People love telling me they value intensity and wholeheartedness and honesty, and then I put myself out there (and not even in an assholish way, mind you, but in a true-blue, vulnerable way) and most people are like, “Oh whoa, too much, sayonara.”
 
The kicker is that the only great relationships in my life are built on intensity and wholeheartedness and honesty. Which encourages me to keep trying, even when I get ghosted by people. But man, getting ghosted hurts every time.

“Love people for who they truly are” is the only way and really, really hard sometimes. (Self-love being the hardest version of this.)

Sometimes you stub your toe on a hard dog toy and your toe bleeds and then your dog licks the blood and a powerful human-dog bond is formed.

“You made art because it was the only thing you’d ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone else thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils.”
 
— Hanya Yanagihara