6. Everywhere there’s kindness, there’s beauty

No trigger warnings that I know of. If you find any, please tell me. If you find any grammatical errors, please tell me as well.

Why is it that we’re still obssessing with such a narrow understanding of beauty? How can we not see beauty in our differences? We’re surrounded by people telling us how to look: Skinny, long, flowing hair, long legs, sexy clothes, glasses only if they compliment our look. What? Who could mistake that for beauty? Don’t get me wrong, of course many people who look like that are beautiful. But that’s not why they’re beautiful. You see, you’ve probably heard that inner beauty is more important than outer beauty, but still felt that you weren’t beautiful enough. The truth of the matter is, you can’t separate inner and outer beauty. They work together and are sort of the same thing. Let me explain:

At primary school I had this friend and I always thought she was exceptionally beautiful. I loved the way her hair looked, I loved the way she smiled, I loved the way she spoke. One day, she said mean, uncalled for things to me, ganging up on me with other kids and suddenly her face changed, and I found that she was ugly. We made up later and for a while, I was indifferent to her appearance until years later she listened to me when I was in great need for someone to listen and I found her beautiful again.

You see, beauty is not something we can establish or reject by looking at someone for the first time. We won’t find it in magazines, on catwalks, in clothes shops. We won’t find it in skinniness, even faces or make-up. We won’t find it in being pressured to lose weight by people who think we aren’t worth their attention just the way we are.

What we do when we first meet a person and don’t have much to go by, is judge them by their appearance. We can’t help it. The understanding of what makes an ‘above average’ appearance in this society is questioned way too little, I find. When we first meet people we put them in categories, according to this stereo type of what ‘beauty’ is. The worst mistake we can make is reject someone because of these categories and to stick to these categories, even when we realise that the person in front of us is just that: A person, not a picture.

Everybody who sticks to these categories is missing out on the thing they originally wanted to do: To surround themselves with beautiful people.

Beauty if everywhere you find kindness. Helping someone, an honest smile, a kind word, a hug, listening, being concerned, paying attention to someone, having the will to fight with someone, for someone… This is where we find beauty, this is where we find love. And suddenly all the features of appearance that you previously categorised as ‘not pretty’ become overwhelmingly beautiful, and you don’t know how you could have been so wrong. So, the next time you look at a person, see them as a person and not as a picture.

And, if you ever find yourself standing in front of a mirror asking yourself: “Am I ugly?” all you really need to do is ask: “Is there kindness in me?” And then you’ll have your answer.

5. Would You Rather Questions Round 1

So, for just a bit of fun I decided to play ‘Would You Rather’ today. I’ve chosen ten questions from different websites.

1. Would you rather be ignorant and happy or be knowledgeable and never fully content?

Well, if all the bad things still went on around me, I think I would rather be knowledgeable and never fully content. If it became fact that I would never be able to change any of these circumstances in even the smallest way, I would rather be ignorant and happy!

2. Would you rather be able to go forward or back in time?

I would rather go back in time. I would love to be able to hang out with some of the great classic authors. I would love to know what it was like living in different times. I think we can learn a lot from the past for the future.

3. Would you rather give out bad advice or receive bad advice?

Receive bad advice. I can always choose to ignore it. But if I told someone bad advice and they go ahead and follow it and end up being hurt, well that would be terrible!

4. Would you rather be a master of every musical instrument or be fluent in every language?

Fluent in every language. How cool would that be!

5. Would you rather be in your pajamas all day or in a suit all day?

Well, does suit mean actually leaving the house and doing something? Then I would choose the suit. Plus if it’s like the classic suit that some men wear for formal occasions, it might be fun because I’ve never done that before.

6. Would you rather always have to tell the truth or always lie?

I would rather always tell the truth.

7. Would you rather have a photographic memory or be able to totally forget anything you want?

Be able to forget. Honestly - remembering every little detail would be very stressful I imagine. Plus I would never be able to get lost anymore. And getting lost is actually kind of fun.

8. Would you rather be a dragon or have a dragon?

Be a dragon, obviously!

