16 Comments
User's avatar
Sonia's avatar

Love this, an honest and powerful reflective piece… thanks for sharing 💛

Romantasy for the Curious (FS)'s avatar

Hey, I just wanted to come back here and say that your style is fascinating! Perfect mix between poetry and deep essay/analysis. Loved it. Thanks for sharing! <3

CB Tolofson Surviving Control's avatar

This is a gracious way to live a life! This is quite the struggle your me.

Anju Gaina's avatar

Work sincerely on the matters you can control, that’s called standard

Easy Weezy's avatar

Whao really beautiful

Kate North's avatar

Amazing!

𝒁𝒂𝒚𝒏𝒂𝒃 𝑩 ❦︎'s avatar

Perfection!!!!

Thank you for sharing

Looking forward to more of this!

Really amazing

The Liquid Slate's avatar

We definitely need more poets like you over here!

Avasa's avatar

Beautifully put. We often treat standards like a cage when they should really just be a compass.

Arial Wicklund's avatar

I liked this:

Expect effort.

Accept imperfection.

Keep trying anyway.

We are humans living in a modern world that may not actually be designed for us. We aren’t machines. We fall short, make mistakes… it’s part of the human experience.

But I like your ending thoughts.

Resonance's avatar

Amazing!!! I believe our standards mainly come from our upbringing and our moral compass, we set them because we want a foundation but we drift when that pressure becomes more of a choice, I say hold them lightly and bend them to your liking but remember your foundation and never lose yourself!!!!

Words about things and stuff's avatar

Thank you for sharing this. We all have those questions and doubts. It’s unavoidable. For me, the older I get… the less time I know I have left… the more I take them seriously. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, probably not, but for me that realization was when I really started to answer those questions witj serious intention.

Allgood Wellness's avatar

I enjoyed this ✨

Moe Badreddine's avatar

There’s something honest about not trying to resolve the tension. Standards pull you forward. Reality pulls you back, and somewhere in between, you learn how to keep going without turning on yourself. A nice reflective piece!

Michelle B's avatar

What I like about this is how unsparing it is without becoming cruel. It doesn’t pretend discipline is easy, and it doesn’t romanticise failure either. It sits in that uncomfortable, very human space where you know what you value, keep missing the mark, and still refuse to call the values meaningless just because you can’t embody them perfectly.

The line that stayed with me most is the idea of holding standards lightly, not as judgment but as direction. That feels true. So much suffering comes from turning ideals into weapons against ourselves, but there is also something empty about abandoning them altogether. This piece understands that tension beautifully. It captures the exhaustion of self-awareness without collapsing into self-pity.

It also says something bigger about being human: that inconsistency is not always hypocrisy, sometimes it is just the ordinary struggle of living with conviction inside a world built to scatter your attention. That felt honest to me. Quietly painful, but honest.

Love, Lydia.'s avatar

“It’s easy to imagine you’re standing outside the mess”?! Oh I love this. Very relatable and so human