Matt Joseph Diaz

Welcome to Monday Motivation with Matt Joseph Diaz! Every Monday (obviously), I'll be serving up some motivation to get you through the week.

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.

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.

Instead of being allowed to exist as fully complex and sexual human beings, they’re relegated to being a tag in pornography. They’re seen as a guilty pleasure among those with “abnormal” sexual appetites, something to be viewed sexually in spite of their comparison to what we consider "the norm."

I promise you, people living with depression are acutely aware that things probably aren’t as bad as they could be.

As much as you want to believe people are all the same, we don’t have the luxury of being seen as the “default” in the same way white, straight, cis people often are. We don’t have the luxury of dismissing our painful history and systemic issues for the sake of everyone getting along, because we’re still in the middle of them.

This week Matt reminds us how amazing we are.

After spending a long time in nature, it stopped being intimidating. It started being calm. The quiet wasn't something I feared anymore. It was something I wanted to cherish.

">

"The universe is a big, dark, cold empty space — but you're not any of that. You're a light."