We accept the love we think we deserve

“You can’t ask for what you want unless you know what it is. A lot of people don’t know what they want or they want much less than they deserve. First you have figure out what you want. Second, you have to decide that you deserve it. Third, you have to believe you can get it. And, fourth, you have to have the guts to ask for it.”-Barbara De Angelis

“No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it”-Richard Bach

Good afternoon SQers! I know it has been quite a while since I have posted, but I figured why not post at the end of the year. I am not sure if this post is going to mean weekly posts again, but it will mean at least one more post for now. I hope your year has gone well! Mine has gone by looking like a blur with a whole lot of change and new experiences. Nevertheless, here we are again at that reflective holiday time period.

Recently, I have been doing a bit of reflecting on the relationships in my life. Despite my sarcasm and tough personality, I like to think of myself as a genuinely nice person. If you analyzed the relationships in my life, I think you really would see the extent to which I try to be a loving and caring person. As with anything, it has its negative side…sometimes I give too much.  For all of the”crappy” people in my life,  it is in my nature (for some reason)  to want to give them the benefit of the doubt. To allow them to stay in my life justifying it on the grounds of “Oh he/she is just going through a rough patch”….”He/She’s a good person deep down”. “He/She just needs a friend”. My rationale behind doing that somehow I am being the bigger person and being there for someone when they need me. Rather than seeing it in its truest form for the enabling that I am being a part of and for the damage it inflicts on my own life.  

Both these quotations allude to the idea of figuring out what you deserve. As the De Angelis quotation breaks it down step-wise part of making that change in your life rests upon realizing what you want and more importantly what you deserve. I am a believer in karma. If you are someone who strives to be a good person and make good choices, you deserve to be treated as such. You should not be spending your time with someone who does not realize how wonderful you are and who brings you down. It can be hard to sit back and be selfish about what you want & what you deserve, but sometimes you need to. You have to remember what an incredible person you are and check your own life every now and then. If you ever forget and can’t do it for yourself, just ask someone important in your life  . The second part of the equation is what the Bach quotation alludes to…you need to allow yourself to go after and create that kind of life for yourself.  It may create a certain degree of disillusionment with what is familiar to you, but it is integral to creating the kind of life you deserve to have.

Part of what sculpts that existence is who we choose to surround ourselves and share our time with. This is where that relationship piece becomes crucial. To be the best version of ourselves and to be content, we should spend our time with people who love, support and challenge us to be better. Whether we are talking about friends or romantic relationships, it is worth taking the time to examine the relationships in your own life.  It takes a lot of strength to cut ties with the people who are toxic to your life, but in the end you will find it a cleansing process. Also , it is worth taking the time to remind those who are important to you just how important they really are. I challenge you to take stock of your own life in all of its aspects and evaluate whether or not you are living the life you deserve. If you find that you are not, find solace in the fact that you can be the agent of that change. 

That’s all for now. Happy New Year my lovely readers! Hope you chase after what you DESERVE in 2013. Look out for a Part 2 New Year’s Post coming tomorrow with my personal resolutions. 

See you tomorrow, 

❤ SQ

“Wag more. Bark less”

• “There are exactly as many special occasions in life as we choose to celebrate”-Robert Brault
• “From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”-Anais Nin

Good afternoon SQers! I know it has been quite a while since I have written and I have just been so incredibly busy I apologize. I hope you all have been well. Like I told you a while ago, I have not fully given up on writing for this blog and I will be back to write periodically. Recently, this theme has become something I have noticed quite a bit in my life so much so that I thought it might be post-worthy.

Everyone has bad days. That is a universally accepted truth. Some of us have ruts that last months, years and for others it can be as  short as a couple of minutes or hours. Doesn’t seem fair does it? No way it is. You have zero control over what happens to you, but you can control your reaction. As most of my friends can attest to, I am just about sarcastic and cynical as they come. There will probably never be a day you see me radiate sunshine and positivity from the deepest depths of my soul. The amount I sleep during the week is terrible. The things that have happened to me over the past couple years are enough of a reason for me to consider wearing black constantly and being angry at everyone. Yet that’s not the way I am.  Sure sometimes when I find myself super stressed I may complain a little too much to my friends and family (which I am so sorry about–if they are reading this), but looking back on things I wouldn’t say that I hate and regret everything.

