I ll never forget the face of that woman. She was sitting at an ideal place, at the fish tavern with her partner. She was enjoying a good fish platter with her husband or partner. She was next to the sea, she had the luck to enjoy the sea breeze and sun in a beautiful island. But did she look happy? Was she happy? You can guess the answer... And the answer is no, she looked deeply miserable. And unhappy. Miserable and unhappy together can be a deadly combination. You wander. Why people have sometimes everything they have asked for but still do not enjoy it? Why do we make life complicated? Why can't we live in the moment? Someone said that if you are too anxious about the future you are not present. You don't live the moment. Is it so hard to achieve that ? I' ll never forget the face of that woman who just gave me a day lesson. "Remember to smile. You never know who will fall in love with your smile".

June 2nd of 2019, 12:02am how many people have you met and have the courage to truly say that you love them? how many of those would you do the absolute most for them to remain in your life? today we live in a society where anyone will meet someone and constantly post pictures of their get away in California on their Instagram or post cute little videos of them cuddling together onto their snapchat stories but we all know that in about a month they won't be together anymore. We live in a world where the "clout" you get from the public is more important than your own respect. Now a day we tell each other that we care about someone but we don't tell them, they are important to you but you don't demonstrate it, you miss them but you don't talk to them, or you want to see them but you never make plans to see each other. I won't lie, I am 100% guilty of doing all those things, sometimes my parents go on and on about how in their time they would all hangout and listen to music, and everyone was out of their houses enjoying each others presence and thats all that mattered. I have had people that would send me paragraphs and paragraphs that they were so happy that I was in their lives and they never wanted to loose me, but crazy that those same people were the first to leave so fast that before I knew it I hadn't texted them or even crossed a hi with them at school in months. Im tired of constantly hearing the same thing, I wish we could all just take a moment and open ours minds up and realize what we say. I want to be about to look into the mirror or look at a picture of myself and be able to say that I love myself. I want someone that will love me more than I love myself, someone that will help me see and find new emotions and make me fall in love with the person I am when I am around them, because love is not just something you text at random because you want to fix a mistake love is not a I "like" you, love is something so much greater, by actual definition Love [ luhv ] noun - an intense feeling of deep affection. I think we all get caught up in wanted to be in love and we want to believe we are in love that we avoid all the signs that are placed right in front of us. Love is not the butterfly feeling you get in your stomach when you see someone, when in love you are so comfortable with someone it feels like you've known them all your life. but most importantly, and this goes to anyone who needs to hear it, learn to love yourself before you choose to be with anyone else, and loving yourself is not loosing ten pounds so you feel better, it is not getting your nails done every two weeks, or changing habits that someone didn't like that you had, its accepting who you are and being comfortable with the person you are. there is only one you in this world, don t be so hard on yourself and give all your love to you then find someone and give all that love and more. For the best of our society and our world lets spread more love, accept our differences, we all have our given time on this world, lets stop avoiding that message or waiting 10 minutes to answer because we don't want to seem " too desperate" and lets love ourselves, our friendships , our families, our community, our world.

Our generation is more connected than ever thanks to social media, and nowadays everybody can express their opinions. This is a very good thing, and a very frightening one at the same time. Indeed, it's very heartwarming to see that freedom of expression is alive and well, but it is also scary to think that with the modern tools available, anyone can be heard throughout the whole wide world. That means that anyone can create a movement or redirect the purpose of one, which can have good as well as bad consequences. The ease with which someone can be heard is great because it allows anyone to make injustices known and undone, or make heroes known and rewarded. For example, a few days ago, a video of a man named Mamoudou Gassama saving a child by scaling a building in Paris went viral to the point where the French president Emmanuel Macron rewarded him with a medal. This story was quite innocent and had a happy ending. However, the freedom of expression that made the hero known also ended up making him hated, because in this new world, everyone wants to be heard by everybody, and what better way to be heard than by using trends ? Thus, the Parisian hero, who happened to be originally from Africa, became the poster child for pro-migrants militants, who are hated by a lot of people. And that's how, in an instant, in this world of eyes and ears, we started shouting over each other and using a hero as a scapegoat, when the only point of the story was that a child had been saved by a good Samaritan with great climbing skills. We should have rejoiced around that story, but instead we started bickering at each other because everyone wants to have the last word, even when there is no word to be had in the first place. That is what frightens me. My generation is so focused on expressing itself that it sometimes gives too much meaning to trivial or simple things, making actual meaningful things trivial themselves. And if we lost the joy of knowing a life has been saved in a couple of hours, what else did we already lose without realizing it, and what else will we lose if we keep acting this way ?

