It is very easy to get in your own head when you want to try something new, or you want to change something in your life. Sometimes the biggest obstacle to doing something is the belief that you aren't allowed to do or be something outside of peoples expectations. Whether its a little thing like getting something different than your usual at a cafe, or something big like changing careers, you need to stop obsessing over invisible rules and expectations and just do it. You're freer than you think you are.
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A constant trap that I am breaking free of
Feb 16, 2025
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Honestly the best way to reinvent yourself is just to live. Being in a new place with new people will expose you to so many amazing things you never would have been aware off if you stayed at home.
Big tip is to just try things, figure out what you like without the pressure of feeling like you have to keep up a performance! try new outfit styles, new hair do, new clubs and hobbies just get out there and experience everything!
Itβs freeing I can promise you. Slightly scary at times but the best thing I was ever told was feel the fear and do it anyway.
Apr 18, 2024
Jan 25, 2024
Top Recs from @ngaatee
Whether you need inspo, are curious about the discourse over the last few decades, want to get into a new hobby or whatever else, you can download open source magazine issues from decades past. They have magazines from as early as the early 1900s too! I have been obsessed with old video games lately so I have been looking at the old club nintendo magazines and it has been so fun. Like look at some of the covers these magazines used to have
Aug 7, 2024
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There is something about seeing someone be unconscious about something that they really love. The sincerity of it, the way they forget to be quiet if its in public, the way they gesture with their hands more. Its great 10/10 would recommend being passionate about your interests!
Jul 10, 2024
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Originally I went in with a double major in sociology and communications because I felt like I needed to major in at least one "sensible" major so I chose communications. But I took philosophy as my sequence and I fell in love with it. My then lecturer invited students to this philosophy symposium and he saw my interest in philosophy (I had never dared even think about why I kept choosing philosophy modules during my degree) so he said I could speak to philosophers there and ask them about their work so that I could also see what the field was like.
I almost didn't go but I went and I knew that philosophy wasn't a passing fascination for me. I didn't want to go because I was scared of having to tell my parents that I wanted my double major to be philosophy and sociology i.e. two interests that people told me were not a sensible career path. But I loved it and I realised that I could actually just go to the offices and change my majors and no one could stop me so I did. People were dubious of my decision but I ended up tutoring second years in modern philosophy, African philosophy and the ethics of AI, and now I am doing my masters, so I would say that it is a moment where I exercised my free will that worked out. It isn't my favourite because it worked out though.
It is my favourite because I was willing to risk it not working out. I exercised my free will fully knowing that it might "go wrong" and I did it anyways because I decided that the chance of it going right was worth it and I trusted myself to live with whatever the outcome would be. I still feel the electric sensation of being assertive in a decision that I made on the basis that I wanted to do something because it would make me happy, not because I was concerned with the shame of not meeting people's expectations.
Funnily enough I actually loved communications and I still keep up with research in it, its just that my favourite parts about communications are also not the "this will get you a job" sensible aspects of it, those parts were just okay to me. This decision had a domino effect on how I live my life, it got me back into making art, it made me interested in film, made me realise that I love teaching, and perhaps most importantly it made me brave. There is a version of me somewhere that is too timid and afraid to really live but instead, because of that one moment where I said "fuck it" and just did what I wanted to do without overthinking it, I am passionately and intensely alive. And prone to getting my hopes up lol.
Sep 27, 2024