Greetings! The name is Time Lizzy, or Time as my friends call me. They/Them pronouns. I love to try new things, draw, sing, dance, garden, and I do some witchcraft in my free time. I'm a Hetalia role playing partner if you guys are interested.
I love kids they’re all like.. “when i grow up i’m gonna be an astronaut and a chef and a doctor and an olympic swimmer” like that self confidence! That drive! That optimism! Where does it go
It gets destroyed by adults not believing in you and telling you to pick a realistic career. And by society creating all these obstacles to the point that you’re too tired to try.
But they’re not really unrealistic, SOMEBODY is going to be an olympic swimmer and it might as well be you.
Actually I want to talk about this a little more than I did, because olympic swimming is incredible and works perfectly to talk about attaining goals.
I used to be a varsity swimmer, and I was damn good, but I was forced into it by my parents and completely lost my love for it and therein my drive. But in high school I was swimming against such talented swimmers like Olympic Swimmer Missy Franklin. I’ve met her, and the main difference between her and me was that I was strong but had no passion, but she was strong BECAUSE she had passion.
And I could have been good, really good, maybe even Olympic good. I even have the predisposition for it, been swimming since I was 2 years old, have a mom who was almost an olympic swimmer. Missy didn’t have either of those things, she just wanted it, loved it, had been doing it for a long time, and decided she was going to kick ass at it.
Right, that’s great and all, but I completely missed my opportunity to be an olympic swimmer, yeah? and can never achieve those dreams I had as a kid? No, not even though. There was this whole thought that female athletes peak when they’re 17 years old and lose their skills quickly after that, and male athletes peak around 19. But then Olympic Swimmer Dara Torres shows up. She was an olympic swimmer when she was 17, 21 and 25. Pretty normal age for retirement. She had a few kids. She kicked butt at being a mom.
And then at 33 years old she decides she’s bored or something gets back in shape and kicks so much ass at the trials that she lands herself on the Olympic Team ONCE AGAIN. And then 8 years later, she decides, heck I’m 41 now, no one has ever made the olympic swim team as old as I am, I want to get in shape yet again and teach these children how sports work.
And she still has the record for oldest US Olympic Swimmer, not even any men have beat out that record.
So basically what I’m saying is you could be an olympic swimmer, you really could be. And there are obviously a lot of things stopping you and trying to get in your way: your brain, society, too much chocolate cake for example. But if you really dedicate yourself to it and love it with all of your heart you could, you really could.
And lets say olympic swimming isn’t your jam? That’s cool too. There isn’t a single skill in this world that you can’t learn if you absolutely love it and want to. Any skill you want is going to take time. There are countless famous people who started learning a skill after 20, 30, 40, or even 50. Not a single person has even been president under age 35 (most likely because you’re not allowed to be, but there’s a reason for that). Whatever you want to do you’re probably going to be bad at first, and I’m talking really shitty.
Van Gogh got started in his 20′s and was thought to have no artistic talent at first and was forced to sit in the back of classrooms where the worst artists in the class sat. So yeah you’ll probably be bad, like really bad and everyone including you will think you’re bad. If you stick with it though, if you’re willing to work for years and years, if you keep loving it after all the pain it’s given you,
then you might just paint Starry Night.
#looks like there’s still time for me to learn how to draw
… YES. As someone who started drawing at 35 and who always was like: ‘eh, I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life, but I would love to be able to’ this is near and dear to my heart. If you want to draw, start drawing. Keep drawing. Be shit at drawing at first. Keep it up, doodle things on scraps but also draw stuff you don’t think you can draw. Challenge yourself, you will be surprised what you can do. It will be frustrating at times, but it will also be awesome. It is SO much a matter of practice and dedication, not talent.
This applies for writing, too.
Don’t ever think for a second that it doesn’t! Want to start writing? Then write! You will get better the more you write, the more often, and you will improve, all of the time, as long as you dedicate yourself.
And don’t forget music.
