Youthful Life: X

"In times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” Chadwick Boseman  I'm still processing through Black Panther  but even so there is so much to unpack from it. This week I've spent substantial time talking about authentic self-care, narrative autonomy, and emotional labor. What I have come to see is that so many of the people I've interacted with recently have yet to realize what makes them both mundane and unique. It's this balance of self-actualization that you are in fact the only person who is you, and also that you are like other people. That duality matters. We want to be different but we also don't want to feel alone in the world. We yearn for human connection and yet want to retain our individuality. What if we treated ourselves - that is who we are, how we are, our stories, our gifts/talents, etc. as if they were the most valuable thing in...

"Sometimes, how you ingest this idea of masculinity as projected onto you by the world could be the difference of life and death." Barry Jenkins We're bad with emotions , well most people that is. We don't know what to do with them. We keep them bottled up. We let them out in messy ways, usually accidentally. We're all over the place. We are emotionally unstable. Why? You tell me. Maybe you don't know, or maybe you do and you're not willing to share that truth with yourself. We are socialized in a myriad of ways (family/upbringing, friends, school, religion, media, etc.) to act and to not act. That is the impact of being taught to suppress your emotions. It might not have been direct but all the times you were told to stop being sensitive, to grow a backbone, to be strong, to stop crying, to get it together, to be man up, and the list goes on and on were the negative reinforcements of an ideology that asked you to shut down a critical part of your...

" There's just some magic in truth and honesty and openness." Frank Ocean People need people. People need people to need them. People want to be seen, heard, valued, wanted, and appreciated. Humanity is reliant on community, connection, and relationship. It's why we struggle with being alone but even more so feeling alone. That fear of isolation is one that is embedded in all of us. Managing that feeling takes practice, and no one completely excises it. It's there to remind us that regardless of who or where we are, we always require some kind of connection to another. Nothing hurts more than putting yourself out there and being shut down. There's such a visceral reaction of embarrassment, shame, and retreat into yourself. That's what happens when someone tries to connect with us but we don't open up to receive them. That's not to say that anyone and everyone who wants to commune with us can and should have access to us - no everyone deserve...