Given Enough Coffee, I Could Rule The World!

flowerais

a gentle reminder that you did well this year. you met new people, learned new things and felt new feelings. you did so many things that made you scared. you picked yourself up off the floor after feeling completely defeated or heartbroken. there were some really tough nights but you survived them all. you made people happy just by existing. you accepted many goodbyes but the serendipitous meetings made up for them. it was your own hard work that paid off but you always downplay it or compare yourself to others. that’s not fair on yourself. you’ve come so far from the first day of this year. you have more wisdom and strength now. yes, other people seem more “successful” but does that even matter? please don’t think so lowly of yourself to only think about your failures. 2018 was your year of growth. I hope you take a moment to be kind to yourself, and believe that 2019 will be even better.

themessesofmen

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)

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Moreover, individuals who appear exceptional to us, the ones we honor with the name of genius, are those who tried to work out the fate of all humanity in their particular lives. No woman has thought herself authorized to do that. How could Van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Borinage, she would not have felt men’s misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption, so she would never have painted Gogh’s sunflowers. And this is without taking into account the painter’s life—the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that fed into van Gogh’s art by feeding his sensibility—would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognized the anguish of Man driven from paradise. Saint Teresa is one of the only women to have lived the human condition for herself, in total abandonment: we have seen why. Placing herself beyond earthly hierarchies, she, like Saint John of the Cross, felt no reassuring sky over her head. For both of them it was the same night, the same flashes of light, in each the same nothingness, in God the same plentitude. When finally it is possible for every human being to place his pride above sexual differences in the difficult glory of his free existence, only then will she be able to attempt to discover in her life and her works all of reality and not only her own person. As long as she still has to fight to become a human being, she cannot be a creator.

Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex