Come Here. Bring All Of You. Your Doubts, Your Worries, Your Insecurities, Your Highest Goals, Your Brightest

November, often overshadowed by the charm of October and the magic of December, holds a quiet beauty of her own. Remnants of Autumn linger, while the anticipation of winter’s first snow begins to settle in. I’m looking forward to cozy nights by the fire and the subtle beauty of bare trees against the dusk sky 🤎

Instagram: @melvolkman

“Millions of people have decided not to be sensitive. They have grown thick skins around themselves just to avoid being hurt by anybody. But it is at great cost. Nobody can hurt them, but nobody can make them happy either.”

— Unknown

It wimdy

I've seen this before, but it's been years and it just came across my Twitter in its dying days. The words are from a favorite author of mine, Maggie Stiefvater, and they are the words I most need to hear when it comes to dealing with chronic pain and illness. I didn't need this the first time I saw it, six years ago. I need it now. Maybe you do, too.

"A beautiful life is not stumbled upon, it is built. It is chosen. It is nurtured over the years. A beautiful life is made from the heart, not the head. It is not one we can rationalize our way into, it’s one that must be felt. A beautiful life is not one that is immediately comfortable, but one grown through the acknowledgement of what is worth being uncomfortable for. It is not one that is easy, it is one that is worth it. 

A beautiful life is composed of the things our 90-year-old selves would have wished we’d done with the years in which we were so young but didn’t realize, before the decades piled up and passed us by and we came to find how little time even the luckiest among us have. It is made of all the little whispered prayers they’d have for us as they looked back, the same way we imagine our younger selves now and wish we could impart and instill so much guidance, so often leaning in the direction of — go where your heart already calls you, move toward the truth you already know.


A beautiful life is made with someone who not only makes you fall in love with them, but makes you fall in love with the person you become because of them. The kind of human being they push and inspire you to be. The kind of person who loves you as you are while still holding space for your growth. The kind who would carry you down the steps if you could not walk anymore, who would hold your hand until the last minute of the last hour, with whom you could have nothing, but it would still feel like everything. 

Happiness is not how your life appears, it is the quality of your connection to it. How deeply and intimately those bonds run. How much you truly cared about what you were doing and the people around you and the memories you made and how bravely you put your heart into your days, rather than hiding yourself away and wondering if you could make things appear full on the surface, while it all sits empty just beneath."

Brianna Weist - THE PIVOT YEAR

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The Pivot Year

This is the year you change your life. There's a saying that when the moment comes, you don't need words on a page, you need new thoughts i

i complain and i stress and i collapse under my school work until i take a moment, a step back, and realize that i'm studying everything i ever wanted to. i taking classes on auditioning, on women through the history of music, on 18th century literature while taking masterclasses on shakespeare and musical theatre and watching my friends do recitals, watching free concerts, living backstage at the theatre. i'm just so surrounded by art and other people's love for it that i'm just so- filled by it.

happy new year’s eve <3

Is your soul okay?

Jean Cocteau to Jean Marais, 1939 / E. E. Cummings / A Warm Day by Louise Gluck / "Looking East" by Sara Linda Poly / "In the Stillness" by Sara Linda Poly / Debasish Mridha / Picture is from the Pinterest / Albert Camus / Bring Me The Sunset In A Cup by Emily Dickinson

“Let the water settle; you will see the moon and stars mirrored in your being.”

— Rumi