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You know when you try your best to ignore a certain feeling? You push and push and push it away, but at some point it overpowers you and you are no longer capable of pushing. That feeling is vulnerability.

It leaves you exposed, an easy target of mockery. To others, you are an open book, predictable and uninteresting.

The feeling can defeat you when you’re alone or even worse—when others surround you. You try so hard to disguise that feeling. “Remember to smile occasionally, look up. Don’t slouch!”

As soon as you get home, you collapse onto your bed.

You don’t cry. Instead, you stare blankly into the blue patterns of your sheets and ruffle around your cover.

You tell yourself that just because you feel that way, it doesn’t mean that you’re weak. No. It’s more a reassurance that you are not cold and heartless.

No, you’re human and you feel just like everyone else.

One can lift their head up high only for so long. At some moment, your neck will ache and you’ll need to stretch it.

This is me stretching the neck of my life. Soon enough, I’ll be strong enough to lift my head up high again.  

Deforming Souls?

The one human emotion that I think we tend to underestimate is not love, anger or joy.
It is sympathy. Once you sympathize another, they behold a power over you. A power that can make you turn right or left. A power that grips your brain and penetrates it to reach your soul. From that, you are no longer yourself. You become part of a community of feelings. Your sense of selfishness is erased completely. It is then replaced by a romanticized unity.
Those who master inflicting such emotions on others hold control over people's sanity, rationality and life decisions. The sole problem is that if one can evoke such an emotion on another, they grasp a soul they are able to twist, twist and twist..

Beautiful quote.

Favorite 2013 quotes

This quote will forever resonate with me. Makes you think.

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” Gautama Buddha

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.” -Gautama Buddha

And this amazing Seth Godin speech:

“Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.

That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.

Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.
Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does.
Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.” -Seth Godin


More Siddhãrtha Gautama:


“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” 

Food for thought.

We regularly create delusions for ourselves because we humans strive for perfection in others more than we do in ourselves. We'd rather believe that everything's rainbows and butterflies, become obsessively delusional, instead of scarring and facing reality. Perfection exists in our mind. Nothing is ideally flawless. It's how we perceive things that determines our definition of perfection. Realistic thinking is a talent, embrace it.

Epiphany.

There's self-consciousness and then there's flat out arrogance. The difference is that the latter comes with irrationality.

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If I had to summarize my life in a shirt, I would have "I am with idiot" written in clear bold letters and multiple arrows pointing at everyone.