One good thought: Golden friendships

Growing up, there were times when I would kneel beside my bed at night, filled with such a strong desperation and loneliness that it would swell and bulge within me, forcing me into uncontrollable agitation and panic. I lost the ability to breathe properly, I lost the ability to control the tears that would just pour and pour, I lost the ability to believe. I couldn’t see past that moment, that moment where escape seemed an impossibility. It was such a raw loneliness, as if the whole world had decided to turn its back on me and no matter how much I screamed, no matter how much I scraped within my throat for a voice, no matter how much I banged and raged, not a single soul would turn. I write this firstly to remind myself of where I once was, and also because a beautiful soul reminded me today that it’s just as important to see someone at their worst moments as it is to see them at their best. In those desperate moments I would turn to the heavens and plead for one thing, that the loneliness would stop. Despite the fact I had people in my life that I counted as friends, it seemed to remain a ceaseless and tormenting presence within me. It creeped into every relationship and picked away at it. I felt like there was nbody that I could truly trust, that I could fully open myself up to, that I felt comfortable with sharing my secrets with. Someone who I would be able to share my feelings and thoughts with that I did not want to burden my family with. And every day would continue just as before, lonely and fear-filled days, desperate and uncontrollable nights.

But life moved on. It did not wait for me. It just moved. My environment changed. I moved on to the next chapter and as I did I grew, I developed, and I started to learn things about myself and about just how dependent we are on the places and the people we are surrounded with. I had time to really think and to understand things about myself. New people entered my life, tiny blessings that floated in softly and quietly, whispering out to the winds of change and beckoning them to blow my way. I began to see my own worth. The confidence grew, the self-belief followed. Desperation quietened its roar, instead deciding to morph into positivity. And of course all positivity is contagious. Suddenly this lonely, fearful beggar became a queen. Suddenly she felt as if totally and wholly surrounded by the world that had not one year before completely isolated her. As if filled with regret, it offered up to her the one thing that she had so longed for, that she had prayed to the heavens for each night. And it decided to pay her back with interest.

I feel like at this point in my life there are few things that mean more to me than the beautiful and amazing people in my life. I look at my past and then I look at where I am now and I just wonder with sheer amazement what it is that drew these amazing people to this undeserving and lonely soul. I’m filled with so much gratitude, so much thankfulness, and sometimes I need to remind myself of how lucky I truly am. I’ve learnt a lot during the past few years, about what friendship means. Of course it’s always different for everyone and it always depends on your own personal experiences. But these are just a few of the things I learnt.

People change. The people you thought you would always stay close with are often the people that disappear as time moves forward and life begins handing out the real lessons. And the people who you thought would slowly slink further and further away seem to only want to come closer. They are the people who suddenly help create a tradition of Costa Coffee dates and TK Maxx wanderings twice a year. That’s why it’s so important to keep contact with everyone who wants to keep contact with you. Because you never know when something special might suddenly want to come out and play.

You have to work for it. Hard. Especially when you feel you have something that you would never want to lose. True friendship is hard to find. It doesn’t matter what form that friendship takes. Some people have friends that they can tease and annoy, that are more like siblings, that they can steal their food, turn up unexpected, and re-enact the whole Friends series with and then some. Others don’t have to spend all their time together, they can spend months apart from each other and then resume right where they left off. Other prefer to sit in silence, without any awkwardness, just pure comfort and security. Others might even have a friendship that grows spontaneously between two people who have never even met, who comment on each other’s blog posts and show the other just how important they are to the world. Whatever the case, you have to be willing to work for it, to keep it strong, to put in the time and the effort. We’re humans, we have standards, and we can tell when we’re deemed not that important. “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”  ― Bob Marley

Your mindset is everything. When you start believing that you are worthy of true friendship, that you are worthy of positive influences in your life, you are worthy of true happiness, and you are worthy of only the best things in life, when you tell that to yourself every single day, you will attract all the world’s wealth towards you. It’s something I myself am just discovering and as I apply it to my own life I realise that it is so true. By changing my mindset I changed my whole life. I started to see people differently and I realised that often a whole friendship can be so dependent on whether or not you have made the decision to give it a chance. Keep your mind open and let the possibilities take hold and grow. Give them time, allow them the right to makes mistakes, and it can lead to something absolutely amazing.

And finally (for now!), a few good friends are worth a hell of a lot more than a whole bunch of not-so-good ones.

