Hi š, My name is Mohammad, and Iām reaching out in a moment of desperate need. Iām a father of three young children living in Gaza, and we are caught in the midst of a catastrophic war. Our home is no longer a safe haven, and the future here seems increasingly uncertain. š
Iāve launched a fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $40,000 to relocate my family to a safer place where my children can grow up in peace and have a chance at a brighter future.
Unfortunately, my previous fundraising efforts were abruptly halted when my account was terminated without explanation. However, I remain determined to keep fighting for my familyās safety and well-being. š«¶
If you could take a moment to read our story, consider donating, or simply share our campaign with others, it would make an incredible difference. Every act of kindness, no matter how small, brings us one step closer to safety and a new beginning. š
Thank you for your time, compassion, and support. ā¤ļøāš©¹
https://gofund.me/fd1faea2 š
reblog if youāve read fanfictions that are more professional, better written than some actual novels. Iām trying to see something
Chris:Fuck a heatwave,a goth never gets too warm.
*One Hour Later*
Chris:I have heatstroke.
touch starved people reblog this
I GOT A MOUSE AND I NAMED HIM AFTER YOU
AWW HES SO CUTE
we are having danger days summer!! we are dying our hair and driving our cars too fast and getting sunburned!! weāre making art and participating in the local music scene and eating junk food and spending all our time with our friends!! and killing government employees also.
Advice from Ricky Olson of Motionless in White:
Iāve been getting a lot of messages recently regarding peopleās personal issues with depression, suicide, and deaths of friends or loved ones, and needing help and/or advice. Just a warning, I might get too involved in this, and it could become quite lengthy. Also, it wont all make sense to everyone, but bare with me here.
Just about every āproblemā people have are based on time. Past, and future. If they arenāt stuck in the past, theyāre too busy living in a future circumstance.
When your mind is consistently associating with the past, you are letting yourself connect to pain. By processing guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or any feelings like these, you reinforce a false sense of self. You are not these things. As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot become free from it. Subconsciously, you will resist any attempt you make to heal because your sense of self is invested in feelings of the past. The suffering has become an essential part of who you are by trying to retain the false image of yourself that has been created. As long as your sense of self is invested in your emotions, you will unconsciously resist healing. The only way to overcome this hurdle is to make it conscious. When the realization of your attachment comes to light, you begin to unravel the knot youāve initially tied.
On the other hand, when youāre too busy getting to the future, the present moment suddenly becomes a just a means of getting there. Every task you take becomes unbearable and cumbersome because of your unwillingness to accept the current situation for what it is. People are always waiting for this or that to make them happy.Iāll be happy once I have ____ in my life. Iāll be happy once I achieve _____. Any thoughts such as these are anticipating something you canāt possibly guarantee, and puts yourself in a state of mind that says, āIām not happy until my life gets to this point.ā Everything you do every single day is suddenly meaningless because you want the future, not the present. Waiting is a state of mind, and every type of waiting creates an unconscious inner conflict between the present and the projection of the future you want. Similarly, āwhat ifā thoughts create a projection of yourself into an imaginary future situation which, in turn, creates fear. There isnāt a way to cope with this situation because it doesnāt exist. You can never cope with the future. āThe answer, strength, action you need to take will be there when the situation arises and you need it.ā
Itās good to have goals in life to give yourself direction, but the only way to truly get where you want to be is step by step right now. When a decision is to be made, make it when itās necessary. Realistically, the future doesnāt exist, and the past is gone. I think people forget that the only time we EVER have, is right now. This particular moment. Weāve been conditioned to use the past as a scapegoat for our current actions, and to look at the future with anticipation and fear. The only thing that realistically matters is the present.
People say life is a series of moments. If we cannot learn to ādie to the past every moment,ā we cannot possibly tread with the grain of the universe.