~~Her eyes glance to the SonyPMW that glares a red LED light. She exaggerates a moan as her bottom lip tucks under her bite. 5-digit imprints begin to welt and ecchymosis starts to surface. He thrashes her body into the Kingsdown cushion.~~ My body hosts a habitat for not just one, but two. Beyond my classic blonde ringlets and wide blue eyes lurks a predator. I call her Vixen. She is a lecherous creature infested in my mind. I cannot rid her. We share the same body, but she deludes my cognition. She is the entity of our illness that resides in our ventral striatum. The conflict between us does not cease until I swallow the colored beads engraved with a systematic arrangement of numerical and alphabetical configurations and close my eyes. My mind disintegrates into a trance. Peace―finally, until REM generates its own unconscious version of Vixen, for Vixen has no regard for serenity. In fact, she preys on calmness. I have wild conversations and battles with voices in my head. The relationship among us is hardly fathomable. The only means I have to express the delusion and insanity that unfolds inside my cranium is through abstract metaphors. And even then, oftentimes I lose myself in the psychobabble and pronouns. There are too many identities. Is my nonsense merely a figment of my distorted reality, or is it true? I don't know. I am not her. She is not me. We drive the same car and run on the same fuel, but there is only one wheel. For some months she used her bondage to leave me tied and helpless in the trunk. Vixen drove me down unpaved roads and scuffed our tires. I persisted to plead for a break, but one of Vixen's chief qualities is her apathy. After months of intense therapy and rehab, I finally escaped the trunk. I shifted from the passenger and back seats, contingent on how much time could elapse before the car required a refuel. After innumerous efforts to achieve 30-day abstinence, Vixen took the passenger seat. I hesitated to touch the wheel―afraid I would wreck both of us. I had not forgotten how to drive, but I forgot the traffic rules. Simple guiding principles like stoplights were difficult to realign myself to conform to. The only light in Vixen's world signaled “go;” even red meant “keep going”. It seemed unnatural to stop and “yield” did not exist in Vixen's vocabulary. My folly was a recipe for relapse. Lest our psychosis lost you, allow me to elaborate. I am a recovering sex addict. In order to grasp a clue at who controls my behaviors, I compartmentalize. As such, I personified the part of my mind that is plagued with an illness. She, Vixen, is like an escape artist. She's mastered the skills to escape what is real and deny what is true. She abducts our body into her alternative universe and I return with black and blue and welted evidence of our travels. My unadulterated self is impaired with shame and disgust. I see Vixen's graffiti plastered on my body's canvas and it reminds me of her grueling obsessions and masochism. Not that I would ever desire to, but even if forced, I could never escape to the places Vixen is so familiar with. It is her realm, not mine. Thus, I struggle with dissonance and impulses on a daily basis. Dissonance is a frustrating state that devours my energy and cognition. Denial worms its way into my head despite my efforts to banish it. Rationalization, minimization, ritualization, manipulation and crazy-making are only a handful of potent enablers. The constant questions of “who” and “what” confuse even the simplest of ideas, hence the medication to keep me functional―if you would even call us that. Despite failures, I can now intellectualize my behaviors, but whether that belongs on my excuse list or my sobriety strategies: I do not know. But I do understand that ignoring Vixen only intensifies her outbursts, like the one I endured prior to my first lapse―the prerequisite to a relapse: Salty, fiery tears streamed down my cheeks and collected in a damp puddle underneath my bed. I clung onto the metal framework, hiding from voices that echoed off the innards of my skull. White noise screeched in the background like nails on a chalkboard. I am amazed that my neck did not snap while I tucked my head into myself like an isopod crustacean. I gasped for air as if I were being water-boarded by my own tears. I felt like an ant being tortured under a scorching microscopic light with malicious eyes watching its every movement. I could not help but wonder if death was the only escape. My fingers type anxiously as I complete this work. I have so many voices to speak for, but such little language to communicate with. Delusion skews my vision of reality. As I prepare to close my thoughts, Vixen insists to secure the last word, but no. Patrick Carnes' are the words I want to conclude my piece. “Addiction is an illness of escape….it cripples the core ability to know what is real because…rationalizations and delusions make it impossible to cope with details.”