Matt Joseph Diaz

This week: Find what fuels you, and don't beat yourself up if what's fueling you right now is "surviving."

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.

Being a "nice guy" has become an excuse for unacceptable behavior in romantic relationships. Matt says enough is enough. It's time for honesty to take the place of kindness with ulterior motives.

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.

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.

We really want people to like us. It’s just human nature. You may say you don’t care if people like you, and on the surface, that may be true. However, there’s a part of you that understands that openly not caring about being liked immediately makes you more likable — self-assurance is an attractive quality to have.

First of all, befriending someone and becoming their confidant while secretly yearning to get in their pants isn’t just fucking creepy, it’s manipulative. The girls I “befriended” opened up to and trusted me because I was patient, sensitive, and seemed to have their best interests in mind.

I know that the world can seem like a scary and terrible place, where it feels like the threat of judgment and exclusion is constantly looming. That’s because it is; but there’s so much more love and kindness on this planet than evil and suffering. There is generosity and spirit in every human being that runs so deep, you’ll find it hard not to fall a little bit in love with each and every one of them.

I’m uprooting my life to try something new and different in another city in another state. In the time leading up to the actual move, I’ve found that a bunch of weird fucking shit (for lack of a better term) has showed up out of nowhere.

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