Here’s to all the amazing people in our lives. Here’s to all the beautiful connections we’ve made. And here’s to so many more. And here’s also to the fact I managed to get this posted before midnight! 🙂

See you tomorrow my beautiful friends ♥

 

One good thought: What you are not

Today’s good thought comes from this beautiful piece of Typewriter Poetry written by Amanda Torroni. Stick her name into Google for more amazing pieces!

We forget to focus on what we are not sometimes, who we don’t want to be. Or maybe we know it, we just don’t always say it, or spend too much time thinking about it. I think there are some things I could never let myself become. I could never be fake and I could never be a hypocrite. These are the two things I cannot stand, and that I have to distance myself from a lot. There are other things too; I don’t want to be afraid, or dependent on someone else. But I think my biggest fear is to become someone who is filled with regret, who reaches the end of her time and looks back on her life and thinks of so much more she wanted to do, and could have done.

Every word of this poem is true. I’ve given up on trying to think too hard about what I want to do with myself, and what career I want to follow. Not knowing these things quite honestly scared the shit out of me. But I realise now that not only is it okay to not know, I don’t actually need to know, not right now. Of course there are some things I do know, things I desperately want to do. My bucket list so to speak. And they are things I am determined to make happen, however long it takes. But everything else doesn’t matter. We’ve got to take each moment as they come, and to allow our journeys to unwind as we walk. To pick up the clues and the self-realisations on the way, so that we can piece them together when the time is right. As long as you are doing everything in your power to make the most of each and every opportunity, as long as you aren’t sitting back and wondering when you’ll get a chance but instead going out there and making them, then all of that adds up to regret-free living. And that’s all I want. So I can get to the end of my time and sit back smiling at myself, filled with all the knowledge I don’t quite have yet, and I can whisper to myself, ‘you did alright H. You did alright.’

See you tomorrow! ❤

One good thought: Moments of glory

So today I’m taking my inspiration for my one good thought from the amazing author John Steinbeck and the book I’m reading, East of Eden. I’ve already fallen in love with this book and even though I’m not too far into it yet, I’ve read enough to tell me just why Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature and why he himself thought it to be his greatest novel, with everything else he had written being ‘in a sense, practice for this’. It’s also made me question all my life choices so far seeing I hadn’t read it sooner.

There’s one passage in particular that, after I finished reading it, made me want to come on here and copy it word for word to share with whoever I can. It doesn’t give anything away in terms of plot so no spoilers here, instead it’s just a beautiful paragraph that I relate to so much right now. As I typed it I felt it’s power even more as I took in each word separately. Perhaps you can try it too; read it slowly, pause at each comma and full stop, maybe even read it aloud.

‘Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great streching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then – the glory – so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men’.

I feel that the reason I relate to this so much is because I don’t think that glory has lit up my life just yet. But recently, and I mean very recently, I’ve been feeling that fuse burning, I can feel it in my stomach just as Steinbeck describes. And as I read his description I can’t help but feel excited because I cannot wait until that cricket song reaches my ears and I can dance in the sunlight that emerges. We all deserve that glory, and I think everyone gets a chance to experience it. But we have to be ready and open to it, that’s the deciding factor. If you’re asking for something amazing to happen, if you’re asking for change or an opportunity, but then you sit around and refuse to chase it, you don’t make the sacrifices and put in the effort that’s needed to attain it, you don’t search for it with the true intentions of grasping even the slither of a chance that brushes past you, then you may never get all that you wish for. But if you are, if you manage to fully focus yourself on receiving it and change your whole attitude to every chance that comes your way, going for everything and letting nothing escape you, then the universe will send you more opportunities than you can count. I don’t quite know if I believe in the Law of Attraction, or that I even understand it really, but I think that attitude is everything, and once you start believing that amazing things are destined for you, then even if each step is painfully slow, they will make their way towards you.

I know I’m ready for that glory to light up my life. I’m ready to do absolutely anything for it. I’m at a point in my life where I don’t feel I am totally committed to anything at all. I feel that if an opportunity came up half way across the world, there would be literally nothing in my way that would stop me from taking it apart from the sadness I would feel at being so far from my family and friends. But the fear that once stopped me from going after the things I truly wanted has long since dissipated and it gives me the greatest of comforts just knowing that. And it makes me think that even if I have to wait a while to move to New York or get a chance to travel and make real change in this world, I’m okay to do that because I know with a guaranteed certainty that they are things I am going to do. I won’t allow it to be any other way.

Here’s to glory lighting up each and every one of your lives with the brightest lights imaginable! ♥