30 Things I’ve Learned In 30 Years About Life, Love And Anxiety As An ENTP

1. His zodiac sign won’t matter, what matters is courage, love and responsibility.

2. There is no other thing truly bringing more happiness than watching animals live freely.

3. Our most intimate dreams will only happen if we stop acting like we still have time and start working towards them.

4. You might never really get along with some people, and they might happen to be your family.

5. Everything is temporary. Relationships, money, careers, love, friendships, disease, life. Learn to love everything you have today, and if you can’t, it’s fine, this too shall pass.

6. Nothing gets entirely better with age, we’re still figuring it out, dipping ourselves in existential mud, just with less time ahead of us.

7. You feel much more alone later in life, and you kind of grow used to it.

8. Your high school friendships will not define your life.

9. Jealousy is natural, and it will happen between you and your best friend when you least expect it.

10. I am a writer and I have the gift to turn each person that walks into my life into a never ending character inside a novel, but all I wish for is to be anonymous to the world and the leading character in one person’s heart.

11. In marriage, there’s always the one who loves and the one who leaves.

12. Sometimes I am trapped again in my parents’ house, in my small bed in my little room, with all the insecurity and pointlessness monsters reaching out for me. But then there’s always something refreshing about going there – my dreams are still young there, I am still a teenager and when I look out the window the sky still shows me the promise of New York. I want to go out in this crude rainy weather when it’s all spring sparkling green, tuck myself in a cafe in the park, sink in my chair, smoke, drink coffee and write. The smoking ban has killed the writer.

13. I think writing is something deep down in physiology. I have been thinking about it as a way of letting out all the stories I could not apply to people or events in my life. I am passionate, and this consumes and sometimes takes everything. I am that kind of person who will go to a stranger in a crowd and simply compliment them for what they don’t know about themselves, walk out on a pitch because I remembered I have to eat ice cream and that suddenly seems more important or kiss somebody I barely know, or never met before, because that feels to me like the only logical way to let words form in a shared perspective.

14. There is truly no other place bearing so much love as airports.

15. To believe is to keep your faith enamoured with life.

16. Tumblr is, I suppose, at some level, just thank you notes from people to other people who post or re-post collective or particular memories.

17. If people want to believe in Hollywood movies, let them believe in Hollywood movies. Being romantic is not a disease.

18. I hate 500 Days of Summer because it reminds me of when I was really young and really naive and growing up with a lot of American comedy romance (and Woody Allen) is perfect for building unrealistic expectations in life. I hate it because it reminds me how stubborn I used to be to pursue some guy I loved and because it made me try and live up to some fantasy (the type that makes you wonder if it’s real life or its TV). But I used to like it, and I used to listen obsessively to the soundtrack. I haven’t really seen many movies in my life because they always have powerful effects on me.

19. I beg to differ on Charles Bukowski, who says nothing can save you, except writing. Sometimes, absolutely nothing will save you, not the nights you end up wasting waiting for something grand to happen, not the mornings where coffee has no taste and you wake up knowing the day will not be a blast, not the plans and schemes you write down on your imaginary flipchart to make the world go round. You end up stuck, alone and in the disparate points of chaos that drag you down, you have to come up with something to save yourself. Then you make six impossible wishes before breakfast, start walking and working and learn to seize what you call paranormal activity when it comes true.

20. I’ve been the nice girl, the crazy girl, the adorable teenager, the girl who only dated guys in bands, and photographers, or who at least pretended to be artists, the empathetic and unsympathetic, the coward. I’ve been the girl who boards on a plane and vanishes and the woman who stays and tries to make up for the lost time. I’ve been the bitch; and the sweetheart; the selfish and the selfless. I’ve been the fiancée who waits on a terminal without a suitcase and I’ve been the other woman. The always unimpressed, and the addicted. I’ve been the girl everyone wants to date, the stranger everyone regards as a snob because she doesn’t feel like talking when she has nothing to say; the girl who dresses up in high end lingerie under second hand attires and the one who picked up women in bars while dancing because she took sexuality seriously enough to be able to make fun of it.

21. You know you’re special when someone sends you Michelle K. poems.

22. In a letter to Fitzgerald, Hemingway says “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously.” I will never forget our personal tragedies. But I write. I write our history, I write the stories we’ll never have.

23. Being honest, and honest as an artist can bring you a lot of trouble. Like alienating friends, pushing people away, giving way to a lot of paranoia. Something you’ve written can turn tables every moment of your life because today’s general perception is so much oriented towards the author’s own life and its translation in art through writing, and not towards the manuscript. I see this all the time.  I’m not gonna say – okay, I can write anything, don’t take me so serious ’cause it’s not real. It’s fucking real, but once reality took its toll, it’s just a good or bad piece of writing. Meant for people to read and connect with it. Made for others to criticize or enjoy.  And people who truly know you should never be affected by what we still call today postmodern fiction.

24. Some of the most expensive hair products in my bathroom where there just to impress some snobby demi-famous guy I used to date, who went once to buy all the blue cheese in a fishermen’s village supermarket and I couldn’t laugh about it because it was so pompous and he was so serious.

25. Some people will try anything to get in your pants. If you let them, better choose those who will try even when you have a bad hair day, no make-up and a shirt that looks like pijamas. Whoever doesn’t get you for you, doesn’t get to go down on you.

26. Date a girl who reads poetry on the street at 1 AM while all the others have their dinner, their last cigarettes, the leftovers from sugar drenched drinks. Date a girl who forgets about the world and the noise around while everything’s just building up within. Or just watch her emotion unravel in bare silent motion, in her shadow. I don’t think I’ve seen anything as beautiful in a really long time.

27. Once upon a time I decided to listen, and not speak any more. The more I listened, the less I could feel letters form on top of my tongue. It was a new habit, a possible runaway from myself, the infinite talker, and from the scary idea that I could be in love. So I wrote poems, made phonecalls, asked strangers, bartenders and writers I met what to do when what you’re feeling is something you can no longer contain. Nobody seemed to know, and the answer came by itself, making letters form into words again on top of my tongue, ironically, while I was blowing some guy.

28. I grew tired of being in a permanent mind set of self preservation – which translates into always being steady to repair anything that can get bruised. It’s like exercising airbrushing forever but if people did airbrushing in real life i bet it would feel rather like plastic surgery. So what I’m calling for, ultimately, is a place where I can drop all the guns and forget about retouching my hopes and dreams from one day to the other.

29. You can have a love affair that lasts forever, with your work, your art, the beauty of carrots in buckets or bugs raining in your watermelon plate in June. Usually, these are deep and undeniable liaisons but I could never compare them to the deepness of basic, comfortable silences between two people in the same room, the secrecy of inside jokes that are born and raised in a human relationship or with the shameless erotica that you can only get after sharing time, space and memories with a person. Aging, I realize I haven’t changed at all since I was fifteen and that only the life has gotten weaker, wider and scarcer, like a sandless beach.

30. While the world has found the right names for all chronic mental diseases, I believe poetry is also a brain dysfunction, yet the only one that owns itself the mastery for the cure. Isn’t it lovely to say, “He/She suffers of Poetry?”.