Refusing to go with the flow of life will bring sorrow and heartache. When you cut off your relationship with good things in your life that have diminished, you can grow. Itās a cycle. Clinging to a good thing that used to be and resisting the change in life will bring āfailureā in some area. When you realize that everything is impermanent and let good and bad things come and go, youāre allowing the universe to work without rubbing against the grain. Offering no resistance to life will let you be in a state of ease without being dependent on things being or ending up a certain way, whether it be āgoodā or ābadā.
If youāre wondering what your purpose in life is, sit back and think about it for a moment. If only the present moment matters, your purpose in life at this particular time would be sitting there, reading this. If youāre taking a shower, your purpose would be just that. To have purpose and to have direction are two completely different things. Having a purpose is, again, a state of mind. You donāt need anything. Once you become one with your inner state of being, external situations are far more joyous than anything you can imagine. Simply watching clouds pass is pure ecstasy, in the right state of mind.
Contrary to what weāve been conditioned to believe, you are not āyouā. For example, I am not Ricky, and I do not play in a band. This is only what external situations have claimed me to be. I am the inner consciousness that watches the bag of bones you know as Ricky. I am simply a viewer. A conscious being sitting back, watching the thoughts and decisions being made. Same goes for everyone. Itās confusing at first, I know. But the realization is profound.
To go a step further, take a conscious breath. For a split second, you become free of any thought, and just are. This is your being in itās most pure form. With practice, be it meditation, or just consistently trying to be in a state of āno-mindā, it becomes easier to access this state for longer periods. For me personally, my head feels heavier and expanded in this state. Itās difficult to explain, but once you get that feeling itās impossible to forget it.
Something I struggled with for a long time was to not try to force a future outcome, no matter how bad I wanted it to happen. For years, I tried to make music my full time job. Band after band, things kept falling through. It seemed impossible at the time for me to create anything the way I envisioned it, and no matter what happened, I wouldnāt let it go. My persistence was almost too much. I lived and breathed music. When bands stopped working, and I couldnāt find willing and dedicated members, I started creating everything myself. I didnāt have any other choice. I felt like if there was any way I was going to āmake itā, I would have to do it myself. Almost every night I would lay in bed for hours just staring at the ceiling envisioning myself playing a show with people I didnāt know, and the feeling of setting up equipment and meeting new people. I lived for those moments before Iād go to sleep when I could almost be where I wanted, in a made up circumstance in my mind. There were many nights I cried myself to sleep because it was the only thing I ever wanted, and it just wasnāt working out in my favor.
When I was in college, I started working with a friend at a local ice cream shop. The manager there taught me more than I could ever even understand. I would talk to her every day, and she always had the perfect insight to my problems. She always told me to ābe patientā, and that āyou canāt force something that you donāt have control over. The more you push, the worse youāre going to feel because things arenāt happening āquick enoughā. You know where you want to be. Enjoy the process of getting there.ā To me, this last part made no sense. How could I enjoy all the struggling and heartache that I was going through to get where I wanted to be? Of course I didnāt know how to listen, because I didnāt know what just ābeingā meant. It was a riddle to me. And the only thing I cared about was making music. Everything was a means of getting to where I wanted to be.Thus, creating constant conflict in my life.
Months later, I ended up going on tour for three months doing merch for a local band from my area. I was more than ecstatic. It felt like even if I wasnāt playing music, I could get in the groove of traveling and learn the ropes. Maybe meet connections to people who needed a new addition to their band. I couldnāt have been more wrong.
Those three months were the worst ninety days of my life. Sure, I was getting paid each week, but thereās only so much emotional torment people can put me through. I got shit every day for not pushing sales hard enough. For not talking enough. For them selling four shirts because they were on a tour that wasnāt even close to their style of music. I drank almost every night. To pass the time, and to cope with the unnecessary garbage I had to deal with. I left as a hopeful guy with all of the possibilities in the world, and came home a broken, heartless shell of my former self. For two months afterward I didnāt do anything. I slept and drank.