I know some people (as I am sure you all do) who spend their lives complaining. It makes them feel better to vocalize their problems, concerns and issues to everyone. These are also often the same individuals who take joy in finding fault with everything and everyone. The worst part is when you listen to what they are complaining about you ask yourself..”Really? Is it really that big of a deal?” The other question I always ask myself with those types of people is: Isn’t it exhausting being that way? You would think at some point they would become exhausted of riding on everyone and bringing down the mood everywhere they go. Don’t get me wrong I complain, but life is too short to hold grudges, to constantly be bitter and pride yourself on bringing everyone else down. Constantly doing so makes you terrible to be around and takes a toll on you as a person. Slowly but surely you are going to end up alienating everyone that matters to you because no one wants or needs someone like that in their life. 

I am not trying to say you need to walk around like the happiest person in the world.  Instead choose to actively spend your life searching for the positivity. Even when everything seems like it is going wrong, take the time to laugh and smile. Who cares whether it is Comedy Central-worthy or if you just watched a video of a koala bear clinging to someone’s leg. When things really truly get difficult, you will long for those days when things were easier . Choose to celebrate and be more positive. It makes you a better person in the long run. 

That’s all for now.  Have a great week!

See you next Sunday,

❤ SQ

Projecting on

““Why can’t we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn’t work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.”-Snoopy

“I do not say ‘good-bye.’ I believe that’s one of the bullshittiest words ever invented. It’s not like you’re given the choice to say ‘bad-bye’ or ‘awful-bye’ or ‘couldn’t-care-less-about-you-bye.’ Every time you leave, it’s supposed to be a good one. Well, I don’t believe in that. I believe against that.”-John Green (Will Grayson)

Good morning SQers! Happy New Year! I hope you had a great time ringing in 2012 with friends and loved ones. I do not know about you all, but I could not be happier about letting go of 2011 and embracing a new, hopefully much better year. You might be wondering what on earth is with the quotes I chose for this week.  I think by now you have gotten to know me fairly well and you know that I do not beat around the bush. Most times, I will tell you honestly and bluntly what I think. This week’s a little different from most in that this will be my last post for a while. I have never really been talented at doing good-bye’s or final anythings so I figured I would address things in post form leaving you with fun quotes as I do every Sunday.

Oh boy…where to begin? Well when I started this blog as my New Years’ project two years ago, I did it on a whim. It was just more of an organized way to keep track of the quotes that I found and sent to my friends & family every week.What started for me as a collection of post-its transformed into something that was bigger than I bargained for. I never pictured it growing into something this big. I expected the majority of views to come from me and my mom honestly. These past 2 years by no means have been an easy 2 years for me at all, but I think writing this blog was definitely a good thing for me. It was an outlet for me to share the things that were on my mind. I loved writing every Sunday ( and I hope you all enjoyed reading it!)

That being said, as most good things even writing this blog had to eventually come to an end or a prolonged hiatus. I only say hiatus because I do not know if I will be  indefinitely done and to say I will never write on here again is a big statement. I probably will write a sporadic post or so whenever I feel inspired, but it will not be the regular every Sunday posts I once promised. It makes me sad to be letting go of SQ, but I look forward to finding my next project.  If I have any advice to you about personal projects,  it is that if you have an idea…go for it! You never know how it might end up changing you as a person and you have nothing to lose by investing in yourself.

“Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.”-Rumi

Finally, I want to thank all of you for being such loyal readers. Thank you for sharing, commenting and telling me what you thought of my posts. I learned a lot from you and wish you all the best! Continue to come back whenever you want because the physical blog is not going anywhere. If you have topic suggestions..email me at sunday.quotes@yahoo.com.  In the spirit, of the new year…here is my wish for all of you: 

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”-Neil Gaiman

That’s all for now. Have a great week! 

