Mud

Life is such a weird process of doing stuff, and realising that stuff was stupid, and recovering from stuff, and discovering that you hate a thing you loved and you love a thing you hated. I hate all of it, but I love it too.

I watched a beautiful video recently by Leena Norms about 'finding yourself'. She talks about how the term is effectively misleading because as a living person you'll probably at some point realise some of the self you have found is not you any more. My favourite part was this bit about love:

I want a love that asks me from the pillow each morning, "and who are you today?" and I will ask them the same, and perhaps I'll say "and actually, I kind of liked who I was yesterday, but I think I'm going to make some tweaks - here, and here, and here - because I think it gives me a better overall effect, and makes me ultimately a better person" and they'll be like "cool, I can't wait to meet you."

Change is weird, but when you love someone you should be excited to take the boat round each river-bend with them, and the same can be said for yourself. But sometimes that's hard because you've gotten stuck in a really muddy and gross part of the river, or you're long free from it but you still feel all muddy and dirty and like you're causing an environmental concern for the rest of the river and maybe you should just get out of the boat (is this analogy still working?).

Concentrate on how clear the water is and how it moves. Forget about that stupid bit of river from earlier. You know, it's the river that was muddy, not you. Keep that boat going. I'm seriously going to stop with this river analogy now.

Just don't give up, don't punish yourself for going about life in different ways at different times, and don't force yourself to eat Brussels sprouts if you hate them.