And if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself get a better mirror look a little closer stare a little longer because there’s something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit you built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself you signed it “they were wrong.”
Cuando me encontré con este set de 100 postales, cada una de ellas evocando la portada de un libro publicado por la famosa editorial Penguin, no me pude resistir. Ahora Virginia Woolf, Emily Brontë, Oscar Wilde y Scott Fitzgerald cuelgan de la pared de mi habitación (si queréis hacer lo mismo que yo solo necesitáis un poco de cuerda, fiso (o washi tape, que queda más mona), y unas mini pinzas de colores.
"No
one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I
thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been
quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my
self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and
observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was
entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between
distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize
the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great
renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted
trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds
behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its
beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly
marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would
help others to live."
"Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You will be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is STUPID! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are."
Esta es la respuesta que Neil Gaiman le dio ensu Tumblra una chica que le
preguntaba si, con 23 años, quizás debería renunciar a su sueño de ser
escritora. Yo necesitaba leer algo así, así que aquí os lo dejo, por si no soy
la única:
"I published my
first stories when I was 23. They weren’t very good. I published my first solo
novel when I was 36. I’m glad I didn’t give up when I was 23.
There are very few
successful writers of fiction who are younger than 23. You need a certain
amount of life experience and a lot more writing experience. Giving up at the
point that’s well before most people start seems a bit pointless to me."
“Saying that we have enough artists is like saying we have enough scientists, we have enough designers, we have enough politicians — we have enough politicians — but, you know, nobody gets to be you except you. Nobody has your point of view except you. Nobody gets to bring to the world the things that you get to bring to the world — uniquely get to bring to the world — except you. So, saying that there are enough writers out there, enough directors out there, enough people with points of view. Well yeah, there are, but none of them are you. And none of those people is going to make the art that you are going to make. None of them is going to change people and change the world in the way that you could change it. So if you believe somebody that says, “no, no, we’ve got enough of those,” then all it means is that you are giving up your chance to change the world in the way that only you can change it.”
Estos son algunos de mis párrafos favoritos del inspirador discurso que Nora Ephron dio en la Universidad de Wellesley en 1996:
"Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don't take it personally, but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: Every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: Get back, get back to where you once belonged."
"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. Because you don't have the alibi my class had—this is one of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit: Unlike us, you can't say nobody told you there were other options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. Twenty-five years from now, you won't have as easy a time making excuses as my class did. You won't be able to blame the deans, or the culture, or anyone else: you will have no one to blame but yourselves. Whoa."
"So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful women—who have it all —give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands. And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever."
"Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives."
Estoy enamorada de
estos brazaletes que tienen grabada una frase de mi pasaje favorito de Jane
Eyre.Esta tiendatiene todo tipo de joyas de
inspiración literaria, así que si queréis llevar a las hermanas Brontë, Shakespeare o Jane Austen siempre encima, ya sabéis.
Y si ninguno os convence, en estatienda Etsy graban tu cita favorita. Yo estoy pensado en esta frase de Nora Ephron: “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the
victim.”
"I wanted to start a website for teenaged girls that was not kind of this one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing, because one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism in that girls then think that to be feminists they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in their beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all the answers... and this is not true and actually recognizing all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I realized that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process."
-Tavi Gevinson.
Oí hablar de Tavi Gevinson por primera vez cuando, con tan solo doce años, se colocó en primera línea de los desfiles de algunos de los diseñadores más importantes. Como no suelo leer demasiado sobre moda, no me la volví a encontrar hasta que fundó el magazine online Rookie, dirigido a chicas adolescentes (aunque es interesante también para las que hemos pasado de los quince), un rincón de lo más inspirador, lleno de artículos sobre esos complicados años, de DIYs, y de reportajes fotográficos estupendos.
Su blog personal es una gozada para la vista, y la joven acaba de lanzar su primera publicación impresa, Rookie Yearbook One, que recoge algunos de los posts que han aparecido en su web durante el primer año de vida de la misma:
Y, además de todo esto, tiene las ideas muy claras. La charla que dio para Ted es genial:
"As soon as teenage girls start to profess love for something, everyone else becomes totally dismissive of it. Teenage girls are open season for the cruelest bullying that our society can dream up. Everyone's vicious to them. They're vicious to each other. Hell, they're even vicious to themselves. It's terrible.
It's used as the cheapest, easiest test of crap, isn't it? If teenage girls love a movie, a book, a band, then it's immediately classified as mediocre shit. Well, I'm not going to stand for that. Someone needs to treat them like they're precious, and if nobody else is ready to step up, I guess it's up to us to put them on the path to recognizing that about themselves."
-Mary Borsellino. Como dicen los párrafos de arriba, tendemos a rechazar y ridiculizar todo aquello que apasiona a las adolescentes por el simple hecho de que lo son, cuando, si empezásemos a valorarlas como merecen, todos saldríamos ganando. Ellas porque necesitan ser escuchadas, y nosotros porque lo que tienen que decir importa, y mucho.
Estas son las confesiones de una Lena Dunham adolescente (si queréis leer el resto, este es el artículo original). La verdad es que no ha cambiado mucho.
She didn't change her name! She's a feminist!
A dream recorder so you could watch your dreams on tape.
Just because people don't understand you, doesn't mean you're an artist.
I tell myself that I don't flake out on my school work and that I´m a very together person.
Because I love anything that makes me feel like my life is not my fault.
“Study broadly and without fear. Learn a language if you can, because that will make your life more interesting. Read a little bit every day. But most importantly, try to surround yourself with people you like and make cool stuff with them. In the end, at least in my experience, what you do isn’t going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with.”
