Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.
Sometimes I feel like the Qing Dynasty of kinky proclivities. I feel all progressive and cultured and shit and then someone shows up and tells me they took my gunpowder and invented machine guns with it.
So, I quit my job today. With less than two weeks left of it. But my boss crossed a line and I decided to shut it down.
I excused myself for about twenty minutes beforehand and freaked out about doing it. I’m a wuss when it comes to confrontation. But, I knew I’d regret it if I went in there with my tail between my legs.
Well, I handled it so professionally that my boss said she understood, gave me my pay for the week, and even gave me some extra money and offered to buy me dinner. So, I’m proud of myself. I’ve been working, in and out of relationships, to learn how to address things when they bother me rather than let them stew and to appreciate the legitimacy of my feelings. I consider the fact that I kept my dignity and served myself and my needs to be a huge step here.
So, uh, yay me.
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” – George Orwell, 1984.
I’m not nearly as fragile as I’m allowed to be. I’m given permission to collapse, to surrender, to let the cracks deepen until the secrets and fears and insecurities come oozing out. But, I’m nowhere close to being that breakable. I’m sensitive, but I’m not inconsolable. I’m submissive, but I’m not codependent. I’m pliant, but I’m not weak. To no one in particular, but perhaps to a good crowd: real domination is not grabbing someone by their insecurity, it’s grabbing them by their strength. It’s not about using or patching up vulnerability, it’s about allowing something unyielding and independent the opportunity to surrender. And there is the prize: controlling something that can very well control itself.
thinkivykink (via hiscleverpet)
So, apparently a quote of mine has been making the rounds around tumblr. I’m flattered. <3, Ivy
“Ah! Do you have to be sensual to be human?”
“Certainly, Madame. Pity is in the guts, just as tenderness is on the skin.”
– Anatole France, The Red Lily.
“My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage.” – Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic.
“Buy the ticket, take the ride." – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.”
— Haruki Murakami
“The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand," Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
The Kitchen Sessions #2
(An Intimate Alchemists original)