9 Things Every Girl Should Know Early On In Life!

1. About taxes, savings, and being independent
2. Basic cooking
3. How to take one’s mental health seriously
4. Spare some ME time!
5. Never change for someone until you no longer recognize yourself
6. Take care of your skin since a young age, your skin will thank you later!
7. Never settle just because you are a certain age..
8. Know the difference between a man who flatters you, compliments you and the man who spends money on you, who invests in you. Know the difference between a man who views you as a property and a man who views you properly, a man who lusts after you and a man who loves you, be with a man who believes you are a gift to him!
9. Accept yourself, the way you are. Love yourself, unapologetically!

Book Review #114 : the sun and her flowers

The Sun and Her Flowers, by Rupi Kaur, is perfect for anyone who has recently broken up with someone who did not nurture your soul sufficiently to sprout. For all shattered spirits in search of a safe haven, this poetic collection is nectar to busy little injured bees. In a garden where precious buds are in dire need of water, The Sun and Her Flowers reflects souls who rise above the barriers that hinder their growth. It is a passage between decay, awakening, and healing. Rupi Kaur’s most recent anthology is “the recipe of life.”

Rupi Kaur vividly plays with paradoxical symbols. The book cover contained sunflowers, typically resembling joy and vitality, and its content depicts themes of woe and melancholy. It symbolises the process of regaining light after prolonged, somber nights of despair. Even vibrant and cheerful beings, like sunflowers, can wilt and suffer with scarce nurturing.

The Sun and Her Flowers encompasses an enticing table of contents, akin to a flower cycle: wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. Each category portrays poems with illustrations done by Kaur herself, relevant to their respective themes.

One of the many reasons to love this book  is its capacity to truly mend and heal broken hearts stuck in despair and darkness. This anthology provides light at the end of the readers’ tunnels, and give hope to souls who consider themselves unfortunate.

If you read her first book (Milk and Honey), it's still in Rupi's signature style, but she manages to cover similar topics from a different standpoint. It kind of feels as though her books are maturing with her, as this one handles the issues from Milk and Honey in a more mature, learned tone.

Even if some of the poems in the sun and her flowers seem like recycled oldies-but-goodies, there's no denying that Kaur is brilliant. She's not afraid to speak her mind and talk about taboo subjects, such as female infanticide, immigration, rape, abuse, mental illness and sexual empowerment. Her poems contain difficult subject matter and can be hard to read, but they all hold a unique power that can and will speak to many people around the world. This leaves readers feeling as though Kaur has gone deep into the depths of their personal lives and put all the heart-wrenching feelings they once felt down on paper.

Reading The Sun and Her Flowers will honestly change your life and your relationships with yourself and others. I am truly looking forward to reading her future publications. Definitely recommend that ALL young women read this, if for no other reason than to see that we are all sharing very similar struggles in love and life in general.

Ratings : 5/5 

Relationships : Casualty of Circumstances & Timing

I’ve realized that some relationships are transient but nonetheless beautiful and enriching for all that.

It’s been said that a relationship is a lot like a painting. I tend to disagree. Well yes, a relationship does indeed begin much like a painting, with a blank canvas and infinity ahead. And relationships do need solid foundations, much like the background layers on a watercolor. But beyond that, how similar are the two, really? For any true work of art, the artist works his way across the canvas with a definite goal in mind. Relationships, on the other hand, aren’t entirely constrained by the participants. They sometimes flourish and more often flounder, occasionally doing both.

Circumstance and timing come together in a thousand different ways to encourage a burgeoning new relationship, or to whittle away at the bedrock of a marriage, or sometimes even place prop upon prop to buttress the sweet beginnings, only to wash away the entire romance in a flood of bad luck and incompatibility. A relationship therefore, is a living, breathing entity with a mind of its own. All we can really do is ride upon its back and hope for the best. You might place a bullet in its chest and bury the beast, leaving it for dead. And indeed you may have killed it, but you are just as likely to see it gamboling back to you as alive as on the day you first saw it birthed into being. Both a blessing and a curse, a relationship is what you make of it. You might find your paths diverging in the woodlands, and it may be time to shed a tear and whisper a goodbye. Other times, you collide with each other as you turn a corner and all you can do is brush yourself off, take a deep breath and say ‘Hello'.

There will be a small corner of your heart, somewhere between those veins and arteries, which will belong to him/her forever.

