Heather Havrilesky

Hold your own space and honor yourself and don’t let that space shrink or collapse in the company of indifference. Don’t ask indifference to love you.

Because once you build your own religion around gratitude and pride in who you are, at your best and at your worst, you’ll feel better than you ever have before.

You have to find the beauty in the rawness you’re feeling and the sweetness that lies just beyond your discomfort at being watched and appreciated and loved.

You want to be a sexy, indifferent blur, because then you’re never still enough to notice that you’re disappointing to yourself, that you’re depressed, that you’re running from the truth

Go watch Living Out Loud or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Read Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Read Mating by Norman Rush

Let’s try this: If I told you that you would never, ever fall in love again, what kind of a plan would you make to ensure your own happiness moving forward? What would you work toward? What would you do more of? I bet that you’d have to give up on some big dreams that you care about a lot. But I also bet that giving up some of those things might add up to a weird kind of freedom. Maybe you’d cut your hair short and save up for a house. Maybe you’d start riding horses or writing poetry or growing sunflowers or taking dance lessons or baking pies.

Let’s fly into your future and look back at this year in your history in our minds. This was the year that you really knew that you were an artist, first and foremost. This was the year you committed to what came next.

Remember this year? It was a good year, actually. This was the year you stopped waiting around for things to happen. And somehow, as soon as you stopped waiting, as soon as you started doing things, making things, claiming your own space, speaking up for yourself? That’s when your real life began.

Keep doing it, on all fronts. Reach for what you love with abandon, with hope in your heart, with fragility, without knowing exactly what comes next. Reach and never, ever stop reaching.

It sounds paradoxical, but uncertainty and vulnerability are your guides through this soggy life you’re living. Leaning into your not knowing will bring you more knowledge and wisdom and understanding than you ever dreamed of.