CULTIVATING A RELATIONSHIP WITH SELF:

1. Remove the discomfort around being alone. Take the time to learn yourself, by yourself. Do it often.

2. Start anew. Pretend you are learning to love a stranger. Familiarize yourself with even the most menial aspects of yourself, learn it wholly.

3. Understand and accept that you have changed, you are changing, and you will change. Attach yourself to nothing too tightly if you want to grow.

4. Grow more comfortable listening to the faint impulse within you. Follow it as much as you can, no matter how faint until you can hear it clearly.

5. Cherish your relationships with others, but refrain from making it the basis of your identity. You are “you” before you’re anyone’s sibling, child, partner.

Matsuo Bashō - tr. by David Landis Barnhill

HOW TO BE A WOMAN IN THE WORLD:

1. Take note of other philosophies, but never as a substitute for your own.

2. Keep journals. They’re a great place to air out your private joys, and deepest sorrows.

3. Befriend other women, they are not your enemy, nor your competition.

4. Limit the influence you allow male opinion to have on your life. A man cannot make you whole.

5. Go after what you want, never settle on a first offer or what someone tells you is a good offer.

6. ‘Femininity’ is elusive and arbitrary. It’s innate and doesn’t have to be forced.

7. Decenter men. Replace that with yourself instead, in that lies your guide to life.

Matsuo Bashō - tr. by David Landis Barnhill

https://www.instagram.com/p/CB_Hec5i1-K/?igshid=1d1ukoly18eer

APHORISMS by 𝓒.

1. Don’t have any kids or date any man seriously during your 20s. Enjoy your youth and be selfish. Your 30s is your sexual prime, but your 20s is your freedom.

2. There’s no such thing as a surprise when it comes to matter of the heart, there’s always a sign, an indicator between the words, and every woman has a voice inside and they choose to answer the noise.

3. If a man asks you for money, don’t give it to him; not even for Sunday offering.

4. Be careful of who you get gossip from, a dog that’ll bring a bone will take one.

5. If someone is gossiping or lying on you, always tell people “consider the source”

6. If you have to worry about a man leaving you for another woman, he was never really yours in the first place.

7. Never be too big for your britches, bird fly high but got to come down to the ground to get water sooner or later.

8. [We were talking about my uncle and his destructive relationship with his son and our side of the family, and my aunt said this, apparently it’s an African proverb] “a child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth”.

*Brief excerpts from a conversation with wise women. Golden advice generously passed on to me by my dearest friend, 𝓒. (4/21/19)

BEAUTIFUL WORDS:

Élan (n.) - distinctive and stylish elegance; impulsive and confident ardor.

Orphic (adj.) - mysterious and entrancing; beyond ordinary understanding.

Eunoia (n.) - beautiful thinking; a well mind.

Recherché (adj.) - carefully chosen, rare, or exotic.

— Kim Addonizio, from ‘One-Night Stands’, Wild Nights: New and Selected Poems

LUXURIES: perfume oils on the skin, sensual kisses on the nape of your lover’s neck, oversized wine glasses filled with Viognier, cheeks flushed with joy, discussing Vonnegut over a serene candlelit dinner.

Clara Olivia (Lall) Bergling (detail)

Inst @mariieeq

Sephora Collection: Ultra Shine Lip Gel in ‘Totally Lucid’ & ‘Pink Crystal’