Then one night a couple months later, on my sisterās eighteenth birthday, I tried to kill myself. A combination of years living in the past, the only thing I wanted not happening, and constant pressure of making something of myself all boiled down to that one night. If I wasnāt drunk, I wouldāve remembered: down the street, not across the road. I remember going into my sisterās room, and just collapsing on her bed while she was sleeping. Sticky red flowing down my left arm, staining her white comforter, and dripping on the carpet. After that, I canāt exactly remember what happened. I was sort of in and out of consciousness, a cross between too drunk and shock. Pieces are still there: My dad asking me what happened. Iām crying and yelling about killing myself, and trying to throw up all at the same time. Someone wrapping my arm in a towel to keep the blood from dripping on the living room carpet. Someone carrying me to a car, and then being at the hospital having my arm stitched. They said my blood alcohol level was two and a half times the legal limit. And then they said I needed to go to some sort of psychiatric counseling to evaluate my mental state. This was the last time I drank alcohol.
I went to my counselor for maybe a month and a half of sessions that only helped me realize that I wanted my dad and I to have a better relationship. I was still stuck in the bind of my musical endeavors.
And then Motionless In White came to Seattle on tour. Thatās when we met, and things all started in their snowball to my being in the band. Funny how things work.
Now, donāt get me wrong, Iām the most optimistic person I know- sometimes to a fault. It took so much unnecessary suffering for me to finally accept that the past is the past. I didnāt truly start ālivingā until this last September. Even after everything that happened, and getting to where I wanted to be, it took me over a whole other year to come to realize who I really am and what it means to truly be.
The point of all my story was that I had already subconsciously set my future in motion by emotionally investing myself into what I wanted- I had brought the opening in the band to me. The suffering and heartache was completely unecessary.
The law of attraction is a pretty interesting thing. It wasnāt until recently that I realized that Iād used this law to subconsciously bring everything I have into my life. Itās no secret. People do it all the time. This is why being in control of your thoughts is so important. Whatever you think most about, whether it is āgoodā or ābadā manifests itself into reality. You create the world you live in.
Donāt believe me? Think about everything in your life, and then think about everything (good or bad) that consciously, and maybe subconsciously, occupies your thoughts throughout each day. The connection is unmistakable.
āIf you look for being in any other state than the one you are currently in, you are setting up inner conflict and resistance.ā
āBecome transparent to the external cause of a negative reaction.ā
āIt seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them- while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.ā
āWatch any plant or animal and let it teach you what acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity- which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.ā
āWhen you accept what is every moment is the best moment. That is enlightenment.ā
The quotes from everything Iāve just written were taken from the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend this book. It will completely open your consciousness, and change the way youāve ever thought about life, happiness, sadness, and death.
I apologize for this post being so unorganized. Itās hard for me to condense everything on a topic that has so many different elements involved. To some people, this post will go completely over your head. Which is fine, as you probably arenāt ready to understand it yet, or donāt need it. As for the people who get it and connect with everything Iāve said, you probably brought this post to you as the help you consciously, or subconsciously, needed.
Remember, take control of your thoughts, believe in the universe to bring you what you truly want, and be ever present.
Had a thought so Iām making a headcannon about it
Being neighbors with Ricky Olson without knowing heās in a band would include:
⢠waving to each other while heās out writing on his porch as you do yoga on your own porch
⢠him asking you to water his plants while heās gone on a ābusiness tripā
⢠inviting the other over for dinner if one of you made too much food
⢠seeing all the guitars in his house and asking about them to which he replies āyeah I play, itās an old hobbyā
⢠talking to each other loudly from across the porches rather than just meeting in the middle of the shared backyard
⢠turning to a random channel on the tv only to see Ricky performing Rhea Ripleyās entrance for Wrestlemania
⢠seeing him the next day and remarking playfully: āyou know playing for 70,000 people at Wrestlemania is a bit extreme for a hobbyā