9. Would you rather discover a cure for cancer OR find out once and for all if God was real?

Discover a cure for cancer! Definitely!

10. Would you rather be able to turn invisible or be able to fly?

Be able to fly!

4. Response to comment by lecturer on the meaning of life

Trigger warning: Discussion of the question if life is meaningful or meaningless, may trigger some people

4. Response to comment made by lecturer on the meaning of life, saying it would be “very depressing to talk about. We’re born, we suffer, we die.”

Dear lecturer,

I don’t know if you actually meant what you said there or if it was meant to be some kind of bad joke. Perhaps you meant it in some kind of scientific/factual way, as in aging equals suffering. The question arises why life would still be worth protecting if this was actually the case. Searching for the meaning of life is perhaps a pessimistic way of looking at the world: why would there be just one meaning, THE meaning OF life? It excludes all the little moments of happiness and fulfilment. Is the meaning of life happiness? If I’m not happy, have I failed at life? No, of course not. Perhaps we should phrase the question differently. Perhaps it shouldn’t be what is the meaning of life, but where can we find meaning in life. Every moment of happiness and contentment contributes to that, as does every moment when we’ve learned something from our dreadful experiences, every moment when we’ve helped somebody, basically every experience we can find meaning in. It still doesn’t answer the question why we’re on the earth in the first place. Why some people suffer more than others. If there’s a God. If he/she/it means for us to suffer. If you’ve had the experience of living through dark periods in your life, recovering, relapsing and recovering again, you soon learn that you can take nothing for granted. What it made me do is try to focus more on the little things, on the little, happy moments. It made me appreciate and value the good things that happen to me more. We’ve got to celebrate moments of happiness. In bleak, dark periods of our lives we often feel like this is never going to change, that we’re always going to be unhappy. Sometimes it’s impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. False hope and disappointments make us feel like our brain is betraying us. The fact is, it is betraying us. Humans have the tendency to focus on the bad stuff. There can be thousands of wonderful comments on something you’ve posted on the internet, but one hateful comment can make you question everything you thought you knew. Especially with depression you have the feeling like it’s never going to end, like you’re always going to feel this way. But it will end, and you won’t always feel this way. Life is a mixture of good and bad, suffering and enjoying, happiness, contentment, hatred, disappointment, false hope, justified hope, love, heartbreak… I could go on. The bad stuff, the bad emotions have a right to be there, too, as long as they’re within certain limits, otherwise, there’s help for that. The good emotions have an equal right to be there. So life is not birth, suffering and death. It’s being born, being loved, learning to love, being sent on an unsteady road with lots of surprises, heartbreak, emotional turmoils, but also value, miracles, unexpected kindness and the lessons that you learn from all of these things.  

3. Kill with kindness

It’s all in the title, and I don’t think there are any triggers here, but if you do find any, please let me know.

A strange expression, perhaps. Why would you even use the word ‘kill’ together with the word ‘kindness’, other than to celebrate alliterations? And perhaps the meaning is unclear as well. What it means to me is seeing negative behaviour, especially towards you. And instead of feeding into it and becoming angry youself, you reach into your self and find the place where you hoard your love. Use it to guide this person who is treating you unjustly, in hope that it will show them how misplaced their behaviour is. Does it work? Maybe. Occasionally? Yes, definitely. Is there an alternative? No. We should have learned by now that violence can only create more violence. We should have learned by now that the people mistreating us are people, too, who are not the devil’s children, but who are misguided. What we should do instead of hating them or taking revenge on them is a) forgive them and b) try to help them. This is a lot to ask from anyone. I mean, imagine they said words so hurtful they almost destroyed you, so hurtful they can never be taken back. Imagine they killed someone you love. These things happen every day. And I would never ask of anyone to spend time with someone who did such dreadful things to them. But please don’t forget that forgiving is something you do to create peace. And that revenge will destroy that tiny little piece of peace in a heartbeat. But I want to take our minds away from these more extreme cases, and return to the more regular ones.

