Matt Joseph Diaz

I'm 23 years old, I don’t want children, and every elder who discovers this feels compelled to tell me how wrong I am about my own feelings.

Between all of the political arguments and videos of dogs being excited to see their owners, I’m noticing a trend appearing all over my timeline — seemingly increasing every week. A lot of fucking people are getting engaged.

Dear anti-feminist men, 

I’m writing to you because I want to have a discussion.

For a long time, passing privilege made me feel like I didn’t deserve to call myself latino.

Once I became a body positive writer and speaker, I told the story of that night on podcasts and in interviews as an example of the sort of reaction I was afraid of prior to my video about my excess skin going viral. Every time, the interviewer made a comment about how Dana was “the ugly one,” not me. And every time, I told them I didn’t want her to be vilified or insulted.

How embarrassing is this story, and is the value in it (be it entertainment, educational, or both) enough that the benefit in sharing it outweighs how mortifying it is?

It's time for #MondayMotivation with Matt Joseph Diaz. Today Matt is talking about vulnerability. 

“She just grabbed the bacon off my plate! She didn’t ask, she didn’t even say anything, she just assumed it was OK and took it!”
“It’s just bacon —”
“It’s NOT about the Bacon, Donald. It’s about the principle.”

There’s a big difference between talking and communicating. One exists to relay messages, ideas, and feelings: the building blocks of being a person. The other exists to fill time. I’m by no means here to tell people how to approach their relationships — I just don’t want people to feel pressured to fill silences with noise out of the fear their partners won’t think they care.

When you go through a difficult, traumatic, or transformative experience, there’s a part of you that wants to hold onto the person you were before it happened. You try so hard to hold onto a simpler time–a time when things weren’t so scary. But you can’t.