"Charlotte Eriksson"の名言

I know it hurts and I know there are days when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t breathe because of this unbearable lack of something or someone. I know what it’s like to be sad for no reason at all, standing in the rain with no intention of surviving. I know things hurts, I hurt, but life can also be so beautiful… Wonderful things are waiting for you. I know it, I’ve had a taste of it, small moments of complete clarity. Magical nights under the stars and peaceful mornings with someone you love. Before you know it you will thank yourself for staying strong and holding on. I do, most of the days. I know there are days when even one single positive thought feels like too much effort, but you must develop an unconditional love for life. You must never lose your childish curiosity for the possibilities in every single day. Who you can be, what you can see, what you can feel and where it can lead you. Be in love with your life, everything about it. The sadness and the joys, the struggles and the lessons, your flaws and strengths, what you lose and what you gain.

So find your own combination of things to learn and see and be passionate about. Learn from everyone but be your own guidance, and you will find a red-hot feeling in your chest each night, eager for the possibilities of a new day. No one knows your heart as well as you do.

Everything changed when I learned to honour my body instead of fighting it. When I learned to take care of it, like a precious castle to protect this weary heart. To stop harming it, punishing it for looking like this or that, feeling like this or that. I don’t look like they all told me I had to, but I’m healthy and strong and vital. That is enough.

No one will come and save you. No one will come riding on a white horse and take all your worries away. You have to save yourself, little by little, day by day. Build yourself a home. Nurture your body. Find something to work on. Something that makes you excited, something you want to learn. Get yourself some books and learn them by heart. Get to know the author, where he grew up, what books he read himself. Take yourself out for dinner. Dress up for no one but you and simply feel nice. It’s a lovely feeling, to feel pretty. You don’t need anyone to confirm it. I get so goddamn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days, but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. Slowly building myself a home with things I like. Colours that calm me down, a plan to follow when things turn dark. A few people I try to treat right, even though I don’t sometimes, but it’s my intention to do so. I’m learning. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. I’m learning to save myself. I’m trying, as I always will.

So I died many times that year. In the cold, in the storm, on the run or on the drunk for my heart did not want to beat but kept on beating anyway and my pain was as real as real can be, and I tried to learn and deal and run and feel but nothing really worked. I built a comfortable home in my sorrow and settled into a quiet living. No sparks or grand gestures, just a simple daily hymn to comfort. The leaves fell off the trees and coloured this city in all kinds of pretty, and some days that was enough to make me smile at least a little bit, within.

There are things that will happen to you and there is nothing you can do about this. Isn't it exciting beyond belief?

Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others.

I woke up early and took the first train to take me away from the city. The noise and all its people. I was alone on the train and had no idea where I was going, and that’s why I went there. Two hours later we arrived in a small town, one of those towns with one single coffee shop and where everyone knows each other’s name. I walked for a while until I found the water, the most peaceful place I know. There I sat and stayed the whole day, with nothing and everything on my mind, cleaning my head. Silence, I learned, is some times the most beautiful sound.

Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story.

So many people will tell you ”no”, and you need to find something you believe in so hard that you just smile and tell them ”watch me”. Learn to take rejection as motivation to prove people wrong. Be unstoppable. Refuse to give up, no matter what. It’s the best skill you can ever learn.

You have to stop carrying life like a burden. Life is not a burden. It’s not heavy to be alive. It’s weightless. It’s light as air. You’re just floating, a leaf through space, for a little while. You just have to learn to close your eyes more, or open them, when you can. You just have to learn to float with the current more, not fight against things. Change, movement, transitions ... you have to become one with the current.

If there is anything I’ve learned the last year it is the importance of being clear on what you want. I spent the better part of last year just figuring out what I actually want with my life. What I want to have around me, how I want to spend my days, the people I want in my life, what I want to create, why it’s important to me and most importantly who I need to be in order to create that life for myself. Who do I need to be to have that career I’m dreaming of? When you can see the highest version of yourself crystal clear you will wake up each day striving to walk in new ways. You see that future YOU as a role model and you are filled with energy to grow and level up and take that place. If you want a change, you really do need to let go of how you have done things in the past. It’s the most exciting feeling, stepping into that future vision of myself, a little bit every day.

Where are our heroes? Where are our role models? Why are we leaving youth behind and laughing at the ones who are still there? Why not help each other out instead? with a little grace. with a little compassion. Love for all and everyone around because we’re all stumbling or succeeding back and forth, every day, and I want more community. I want helpers and guidance. Am I helping someone? I don’t know, but since the tender age of eighteen I have written down my stories and experiences of love and loss and youth, just so these stories can exist in the world. For someone out there to find and read and feel a voice in my words saying, “I’ve been there, I’ve done this, you can too: come, follow me.” Have you ever lost something by teaching what you know, and learning what you don’t know? Have you ever lost something by helping someone in need, or letting someone help you while in need? Have you lost something by loving? In comparison, how much have you lost by meeting someone with ignorance and hate? Love. I will choose love. And I’m scared and shy, of everyone and everything, to make a fool of myself; to be laughed at; to not be what people would like me to be. But I will choose love because that’s the sort of person I want to be.

I was free with every road as my home. No limitations and no commitments. But then summer passed and winter came and I fell short for safety. I fell for its spell, slowly humming me to sleep, because I was tired and small, too weak to take or handle those opinions and views, attacking me from every angle. Against my art, against my self, against my very way of living. I collected my thoughts, my few possessions and built isolated walls around my values and character. I protected my own definition of beauty and success like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, for no one saw what I saw, or felt the same as I did, and so I wanted to keep to myself. You hide to protect yourself.

If you can’t do it for yourself, you do it for all the other young souls who need to be shown that things are possible. That they too can do that thing they dream of.

I believe ... that you must collect and pursue all your passions. Let your desires lead you to foreign territories. Your path might look scattered for now, like you have no direction or clear aim, but I believe that one day, all these ideas and spread-out skills will combine and create a creation of impact, a combined masterpiece of everything you found to love, and that will be your legacy.

Everything changed when I switched from saying “I have to do this” to “I GET to do this”. When I started viewing my art as a way to serve instead of building for my own profit. When I tried to meet people with an open heart and a will to love them instead of guarding my own history of solitude and brokenness. Dedication. Giving. Loving. That is the goal.

How does one know you’ve “made it”? You no longer feel like you have anything to prove to anyone. You have no regrets or resentments from the past, anger that you’re working from. No people you want revenge on or songs you want to sing in order to finally speak your mind.  Instead, you work from a place of wanting to do the work only, without any attachment to the outcome.

Being a person who pushes himself to his or her own limits in order to become as great as he or she can possibly be means being a person who is constantly faced with some kind of fear. May it be mental or physical, may you be an athlete or a writer, YOU are facing fear, every single day, by doing something your mind or body never did before. But by overcoming that fear you take one step higher on the ladder, and the goal is to take those steps every single day.

Leave that room, kid. Shut the screen off. Take your dirty shoes, not the pretty ones, and go out to feel the wind. Touch water. Touch earth. Touch wood, touch skin, touch everything you can touch and memorise everything because that’s all you will live off in the end, and that’s all you will need.