You can only be genuinely happy when you’re free, and you can only be completely free when you are yourself. Because if you are not being yourself then you are dragging that around, with that weight holding you back you can’t be truly free, and if you don’t feel free, how can you be happy?

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Solo se puede ser genuinamente feliz cuando se es libre, y solo se puede ser completamente libre cuando se es uno mismo. Porque si no estás siendo tu mismo entonces cargas ese peso en tus hombros, con ese peso impidiéndote seguir adelante no puedes ser verdaderamente libre, y si no te sientes libre, ¿Cómo puedes ser feliz?

Some Underrated Advice.

There’s this project that’s been going on for some time now, and it’s become quite famous: Humans of New York, which consists of using photos and captions to show the human side of the residents of a city that comes off as isolating and individualist. Recently, they worked with Mott Hall Bridges Academy to raise money to send kids to college, and it was amazing. They were even invited to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and went to the white how to meet the president. With the latter, he used the occasion to ask the president himself some questions, and uploaded them about a week ago to his Facebook page.

There was one that really got to me: “When is the time you felt most broken?”, and I was surprised when it didn’t get as much attention as I thought it would and that it should have, because his answer was simply inspiring: “I first ran for Congress in 1999, and I got beat. I just got whooped. I had been in the state legislature for a long time, I was in the minority party, I wasn’t getting a lot done, and I was away from my family and putting a lot of strain on Michelle. Then for me to run and lose that bad, I was thinking maybe this isn’t what I was cut out to do. I was forty years old, and I’d invested a lot of time and effort into something that didn’t seem to be working. But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I’ve felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re worrying about yourself—if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?’ — then you’re going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path. There’s always something to be done.”

I feel that we forget this too often, we become so involved with ourselves that we don’t remember that there’s so much more, and that all of that is probably much more important. I loved this so much, and I wanted to share it because, well, I think we need to keep it in mind.

 

 

Normal is just an illusion.

“Normal is just an illusion, what is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” — Morticia Addams.

Half of the people wants to be normal, the other half claims to be different. But truth is that we all have things in common, and things that differ from each other… And if that’s the case, we can’t be completely normal or completely different, can we?

So, to my understanding, what we really are is unique.

Now, think about it for a second. If we are all unique, wouldn’t that mean that we are all different, and at same time, the same, and by that, normal? So we are indeed normal, since being unique is what is common among human beings. 

We could go on and on, but does it truly matter?  

You should definitely add this to your to-watch-list.

Netflix, the home of binge-watching, is often just praised for it’s always growing selection of movies and TV shows. But did you know they also have AWESOME documentaries? I know, right? amazing.

2 of the great titles included in this category I personally recommend are:

• The Kennedys.

 

From The History Channel, the “Twentieth-century America’s most storied political family gets the epic treatment in this miniseries that spans three decades of Kennedy history.” Starting Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Tom Wilkinson and Katie Holmes (Yes!), this 8-part movie event gets 4 3/4 out of 5 stars.

 

 

 

• Mankind: The Story of All of Us.

Also from The History Channel, this 12-part documentary features, as its name suggests, the story of mankind right from the beginning in Africa, to our time. Honestly, where else can you learn about how we all came to be, in such a great way?

It gets 4 1/3, out of 5 stars.

 

How I became a Feminist

It is greatly known that Latin American culture is mainly characterized by being very family oriented (very being an understatement in comparison to the north american ways). The family interactions are not limited to your immediate household, but you are constantly engaging with cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents and their families, which to us, are our family too. And ever since I was a child growing up on the tropical Santo Domingo, I saw that most of them, and all around me, followed the same guideline: Men work and women take care of the house and their children. From that, I quickly picked up that there was a difference between how boys and girls were expected to act. Basically, one was taught to act and the other one to react, one to lead and the other one to follow… Can you guess who was which?  

“It may takes us longer to find where we belong, but I can assure you, once we do we’re never letting go.”

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“Puede que tardemos más en encontrar el lugar al cual pertenecemos, pero te aseguro que cuando lo hagamos jamás nos iremos.”

Who is it that you love? (Short Story)

By the time I woke up, the sunlight coming through the window had been replaced by the ones from the moon and the city, and I could hear the sound of the traffic outside. Suddenly I felt a hand caressing my back, making me shiver.

Of course he knew I was awake.

Sports Illustrated first “Plus-size” Model.

I have been seeing this “breakthrough” from Sports Illustrated (A magazine marketed for men) EVERYWHERE this past few days, even in one of my favorite blogs, Hello Giggles. And I really, really need to take a moment and know I’m not going crazy here. Is it just me, or this beautiful woman is not a plus-size AT ALL?

I mean, I guess that if we take in count the magazine’s history with the type of models they feature, this is actually a good thing. But still, I can’t help but worry about the point where our perceptions about what plus-size actually is.

Here is what I picture when I think of a plus-size woman:

Or, even this:

All beautiful women. But this:

Is just a normal, every day, common size. This is Robyn Lawley,  the woman the magazine is featuring as a plus-size model.

We’ve been bombarded from media about perfect models and beachy bodies so much, that we’ve grown into the seeing a real and normal size women as plus size.

And that is just not okay.

Does this have to do with the fact that this magazine is directed to a male audience, and they need to keep on feeding their unrealistic fantasies in order to get the expected profit? I don’t know, probably. But it doesn’t change the fact that at the same time they feed insecurities to young women minds, and this just goes unnoticed like a thousand other things in the media.

 

Why Women Aren’t Welcome On The Internet

It’s not okay.

WOMEN. HEALING. VIOLENCE.

By AMANDA HESS

“Ignore the barrage of violent threats and harassing messages that confront you online every day.” That’s what women are told. But these relentless messages are an assault on women’s careers, their psychological bandwidth, and their freedom to live online. We have been thinking about Internet harassment all wrong.

Click here to read at The Pacific Standard.

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This “Boom Clap” cover is simply glorious.

Lennon and Maisy, from the show Nashville, just released a cover of Charli XCX’s soundtrack song “Boom Clap” from the movie The Fault in Our Stars and it’s amazing!

—Via Hello Giggles