sun & ink

You know that shivery feeling you get after spending hours in the sun? That's what I have right now. (Also, teeny-tiny freckles have begun to appear around my cheeks, which is surprising and very welcome, as I never tan and I rarely even get freckles. Success!)

Sitting on the slightly damp grass during lunch break and again after school, drinking ice tea and tossing around silly ideas for next weekend. Wearing pegged trousers, ankles bare. I'm immensely tired and school is a pain but the sunlight and my friends and these drawings by Stephanie Kubo make things easier.

What made you happy today?

mondays

Boys of Milan & Paris FW2011 from Justin Wu on Vimeo.

This holiday has treated me rather well, what with all the sunlight and the warm breeze and parks and friends. I hope you've all eaten an adequate amount of Easter eggs as well.

And here, have a video of male models goofing around during fashion week. (Sent to me by my friend V. Yes, I added that information to save face, because I obviously tend to do more intellectual things on the internet than ogle male models. Ahem. Anyway, you should thank V for this, not me.)

a bit too much

(Some flowers in photo form to cheer me up.) 

 
There's a bit too much going on, what with everything yesterday had to offer. Parks before sundown and walks at midnight and music threaded through the night, Antti Autio Trio and Neat Neat. Also writing letters on the train home just to stay awake. And missing people, because I always do. 

Right now I'm sitting at my desk with the open window on my left, staring at the fading stamp on the back of my hand, trying to knock some sense into my head but failing. (I don't mind though, remember what was said about failure yesterday?)

(Also: the new series of Doctor Who. Whew. Please discuss. Any fellow Whovians out there or are you all too cool for sci-fi?)

on success and why it matters

I'm going to switch into full-on essay mode for this one. Hope you don't mind.

I'll begin this train of thought by recounting a mini-breakthrough from a therapy session a few weeks back. I was frustrated by my slow progress, going on about how I know that I'm being too hard on myself, but I just can't do anything to change my way of thinking. My therapist asked me the same question he's raised several times before: what would happen if I stopped berating myself for everything? What is it that I am afraid of?

And suddenly I had the answer. I'm afraid that if I stop asking too much of myself, I will never achieve anything again.

Breaking it down, that means I choose to live the way I do, constantly berating myself, constantly being disappointed.

It means that I choose to be miserable because I'd rather be successful than be happy.

And still, I am now going to tell you this: I am sick of people telling me that success doesn't matter. 

In the fast-paced highly competitive world we live in, people are constructing dreams of a life not ruled by success, when in fact, a world like that is both impossible and frightening. Yearning for success is base-level human and trying to rid ourselves of it is a perplexing thought. 

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be successful. It is our stilted sense of success that's the problem.

Just think about it. What if being successful was measured by happiness? What if we stopped accepting awry outsider definitions of success and started building our own?

Only during the past few months have I begun to realise how immensely important success is for me. All my life I have been told by parents, teachers and friends to stop being so hard on myself. I expect a lot from myself, always have. There is nothing more embarrassing than not knowing something and there is nothing more scary than failure.

And now I'm beginning to realise that I have been chasing false dreams for eighteen years. For my entire life I have striven for approval, for intelligence, for good grades in school. I have beaten myself again and again over not being good enough, not trying hard enough. I have made my life miserable because I have been running away from failure too desperately to think about other options, other ways of life.

This is not a good way to live. This is not what I want.

Why am I accepting norms of success from society, from people who are not me? 

I am the only one to determine my own dreams. I don't need my life and my happiness to be validated by anyone except myself.

For me, success would mean, for instance, being able to read the books I want to read, study the things I want to study, go the places I want to go and surround myself with the people I love.

These are the heavyweight dreams, the important ones, the things that actually matter. These are achievable dreams and they are all my own. They are dreams that do not scare me shitless, they don't make my teeth chatter out of panic. Instead, they make me feel hopeful.

So, with the risk of sounding like a bad self-help book: close your eyes and breathe deep for a bit and think about what you want. 

And, if you are anything like me, please stop blindly pushing yourself out of fear of failure. Because, as the wonderful J.K. Rowling said in her Harvard commencement speech (which you should absolutely watch because it is one of the most powerful and inspiring things I have ever heard),

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default."

violet

The delightful Camilla has launched an online magazine. The first issue absolutely floored me, full of beautiful photography and a certain sense of calm that I haven't found in any other magazine to date. (Also, the magazine includes a piece on beauty written by the impeccable Meg Fee. So you should definitely take a look.)

how i want to live

There, I think. Books stacked against the walls, creaky whitewashed floorboards and so much light.

I started writing something a few days back. It's been a few months since I've last worked on something. Now I'm writing fragments and joining them together, bits and pieces involving sunsets and lawns and the quiet of a city by dawn.