local-tavern-wench:

i suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and had the urge to draw something. And eat dry cereal.

 Lady!Pavus for the night.

Body clock, y wont u let me adjust T_T

lyndraws:

i can’t believe no one told me about ud vines x

cerseilamisters:

until dawn challenge: favorite female → emily

bottleshark:

Not on the same page.

learnhowtoadult:

lifealamed:

learnhowtoadult:

sailingtoalaska:

learnhowtoadult:

sailingtoalaska:

The thing that ruins me the most right now is that I had this big dream for so long. Like since I was 12 and started going to shows I have wanted to be a music journalist slash work in the music industry.

and I used so many years and spent so much time writing for any website i could, doing any internship i could do. I went to uni and studied journalism but only did music journalism stuff outside because that is all i could see myself doing.

and now im 23, almost 2 years out of uni, and im still working two casual jobs not knowing where Im going in life.

This year I have had to realise and accept that the dream Ive had for ten years will probably never be anything more than a dream. But the problem is I have nothing else. I dont know where to go or what to do. Im not really good at anything.

Where do I go next? I know I absolutely cannot stay in retail forever, it makes me too unhappy and it doesnt fulfil me.

I was the one with all the potential, the one with the big life ahead of her that would become whatever she wanted to be. But now Im an adult and im looking like more of a failure than anything else.

I didnt understand why my brother was so heartbroken the year he turned 18 when he didn’t get picked up in the draft. When he didnt want to do anything else because football was all he knew and football was all he wanted. I didnt understand why he didnt find something else at the same time. Just in case. Just as a back up. 

All the while I was doing exactly the same thing.

Hi there, sailingtoalaska. I don’t mean to butt in, and I hope you’ll forgive me for offering unsolicited advice about your wild and precious life. But I read this post and it broke my heart, so I wanted to share some thoughts for you.

First, I know it is unspeakably, satanically annoying for someone to tell you that you are so young, but you are so young. Trust me (a 31-year-old) on this. It’s tough for anyone to think of themselves as “still young,” because with every single passing second of your life, you are always and forever re-becoming the oldest you have ever been. Still, even if the Singularity never arrives and we never become semi-immortal robo-people, you are, at the very least, probably less than a third of the way through your life. This is good news.

I know you might not believe that, though. I know that right now you are likely yearning for the life-is-my-damn-oyster days of your youth. You’ve emerged from the neon hope and potential of childhood’s candy store. You’re standing on the lonesome plain of a bleached gray parking lot that stretches to the horizon at every point of the compass. Perhaps you are sure that you have peaked, that anyone who encouraged you to follow your dreams was not just careless, but cruel.

If I’m right about how you feel, it’s because that is how I felt for most of my twenties. I would imagine it is how most people feel, actually. I won’t go into the sociological, economic, or psychological reasons why currently-young people have found themselves so singularly disillusioned by the real world. There are many factors, all well-documented: we are “the participation-trophy generations,” we are inheritors of an economy and technological landscape that is changing faster than at any time in history. Those are all true, I guess. But that’s a 50,000-foot view. Let’s look at the experience close up, okay?

Dante said it well, I think:

I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

When I was twenty-seven and in my shadowed forest, I saw the film The Social Network. I came home from the theater, crumpled into my bed, and clenched my pillow against my face so my wife wouldn’t hear me sob. The movie seemed to capture so much of what I had thought I was but had come to realize I would never be. I had once been a promising young guy in a hoodie, too, smiling breathlessly beneath streetlamps as my friends and I planned our glittering futures. It was grandiose for that sobbing version of me to compare himself to the founder of frakking Facebook, but it wasn’t completely ridiculous. Growing up, I was literally the smartest kid in my school, and was voted Most Talented, and had the highest GPA in my university’s history, and had a screenplay optioned before I’d graduated. Not to sound cocky, but I had a semi-justifiable cockiness.

And now here I was, twenty-seven, living well below the poverty line, selling my plasma to pay utilities, working three jobs (including one as a test subject in experimental drug studies) and absolutely enraged and disgusted that I had ever Believed In Myself.

Why did anyone ever reassure me of my potential, or tell me that I could make it in the fields I want? How dare those bastards do that.

I wish I could grab that younger me. I wish I could scoop him up and give him a hug and ice cream cone, and tell him that everything was going to be okay.

You mean life is going to work out how I want it to? he would ask.

I would smile and tell him the truth: No. Not even close. And you have no idea how lucky that makes you.

Here is what I would tell him, and want to tell you, sailingtoalaska: You must be patient, with your life and self, and you mustn’t be beholden to a particular vision of joy. Letting go is not giving up.

This bears repeating.

Letting go is not giving up.

I know now that if I had clung viciously to one specific, rigid idea of What Success Looks Like To Me, simply because it was what I’d thought I wanted, my life would have been lesser and even destructive. 

This is so difficult to understand! Especially, perhaps, for people in creative fields! After all, in discarding or at least delaying one particular path, doesn’t that mean we’re not “shooting for the stars” but “being realistic and settling”?

No. No. No.

The thing is, sailingtoalaska, life can be so wonderful in its weirdness. I have a BFA in Screenwriting. All I wanted to do, ever, was be a screenwriter. Through a series of completely unforeseeable events, I make my living now as a novelist and YouTuber. And I am a very happy and grateful man.

It is okay (it is fabulous) if things don’t go according to your plan. You will have no shortage of detours, coincidences, miracles, and speed bumps. But the reason that this is all okay is that, if you keep going, your life will be at least as good (if not better) than the one you envisioned.

You can keep the core of your dream. You are also free to unburden yourself of calcified expectations and specifics. I don’t know if you’ll be a music journalist, but I do know that there are many paths to the joy and fulfillment music journalism represent. I cross my heart that there are.

I hope this helps. You’re in a neutral zone, it seems like, and I’ve made some videos and written some posts about that place. You may find your way out tomorrow or in a year, I can’t say for sure, but I can promise you that you will find your way.

Here is an excerpt from T.S. Eliot that I wish I could whisper to that younger version of me….

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Be gentle with yourself, my friend, as you wait. 

I am not saying you should abandon your dreams. I just want you to allow for the beautiful probability and radical hope that greater dreams may await you.

- Mike

Holy shit, I did not think that anything at all would come out of this post, let alone that brilliant and very needed reply.

I might be sitting here in a pool of tears but I think your words Mike are exactly what I needed.

And quite obviously what so many others need as well.

It’s nice to know you arent alone, and we will all get through these 20-something years together.

After this reply, you are not the only one in a pool of tears. :]

Well that’s beautiful. The wonderful T. Michael Martin everyone… one of the lovely people I have discovered via the internet and the Vlogbrothers. I know as med students we are on a pretty rigid path… but with residency applications looming and futures uncertain for almost the first time in ever this was a nice reminder that no matter where the big match-computer-in-the-sky says I should end up, it will be O.K. Heck, it’ll be O.K. if it says I should end up nowhere…
No matter what, life will be O.K. and maybe even great.

Just saw this. Thank you. :]

malingshu:

the worst part about being bilingual is being only like… moderately bilingual. like you can make conversation but you can’t like read articles and shit. or if you can understand but not respond. or if you only know enough to look impressive to a monolingual person, but you’re just pathetic to people who are native speakers lolol