Love, Self Respect, and Approaching Birthday



Cheesy and I'm still too immature to handle the "learning to love yourself" line, but I admit I like this song and it's fitting to my post.

There are many bad reasons to start a relationship such as money, loneliness, green cards, and legitimizing babies. But I think the most toxic thing in any relationship is an unhealthy mentality. There are a lot of different variations of those as well but one of the most common is trying to use another person to boost your self-esteem. But that never works. Even if that person loves you more than life itself, you will never be happy until you can love yourself (ha, ha, not in that way. Though it does help...).

This ties into another thing I've been thinking about: birthday presents. I admittedly get annoyed with people who say they don't want anything. I don't judge if people don't give me anything, but it's always nice when they do. Although, if anyone's curious (hint, hint) I do prefer people doing nice things for me as opposed to most presents. The best birthday I've ever had remains the one year in college my friends threw me a surprise party and to the best of my recollection I didn't receive any presents. It just meant a lot to me that they put that much thought into me to actually plan something.

Anyway, the point of all this is I was thinking that none of the things I truly want in life can simply be handed to me. Even more than financial independence, I want to know that I am productive and accomplishing things. It's how I measure my worth. Sure, if someone told me I could have anything I'd probably ask for a billion dollars. But I'd still want to have some kind of job. True, that job wouldn't have to produce money, which would be nice. But I'd still be unhappy if I wasn't doing it. In that situation I would want to be writing.

I've been going a bit bonkers recently and feeling a bit down. Part of it's that I was I was sick for a month! I think I caught two different colds. Blah! But the other major part is just that I haven't been writing. Even just in this blog. Well...I have in the twitter novella I'm collaborating on, but that's hardly enough for me. So I need to get back into gear. My writing has been tossed aside with a whirlwind of moving, settling, getting sick, and jetting off to DC for the ALA conference. But I'm back now and I'm feeling better. I'm actually going to a picnic tonight with my French conversation group and tomorrow I'm staying at a friend's house. Both things I know mean it wouldn't work well to start my resolution now. But on FRIDAY, MAY 16th, I will pick up my writing projects. Now, I won't always be able to do word count because two of my novels just need editing. I may decide I just need to focus on that until it's done. But starting Friday I need to do something writing related every day (unless I'm going to be gone all or most the day in which case, just as with the blog, I will notify in advance). Writing related activities could be editing, sending my book to agents, writing in my novel, or just writing a long blog post like this one (long posts will be more than 3 paragraphs).

I will once again tweet what I've done. I don't put my Twitter feed on my blog because of a running challenge I have with my friend that he find my Twitter. But since I'm willing to bet he hasn't read this (and if he has, he deserves it) here's the link.