Persona now and again.) I can’t tell you what it has meant to me to have all of you lovely, fandamonious, outspoken viewers along for this ride that has been my post-graduate experience. You all cheered me along and gave it to me straight, which I definitely needed some of this year.
Just remember to love what you love and geek out over your fandoms, no matter what they may be. It’s especially during the tough times that we need their engaging stories and communities.
So let us not say good-bye, but instead - “Live long and prosper.”
Forever and always your fangirl friend,
Cate Morland
- The fewer clothes you pack, the more books you can bring home.
- Your integrity is measured as much by the promises you keep with yourself as by those you keep for others.
- There is nothing on this earth more banal than calories.
- From men, seek neither affirmation nor adoration. Seek respect.
- Mail every letter the day you seal it.
- The difference between a child and an adult is recognizing that other people are real. Other people feel, other people hurt, other people want, and other people do not stop existing when you walk away or hang up.
- You have to be your own home, no matter how home-like someone else feels.
- Keep a journal. It holds you accountable for doing exactly what you want.
- To be in love is a state, and out of your control. To love is an action, and a decision you make and renew. A working definition for love: actively trying to understand and care for another person, as they change, as you change, constantly, always.
- Your friends are your life partners. Treasure them, nurture them. Strong friendship is the true “‘til death do us part”, no matter what the scripts say.
- If you’re talking about it a lot, there’s probably something wrong. Contentedness is a quiet tune you hum in your head.
- Curiosity has a longer shelf-life than lust.
- You are not who you think you could or should be; you are what you do.
- To change the narrative frame is to change everything.
- If a man looks at you with a certain glimmer in his eyes and say, “Let’s just go to Paris”: smile, dip your chin. Say nothing until the ticket is in your hand.
If you push me away, I promise you, you won’t find me where you left me. My heart’s big, but not big enough to deal with people who decide to love me when it’s convenient for them.
Sara Sheehan, I Was Never Broken
Lindi Nunziato
Ready for its lesson
I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
10 Life Lessons For A More Positive Life
10 Life Lessons For A More Positive Life
Life has definitely been hard over the last year, but now with there being some light at the end of the tunnel regarding the pandemic, I’m feeling hopeful. With this however, there are a few life lessons that I’ve learned over the last year that I feel we can all appreciate and benefit from. Are you ready to find out what life lessons we all need to hear?
Continue reading
“You’re just making excuses for your excuses.”
~ Dirk Gently to Todd Brotzman, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Imagine if you met someone who can’t eat watermelon. Not that they’re allergicorunablesomehow, but they just haven’t figured out how to do that. So you’re like “what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon.”
And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they’d figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.
This goes back and forth. No, it’s not an emotional issue, they’re not afraidof the watermelon. They caneat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things (“it’s watery?” they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?
“It’sredon the inside?”
Wait, they’ve never seenthe inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they couldbite through the crust, there’s no way to get human jaws around it.
“Oh, you’re supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides.”
And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it’s easy, it’s ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there’s no way that someone just can’teat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.
If someone can’t do something after being repeatedly told to “just do it”, there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.
Yep.
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.
If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. […]
I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.
My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.
Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn’t been making much progress with the instrument.
When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school’s clarinet needed it’s pads replaced.
He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.
Sometimes you don’t need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.