Many breakups, especially those from long-term relationships, involve walking away from a good thing. There are still many positive aspects to a relationship that ends, it's just that those good things start being outweighed by the bad things. Or even harder, a realization that there are bad things to come, and so you make a pre-emptive breakup. One of the hardest parts of breaking up is remembering this ratio, the underlying logic of the decision, and not fixating on all the wonderful parts of the person you're walking away from.

And finally, it's difficult to recalibrate your sense of self as someone who "doesn't have a partner." Your identity becomes tied up in the partnership. You train yourself to think of their happiness along with yours, to plan events that you'll both enjoy, to think what they'd say before you make decisions. The process of unlearning that is arduous, and becomes a constant reminder of what you've lost. Similar to the reimagining of the future, this pops up in all sorts of small ways that hurt each time, as you slowly break the habit. Ultimately, though, this is the reason you broke up in the first place: because you wanted to be an individual more than you wanted to be a pair. It just takes awhile for your identity to catch up. And the worst part is, you don’t even know how to put a closure and lift your belief off those beautiful empty promises. Because putting a closure with this person feels like cutting away this large chunk of your heart! Is there even a way to time travel and undo all the memories that have crowded your heart?

The positives : Break ups are like second chances to live your life. After the pain, you will feel a sense of waking up from a deep sleep. You will get time to work on yourself. Either you pull yourself out of the storm or let it carry you to another shore.

Remember...

• True love empowers you. It does not choke you.
• We may be important to people but not all the time. The biggest challenge is to accept this. LET GO.
• Life is not fair. It never was and will never be. We just have to live it anyway making the best of ourselves and giving our best to others and being good and truthful.

There is a universal truth we all have to face, whether we want to or not, everything eventually ends. As much as I've looked forward to this day, I've always disliked endings. Last day of summer, the final chapter of a great book, parting ways with a close friend. But endings are inevitable. Leaves fall, you close the book. You say goodbye. So, say goodbye to everything that was familiar, everything that was comfortable. Move on.

People will leave you. Often without any reason.
One moment it will be so real but will soon be a distant memory.
Memories will fade.
Life will go on. Without apologizing.

Dark Side Of Love

Love is beautiful and pure. But just like the moon, it has its own phases: the bright and the dark. 

The dark side?

1. You bare your soul to that person. Tell him/her all your secrets, show them all your sides, bring out the child in you. You lower your guards and make yourself vulnerable to that one person.
2. You invest so much time and energy in planning your future together, come up with nicknames, cute words and build your happy world.
3. You forget your self respect, your self esteem and your own importance simply because the other person is important to you too.
4. Memories cannot be blocked.
5. Cant eat. Cant sleep. Cant study.
6. You cannot believe it's over when you recall all those promises that were made to you. A part of you will always tell you that maybe all of this is a dream. Only it isn't.
7. You are emotionally handicapped and romantically paralyzed for an indefinite period of time. You cannot trust anyone again. Love scares you for a while. You build walls of iron around you.
8. It doesn't fade away when you want it to. The more you try to forget what happened, the more you will get reminded of it.
9. The constant dilemma- Should I move on or should I hold on?
10. Wet pillows. Wet bedsheet. Wet notebooks. Some people can't even cry.
11. Basically, you have to die in order to move on.
12. You start to fear falling in love again.

And let me tell you, the quantity of youth succumbing to these negatives is huge. Only a few, who get mature or sensible enough to understand, respect and move on, flourish. But why such negatives win over the positives of being in love? Remember, to remember the good :)

Book Review #95 : Then The Door Bell Rang

Book Title: Then The Door Bell Rang 

Author: Capri Jalota 

Number of pages : 395 

Publisher: Leadstart Publishing Private Limited 

ISBN-10: 9352019504 

ISBN-13: 978-9352019502 

The book consists of 395 pages which is quite a good number to intimidate someone. But the start had the magic, the author Capri Jalota has made sure the first 100 pages to be so captivating that the reader is anxious to read the rest.

A book, simply based on one’s life itself is something that the reader can treat themselves with as a break from thrillers, romance and everything else.

The intriguing plot with twists and turns at unexpected time helps the readers to hook up with the book till the end. The first person narration helps us to go with the flow of the book. The characters are sketched well. The usage of simple words and lucid language helps to maintain coherence throughout the book.

The title of the book 'Then the door bell rang' is a little long, but indicates the reader that the story could be a mystery. The book cover could have been better and relatable to the plot.

