feature image includes advice from Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
Alright y’all. It’s Friday, and it’s been a heartbreakingly difficult week. I have no words for the things we’ve witnessed across the United States over the past seven days. More vicious hateful terrorism and mass scale loss of life at the hands of white supremacists. The largest Immigration raid this country has seen in a decade. Toni Morrison leaving this broken world she helped so many cope with behind. Watching the death toll of this country rise so rapidly in real time with no end in sight, just thoughts and prayers floating off into nothingness. Things are bleak by default as it is, and to add the weight of all this is just so much to bear and, well, it’s got me and a whole lot of you too real fucked up. Hopeless is not a word I would generally use to describe myself but it’s the truth of how I’ve felt at times this week.
I’ve been doing everything in my power to care for myself and those I love in a deep intentional way this week. I’ve filled baths with tears and bellies with meals. Spent hours cleaning my apartment and massaging my scalp with coconut oil. Plus lots of check-ins, phone calls, and texts with my friends and community and LOTS of giving advice. It seems like everyone is looking for something to do, or try, or say to cope and breathe and have the courage to live here. We’re all just trying to survive and support each other through giving and receive advice so I figured, why not crowdsource? This is a time where all forms of encouragement whether tough love, soft love, reminders of truth and power, or reminders that everything is temporary are needed and wanted, so I wanna know what the best advice you’ve ever received or simply have to share is.
It doesn’t have to be related to the political climate of the U.S. of course (though I’m obviously here for it if it is), just tell me a bit of wisdom that’s impacted your life in a helpful way. That’s made it easier to get through the hard days and twists and turns of life, brought a smile to your face, or helped you take on something that seemed previously insurmountable. Or advice that helped you grow into the amazing queer person you are today that you’d like to pass along to someone else. Give me quotes and stories and book chapter references. Give me and everyone else in here a little hope.
Maybe it’s your favorite Toni Morrison passage or a parent/child moment you cherish in adulthood. Maybe it’s a moment of true friendship like the one I’m thinking of from 2012 when I was fresh out of college, so lost as to who I was or where I was going, and doubting myself at every turn. I was drunk at a party and made some self-deprecating comment as I tended to do at that time, and without hesitation my friend Kenzie stopped me. She sighed, made the most intense queer loving eye contact I’d ever received at the time and said, “There are far too many incredible women in the world that have no idea how incredible they truly are. Don’t be one of them.”
I’ve thought about that moment, that advice, and that truth almost weekly for the past seven years. It changed everything about the way I lived my life moving forward and I’m so grateful for that whiskey washed moment on a back porch in West Philly because it landed me where I am today. It shifted something in me in the most powerful way. It gave me something to strive for and aspire to, and once I reached that place, an anchor to steady myself and reach out a hand to pull others along. One piece of good advice can change the world, so show me what you’ve got in the comments below. I can’t wait to have my life changed by the brilliance I know this community is capable of.
Chin up, loves.
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