The biggest advantage I have ever had is loving books. 

I've had books since I could sit up without support. My earliest memory is staring at a poster with pictures and words under them, imagining that CAKE and BALL were real. I read enid blyton and charlotte's web and archie comics - thank you, grandparents. I grew older and read harry potter and heidi and anne of green gables - thank you, parents. 

Years passed and I read TKAM and Disgrace and Jane Austen - thank you, school. 

Books have always been my friends. More, they let me live a thousand lives within my own short timespan. 

When I read, I see the story in my mind. It's as if I'm standing there, in front of the characters, watching the smoke drift across the snow. I smell it. I feel it. The chill of winter brushes my ears, and the silence in the woods echoes in me. 

I grew older, and started reading nonfiction, learning other people's life lessons. Almost no magic, but a lot of mentoring.

I love books. They make me laugh out loud and often make me cry. Every great book I've had is a gift and I've countless ones. 

sometimes you need someone else who has the talents you do not, to express the emotions that you cannot.  

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.” - J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

take me home - jess glynne

I think everyone makes a choice, consciously or not, about whether they will live authentically. We decide whether we will stand for what we believe in, or whether we will hide. 

It's not an easy choice to make, because there are consequences for speaking up. You can't come out of it unscathed. You have to be harder on yourself, because others will be harder on you - they will ask, who is this person to speak up, to have a stance? 

There are no easy answers, too. But speaking up doesn't obligate you to come up with the solution. I think the solution to difficult problems, 'wicked problems', requires everyone's effort. We have to move together towards a better way, towards positive change. 

And does it matter? Speaking up for what you believe in - whether it's every human's right to care, or women's rights to equal pay and opportunities? I think it does. Our voice matters more than we think. And it matters to me, too, that I stood for it. It matters to me. 

"Is what you're doing right now helping or hurting you?" 

"Yes." 

December is a strange month. It feels like cold air, the kind that chills your lungs as you breathe; the inside of a hotel room in Japan, and all the decembers after that, remembering. 

It often sends me on the same train of thought - the melancholy makes me wonder about the meaning of suffering; that makes me think about whether life is about creating meaning from suffering, or if there is more than that, something that has managed to lift away from suffering, something that can call itself pure joy. 

And that makes me think about what I should do with my life, and what one human can do, and whether what I can do is the same as what I should do. 

And that makes me tired. 

I remember I'm supposed to count my blessings; and that all of our time on earth is short. 

I still believe, on my better days when I have time to think of such things, that we are all connected. 

I still don't have the answer to 'what is the point of it all?'. But I do know that it's important to be kind and to give back. Because maybe that is the point, the only point, and I just don't know it fully yet. 

I still believe that happiness exists inside of us. It's not a place travel can bring me to - after all, we bring our mindsets with us when we travel. We can't escape ourselves. But if we have the courage to sit and look deeply and face what we must face, there is, somewhere within, something close to heaven. 

The challenge I face - do we all? - is how to keep my beliefs in the face of the struggles and cruelty of the world. 

How to remain hopeful while preparing for the worst. How to remain openhearted, to love and cherish, while not letting my heart be trampled by everything that happens, everyday. 

But it's possible. It has to be, because the alternative to loving is probably something equivalent to not living and I don't want that for myself. 

it's strange how much of the past we carry with us. Do these things keep accumulating, till they crowd out the present? 

Or do people let go, throw the old stuff away? Do they forget? Is it better to? And if we forget, what does that make us, now, then? What are we without our past? 

how can we be who we really are, while carrying the overwhelming weight of everything we have lived, while looking at the now, the present, and seeing it for what it really is?

and how can we be who we are, without all of this?

i see fire - ed sheeran