The book revolves around the story of the protagonist Jane who was deprived of love and care from her early days. Though her parents cared for her, they failed to show it to their daughter which brought out serious depression in the lil girl. And later when destiny separates her from her loved one, she was left with no hope to live.

What works for TTDBR is the way the author brings in new characters, keeping the flow of the book alive. From the deceased Uday, Jane’s husband, whose personal diary brings with it, a fair share of worms and heart aches, to his doting parents and her relationship with them which only grows after Uday’s death, to the surprising paramour Rahul, who is but a fleeting presence, a phantom whom Jane chases for the first half of the week to other characters, nurses, best friends, a supportive boss, strangers who become more than family and so on.

And yet what prevails is a sense of death throughout. It almost seems that death itself is the protagonist who is taking the plot forward. Mortality pervades through the novel, as each death takes the protagonist further in her search (for answers, truth, life?) across borders.

Time travel with the protagonist from the beginning till the end is a mixture of emotions, relationships and feelings. Though the content mostly deals with human emotions, the presentation was good with suspense as a main ingredient.

This book is a very good example of fiction where the author has weaved the story of a lady and different phases of her life which she has gone through. Story line is full of ups and down which keeps you excited and concerned till the end. Few scenes are created very dramatic. You flow with the book and started sharing joy and sorrow with the characters, which is the actual beauty of the book.

What I liked in the book:
1. The writing style is very lucid and uncomplicated.
2. Loved the way Uday proposes to Jane, the poetry was very good,
3. There were many beautiful lines and quotes in the narrative. There were some really good quotes that I would keep re reading.

What I didn’t like:
I feel that the story could have been tighter and crisp, needs to be more stringent editing. Too much description and many events that did not help in the progress of the story very much. I couldn’t understand why one chapter was Jane’s diary entry when the whole story was told in Jane’s POV in first person.

Overall Verdict - This book is about love, loss, pain, fears, remorse, and friendship. The book begins with Jane standing in her balcony, contemplating her life. I loved reading Jane’s journey full of more downs than ups. It is filled with so many unfortunate incidents that is too much to bear for any individual. My heart went out for her each time. I would recommend this book to those who would like to read realistic life stories filled with highs and lows.

Rating : 4/5

Depression Talk - Symptoms, How To Deal With It

Depression can drain your energy, hope and drive, making it hard to do what you need to feel better. But while overcoming depression isn't easy, there are plenty of little things that can help you on the way to recovery.

Many people make the fundamental mistake of presuming that depression is sadness, but the two are entirely different things. While sadness is a normal human emotion that comes and goes and is usually caused by certain events, depression is a constant feeling of sadness and hopelessness.

It is normal to experience feelings of sadness and dispair in response to adverse life events. Such events could include loss, major life changes, stress, or disappointment. In most cases, the sad feelings resolve as you come to terms with the changes in your life. In situations such as bereavement, these feelings may persist for months and return at significant times.

You can’t just will yourself to “snap out of it,” but you do have more control than you realize—even if your depression is severe and stubbornly persistent. The key is to start small and build from there. Feeling better takes time, but you can get there by making positive choices for yourself each day.

Continue on for days or even weeks and months at a time. 

* Feeling sad, lost, empty, hopeless, or just generally unhappy 
* Losing interest in or enjoyment from activities you previously enjoyed 
*Changes in sleeping habits ranging from insomnia to spending most of your time sleeping or in bed 
*Exhaustion and a lack of energy that makes even simple everyday task If you've wondered if you could have depression or if the feelings you've been experiencing are normal there are some common signs and symptoms to be aware of that can help you decide if you should seek professional treatment. 

These symptoms generally occur for most of your day without letting up and can seem difficult..

*Anxiety, agitation, and restlessness 
*Slowed thinking or difficulty paying attention 
*Feeling worthless or not good enough (often in conjunction with overthinking past mistakes or failures) 
*Feeling guilty about things that aren't your fault or are out of your control 
*Difficulty making decisions or remembering things 
*Frequent or recurrent thoughts of death or suicide 
*Physical issues, such as headaches or muscle pain 

If you’ve taken self-help steps and made positive lifestyle changes and still find your depression getting worse, seek professional help. Needing additional help doesn’t mean you’re weak. Sometimes the negative thinking in depression can make you feel like you’re a lost cause, but depression can be treated and you can feel better! There’s always hope.