See you next Sunday (whenever that might be),

❤ SQ

P.S. As soon as I find my next big project, I will let you know 🙂

iDefy

• Before you get incredibly over excited, this has nothing to do with Apple. Just a play on the i-naming craze. 

“When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect – we even demand – that it brings us momentous events since the night before…We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy…to go to ‘a church of our choice’ and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never have a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.” –Daniel J. Boorstin

“But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”-Haruki Murakami

Good afternoon SQers!  I apologize for the late post, but my post-finals weekend went by in a blur. However, I do owe you all a post so here it is a day late. Hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me 🙂

I hope everyone is doing well and holding up well with the rapidly approaching holiday season and end of 2011.  Has the duality of the stressful holiday panic coupled with the undeniably brighter mood made its impression on you yet? It hit me definitely somewhere between hearing Christmas music every where I go and people about ready to kill each other in shopping mall parking lots. Just something about this time of year I guess. I know it always makes me reflective and nostalgic so there is no better time for this week’s post.

Whether we are cognizant of it or not we live a majority of our life fenced in by expectations. Expectations for who we might end up being, what career we end up pursuing and even what kind of people we should spend our time with. These expectations are derived from just about everyone and everything from family, friends, professors, coworkers, strangers and even on a larger scale society. The infectious nature of expectation takes root in motivational material as well. Anything motivational you peruse will tell you the importance of setting goals for yourself and working towards them. What it does not tell you is to take the time to decide what it is you really want in your heart of heart’s.  I think if any of us sat down on a given day with all of the decisions and choices we made to explain them, it would be surprising how few of them came from us individually. You would find that a good majority of them were motivated by comments and suggestions from other people whether it is  implicitly or explicitly.

As shocking as that might be to realize, there is no inherent harm in that alone. Not living on an island means that our decisions will be influenced by other people whether we are aware of it or not. Sometimes it can be a good thing giving us a direction when our personal compass might be coming up empty or giving us some basic rules to live by. Other times, it can limit us. Just because you should do something or you are expected to do something…does not mean that is the best decision for you personally.  To live the life that is best for you, you need to act based on what you want. Like the Murakami quote says no one else can tell you what’s best for you. You need to take the time to figure that out for yourself. Forget about living fenced in by expectations because as the Boorstin quote will also tell you that does not prove to be a rewarding path either.  Strive to create and live the life of your dreams because it is ultimately your time here on Earth and your choice to how you would like to use them. People are always going to have opinions regarding what you choose to do and their own theories about it all because they can’t help but be judgmental, but you are better than that. Challenge yourself to truly pursue happiness in the way that it makes sense to you even if that means defying expectations that have been designed to set you on a fenced path. Also, give the people in your life the freedom to do the same.  By all means, give your opinion, but don’t forget to love and support them in what they choose to do rather than just criticizing. 

You do not get time back and our time here is short enough as it is.  Make the most of it and do not live boxed in by convention and expectation. Your life is first and foremost yours so why not...defy? Defy expectation and give the strict supporters of expectations, conventions and norms something to talk about. 

That’s all for now. Have a great week!

See you next Sunday,

❤ SQ

The Ten Rules for Being Human

Good afternoon SQers, 

Hope you all are doing well! Unfortunately for me, this week is finals time so I will not be able to write a detailed awesome post for you. That being said you really did not think I would leave you this Sunday without giving you a quote or something interesting…did you? Here’s a couple rules I stumbled across this week that I found intriguing. Enjoy and have a great week!

The Ten Rules For Being Human.

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s yours to keep for the entire period.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, ‘life’.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The ‘failed’ experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately ‘work’.

4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.

6. ‘There’ is no better a place than ‘here’. When your ‘there’ has become a ‘here’, you will simply obtain another ‘there’ that will again look better than ‘here’.

7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. You will forget all this.

-Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott, If Life is A Game, These Are The Rules

See you next Sunday, 

❤ SQ