Important life lessons with Rei

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A place to talk through and discuss our thoughts

Rei

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Aug 11, 2019
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Hi honeybunches!

I wanted to make a running log with everyone filled with important lessons/sayings/ideas that can help us all along in our every day.

Maybe it's a positive saying?

Maybe it's a brief lesson you learned?

Maybe it's just something you wanna share.

Please put the lesson in a quote block so we can have an easy visual signal of your thought.

I'm gonna start off with something someone told me today that was very important for me to put into perspective.

"Sometimes your thoughts get sick and you gotta vaccinate." - Vaccinating can be reaching out to the people you love for reassurance. Because rarely are you a true burden. Your sick thoughts burden you more than asking for love and assurance from those that care about you.
Vaccinating can also be cutting off toxicity!
 
"Money isn't everything." - It May help you with many things, but you have to think of you and what's important to you. Reflect on your priorities. don't let money be the reason you are working a job you hate, and spend most of your time doing.

This is actually something I struggle with a lot, no matter how much I try not to. I am a natural worrier and my generalized anxiety only makes it worse. But sometimes I just get to a point where I say fuck it. Bills will come again, and sometimes I have to just deal with the consequences. I don't regret calling out of work to go to that concert that I have been waiting for years to see. I don't regret spending that money on my favorite boba drink. I don't regret spoiling my dogs to death with treats and snacks they probably don't need. I don't live to make money. I live to enjoy life, and money just helps support my life choices. And, you know, a roof over my head.
 
"Be nice to yourself" "Love yourself."

This is always something that's on my mind, where does the line between loving yourself and being selfish really cross? As a Libra, and just as a person, in general, I am often told that I am just plain lazy, selfish, and don't want to do anything. A portion of that is true, yes, there are times where I don't want to do anything but breathe. I sometimes don't even want to get up to go to the bathroom. But on the other hand, there have been loads of people who tell me to love myself a little, take myself on a date, enjoy my own presence without having to make conversation. Yes, what I choose to do for those activities might come off as lazy but I believe that there are worse positions to be in. Yes, I can sludge around in bed for hours but sometimes there are days, sometimes weeks, where I still get off my ass and pretend to be an adult who has her shit together. For every moment I get my shit together, and for every moment I don't, I constantly try to remind myself that hey, it's a good day, I deserve nice things. I deserve to be loved.
 
You can be thirty years old and not be married, not have kids, not have a high-paying "important" job, not own a house, and it is perfectly okay. Your life does not need to move at the same pace as the people you went to high school with, your friends, your cousins, or anyone else. You are not a failure.

This is a lesson I have to remind myself of on a regular basis. I suffer immensely with thoughts and feelings of insecurity, worthlessness, insignificance, and the crippling realization that I may have wasted all the potential I was touted as having when I was younger. When someone I knew from high school gets married, has a kid, or crosses some other arbitrary life milestone, I have always struggled with feelings of jealousy. Not necessarily because I want what they have, but because I worry I haven't accomplished something of equal social value.

I know I am not alone in these feelings. Since the inception and proliferation of social media sites, I and others my age have been subjected to the social performance of others who only display the best, most impressive aspects of their life. Instead of finding joy in seeing my friends succeed, I found myself wallowing in self-pity, wondering why I couldn't achieve the same levels of success.

There is a careful balance between being happy with what you have and not allowing yourself to become stagnant. I'm learning how to be comfortable with myself and where I am, and knowing that with time and effort my situation will change because I have worked for it. I am learning how to celebrate the happiness of others while not beating myself up because I am not on the same lifepath. Things will happen when they're meant to happen.
 
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Forgive me.

"I am not standing still, I am lying in wait."

The first time I ever heard that it rocked my world a little bit. It was a verbalization of what I had always felt but could never put into words myself. I've always been a bit of a late bloomer. I started school late, I graduated late, I got my driver's license late, I come around to new ideas slowly. I used to think that I was mentally retarded or emotionally stunted, but it was never that I couldn't do those things.

I just wasn't ready to do them.

I'm still facing similar challenges even at this stage in my life. I know that a lot of these feelings and my response to them are born of fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of "what-if". I know that in time I will conquer that fear. I know that I will answer that unknown by learning, the change by acclimating, the what-if by asserting myself. I will find my place in the world, however elusive it may be. I will stand in the current and wait for the right time to let it pull me along.

I am not standing still.

I'm just waiting.

help yourself to a cookie if you understand the reference I'm not here to be laughed at
 
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"Don't accept criticism from someone whom you'd never ask advice."

A little more pointed way of saying "ignore the haters," with a nuance I appreciate. There are always going to be people ready to insult you, ready to say your stuff sucks, but if they're just some random commenter there's no good reason to pay any attention to them. When someone you trust and admire has some feedback, however... listen closely, because you might actually be about to learn something, and take the next step toward your greater greatness.

On a more personal level, once you start to internalize this phrase you may begin to notice patterns with people. Like certain family members who, despite their life being a dead-end disaster, will still insist on acting like you are beneath them and you are in desperate need of their critique. Eventually you just kinda realize: Why the hell should I listen to you?
 
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"Sometimes you will care more about someone than they care about you. Crying over people who won't cry over you may be inevitable, but you deserve better,"

Not everything will end happily - you can't control what other people will do. But you can control yourself, and should surround yourself with people that would cry over you and support you the same way you want to support them.
 
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