You can only help someone, and you can only really expect someone to do the right thing if you show them how. They haven’t learned how to be kind to all people yet, and perhaps they’ll be inspired to be kinder if you show them how.

2. The Importance Of Acknowledging someone’s existence

2. The Importance Of Acknowledging someone’s existence

In this text I will be talking about some personal experience with depression and loneliness. If you feel like you’re not up for this today, save it for another day. Value your own emotional well-being.

When I was thirteen, I changed schools. I did it because at the last school some pupils and teachers had started bullying me, and the rest of the pupils were ignoring me. I had lost a lot of previously very close friends. At the new school, I immediately found a group of friends, but a couple of days in (we were on a class trip), I lost all of them but one. We became best friends, but basically, a couple of weeks later, I lost her as a friend and I had no one. This is when something that I now know to be depression, really started to hit me, and I developed a sort of school phobia, where I could hardly talk in class at all. I mostly sat there, silently crying. The other pupils mostly ignored me, again. If I said hello, they didn’t respond. Apart from people I talked to who were in a different class, I was by myself. In the years to come, I sometimes still hung out with that friend who was my best friend for the first couple of weeks. When three years after I had joined the school she left to go to a school abroad, my mum and I finally started conversation with my teacher and a guidance counselor, as well as the class president from my class. She told me that three years before a group of pupils had gone to the class teacher and asked her what was going on with me and what they should do. She said I was having some issues and they should leave me alone. I know that she was just trying to protect them from me, because fact was she did know there were some issues, but she didn’t actually know what was wrong with me and probably thought I would influence them in some negative way. Which would not have been the case, just to let you know. But I think it’s important to know that “Leave them alone” is the worst advice you can give if you actually want to help someone. I don’t know if this is true for every single situation you can find yourself in. But I do think that, for most situations, it is. Especially when you’re dealing with depression. Depression is a disease of loneliness. I took that sentence directly from Andrew Solomon’s article which you can read here: http://andrewsolomon.com/articles/depression-is-a-disease-of-loneliness/

Social isolation is not a cure for anything, least of all depression, or any level of loneliness. To be fair, neither my teacher, nor I, knew that I had depression. But it had to have been fairly obvious that I was lonely.

Today I am much better. It still bothers me, though, when people I say hello to, don’t say hello back. It’s a form of rejection, and it’s something that I don’t quite understand. I try to make it a point to notice the people around me, and even though it can be very difficult for me to even look at people, I smile and say hello. I offer an ‘how are you?’ I listen. I ask questions. The truth is, whether the person I’m talking to has any issues I might be helping with is not the issue. It’s that some have forgotten the basis of what it means to be human. We’re social animals. We need each other. In the situation I used to be in several years ago, even one word made a lot of difference. There were some people who did say that one word. And I am grateful for that. But the truth is, I shouldn’t have to be. Noticing that someone is there and acknowledging it in a friendly way is not an act of heroism. It’s an instinct in any social animal that we somehow  suppress. We shouldn’t. To say hello, to smile at someone, to actually care about someone, they don’t have to be your friend. They just have to be another living thing.

Another point I’m trying to make, is, of course, that you never know another person’s story. Not unless you ask that person.

1. Introduction

1. Introduction

Hello. This is my blog.

I promise I will work on that first sentence. I’m not really good at introductions, but I figure you should know what this blog is going to be about, which is:

Anything that springs to my mind. Personal experiences and struggles, my view on issues I find important, philosophical thoughts that don’t always make sense. But also book, TV show, Youtuber, film, and other recommendations. If you have anything you would like me to write about, or any question at all, please leave a comment.

The section above this written text, where I’ve written ‘Hello. This is my blog.’ (which is not my most interesting work) is actually for important info you should read before reading the text. Trigger warnings or age recommendations may be in that space, so please read it before you read the rest.

I’m a singer and a writer, so if you find poems on this blog or shameless advertising, don’t be surprised.

Thank you for working your way through the introduction. I hope you’re having a lovely day, and, if not, that’s okay, too. Tomorrow will be brighter. In the words of Michelle:

And in the words of Annie:

Wise kids.

Best,

L.