My dad is in his late 50′s, decided he wanted to learn guitar, and is going for it. He’s learning finger picking style. He sounds good, even though he has no natural musical talent and no training. (He says he doesn’t sound good, but we’re working on that little self-esteem issue.)
Meanwhile, me? I have a lifetime of musical training, excellent ear, and I’m just learning basic chords on guitar. Been self-teaching longer than he has, and technically speaking dad’s waaaay better.
I honestly believe the whole “adults require less sleep” thing is honest to god probably a myth created by capitalism
It is.
i honestly believe that sleep deprivation is the biggest ignored/neglected root cause of health dangers that prematurely kill adults
ask me sometime about the role of sleep in the leptin ghrelin cycle and how its interruption destabilizes weight homeostasis
or about the new research showing that heart disease is not caused by fat, like we thought for years, but by inflammation in the circulatory system whose root cause is unknown but one of the prime suspects is, you guessed it, sleep deprivation
but nobody wants to hear that lack of sleep is killing people. employers don’t want to hear it. and god knows that having sold their waking hours to capitalism to survive workers don’t want to lose the only time they have left to them to live their lives, mostly stolen from sleep
i mean even i don’t want to do anything about it and i love sleep, i just love overwatch more
this this this this this
our society places almost zero value on sleep
on enough sleep
on uninterrupted sleep
on regular, predictable, cycling sleep
all the evidence we have suggests sleep is really, really, really important to the processes of the human body, including both mental and physical health, and yet when was the last time you heard somebody suggest that people had a *right* to sufficient, regular sleep?
Reminder that
– Humans are not meant to sleep for extended periods of uninterrupted sleep.
By this I don’t mean “humans shouldn’t have 8+ hours of sleep a night”; I mean that we are supposed to sleep for four to five hours (ish), then get up and do something relaxing like reading for a half hour to an hour, then get another bout of four to five hours. This is what our bodies were designed for.
Sleeping the whole night through was a fad started with the advent of the lightbulb. Sleeping the whole night through is so recent (and artificial) that First Sleep and Second Sleep are mentioned in Dickens’ novels.
– Lack of sleep for even a single night severely compromises your immune system.
If you’re planning on getting little sleep or pulling an all-nighter, make sure to eat lots of fruit and veggies/take vitamins that day. Or even better, get yourself some bee propolis. It’s a natural remedy used for thousands of years in Latin America and is insanely good for boosting up compromised immune systems (if you get the drop kind, put 3 to 4 drops in a spoonful of honey and mix well with a 2nd spoon to mask the strong taste). It has no side effects and is all but impossible to overdose on.
– According to several government bodies around the world, chronic lack of sleep is literally tied for 1st place as the worst kind of torture (the other is solitary isolation)
– Expecting a teen to get up for 8:30 classes is the equivalent of expecting an adult to be at work at 4 am.
After babies, teens are the age group that needs the most amount of sleep. Puberty is exhausting, and the body needs time to recharge. Ideally, a teen should be getting between 10 to 12 hours of sleep at the bare minimum. Most teens are lucky if they manage to get 8. And that’s a gigantic problem; not only does lack of sleep affect mood (which is extra significant when your hormones are already riding a rollercoaster to begin with), but also has massive effects on growth, which is kinda what the whole puberty thing is supposed to be about.
– Humans were not designed to have the same sleep cycle across the species. Much the opposite in fact.
Night owls and morning people are an actual thing. Because we’re pack creatures, Nature came up with a clever way for our ancestors to always have someone on the lookout for predators and threats: make people naturally alert at varying times so that there’s always someone alert to keep watch.
Forcing night owls to follow morning people’s sleep cycle means night owls live with what researchers have referred to as “permanent jetlag”.
So i just came out to my dad abt being nb, and he said something really wise about names, i think.
He said “Gifts are not obligations. You give things to people, and you hope they like them. And your name was a gift from us to you. If it doesn’t work for you anymore, you’re not obligated to keep it.”
and i just thought maybe other people could use hearing something like that.
that’s so beautiful
Reblogging for people since it sounds very, very wise.
