#trust that growth?

[verdiris]

Here to provide your regularly scheduled MB fanart 😌🤝😌

[slfcare]

it's time to add yourself to the list of

people you like

people you believe in

people who believe in you

people who want what's best for you

people you can trust.

it's time to see yourself as a person to begin with.

[thetypewriterdaily]

sometimes the changes you go through happen quietly and slowly beneath the surface. it’s easy to miss these small shifts as they feel insignificant in the moment, but they add up over time and become the foundation of who you’re becoming. 🌱🌿🌳💚

[iambrillyant]

“sometimes you need to repot yourself in a better environment so you can finally grow. just like a plant outgrows its pot, your soul craves a space where it can stretch and thrive. breathing new air, shedding old habits, trusting the changes, finding the right room to bloom.”

— billy chapata

[ronkeyroo]

" = 👁 ʙᴜʟʟꜱᴇʏᴇ ˊˎ - ⌖ ▹

[wonilita]

౨ৎ How to start over

inspired by pinterest | ♡

ʚɞ get rid of toxic people and things like environments or apps.

ʚɞ clean your room

ʚɞ throw away things that you dont need / that are old

ʚɞ stay hydrated

ʚɞ always be positive

ʚɞ delete old convos with people you dont speak to anymore

ʚɞ find new interests like dancing or journaling

ʚɞ be nice and kind to everyone

ʚɞ learn to love yourself

[sk-lumen]

Lately I am learning more and more to trust in the universe, in divine timing, that there's a purpose for everything. Trust that you are held, you are protected, you are divinely guided, and that it's safe to release control. Surrender. Everything is unfolding exactly as it should be. It's not contingent on you controlling everything. It's contingent on you letting go and trusting.

[mostly-natm]

Lore keeps a baby (out of spite).

[adviceformefromme]

💖TRUSTING YOUR INNER VOICE - 3 MONTHS UNTIL 2025 - GLOW UP SERIES [WEEK 12] - 💖

Your life can drastically change in three months, and this is coming from someone who started last October unexpectedly in hospital everyday for three weeks, to then leave London and move back home and share a ROOM with my mom due to space issues and by the end of the whirlwind I finally got to move into my dream ocean view apartment in Europe. ALL WITHIN 3 MONTHS. How did I transform my life? What remained consistent was my inner voice, leading me towards faith and not fear. Being able to hear God’s direction and having the courage to take a leap into the unknown at each twist and turn. So no matter where you start this October, trust and know that miracles are possible, and if you stay true to where you are being guided you will end up exactly where you need to be. 

UNDERSTANDING WHAT VOICE IS GUIDING YOU…

Are you leaning into fear or into faith? Each day, are you sticking to what you know or are you taking risks? Are you using your voice to speak up when you’re usually quiet? Are you still remaining true to your vision despite not seeing the results in the 3D? Are you trying to control situations feeling anxious and stuck, or are you remaining trusting and faithful to the visions God has placed in your heart? If you find fear is guiding your life, your TRANSFORMATION is going to a struggle, there is going to be friction, and this is where you need to get out of your own way. God wants to move you somewhere you’ve never been, you’ve been doing your vision boards, affirmations, praying, reading, trying your very best to LEVEL-TF-UP, and STILL feeling stuck…and this is because your inner voice is holding you hostage to what you’ve known, to the old version of you, the expired version. These next 12 weeks are for tuning into a different frequency, to locking into God’s direction and here are the steps…

1] You need to meditate to create space in your mind to hear the voice that wants to lead you to your highest potential. It’s always there waiting for you to listen, in order to HEAR you need SPACE.. and to get space you need to meditate. The aim is 20 mins per day, if you’re already comfortable with this aim for 1 hour. I know this might sound like a scary amount of time to sit in silence but think how easily you can spend 20 mins on social media doom scrolling…Do you want to GLOW-UP or do you want to stay stuck? This is what you need to ask yourself daily…But please walk before you run, here is 10 mins meditation that is simple and transformative and will 100% allow you mental space so you can slowly throughout the day start to hear your inner voice - God speaking to you. 

2] Tune out of negativity (the news, low vibration music, gossip, scrolling through peoples highlight reel) and tune into high vibes… Listening to high vibes is going to move you energetically into a new space. There will be more peace and positivity. The high vibes include, morning motivation on YouTube find one that empowers you, cleansing your social media accounts of anything negative or deleting it full stop while you’re on your glow up journey. Listening to binaural beats, gospel, or anything that has empowering lyrics that lift you up. 

3] Once you have removed the low vibes you also want SILENT vibes, this means going for a walk without your phone. Waking up and not checking your phone for 1 hour, having as many moments of silence as possible, and this is when you will start to hear. You might hear negativity in your mind at first, it might be overbearing, the voice might be telling you how stupid you are, how pathetic you are, but PERSEVERE. Get curious on why you have this negativity in your mind, journal on what was coming up for you, you want to clear out the negativity so you can hear the inner wisdom that is waiting to flow in. 

4] PRAY FOR GUIDANCE. If you don’t have the direction, you are wanting to transform your life and don’t know what the next steps are, I promise you the moment you start praying and asking is the moment you receive the answers. It will come in the form of conversations, YouTube content creators will appear in your feed, you will have thoughts, dreams, a book will fall of a shelf, there will be direction from above. God wants to help you, you just have to ask and listen clearly for the answers. They will appear.

A little story time of my 3 month transformation from last October - December and how I completely transformed my life in that time…

Until next week, stay in your faith, your journal and remain hopeful that this time things are going to be different. Your transformation is in progress.

[euphorictruths]

Jake Foreman

[a-path-by-the-moon]

[everyday-is-uncle-day]

two very different flinches

[the-healing-mindset]

No, you're not wrong.

You're not wrong for wanting a better life for yourself.

You're not wrong for believing that you are deserving of better.

You're not wrong for making those necessary changes in your life.

You're not wrong for changing the way you show up to life.

You're not wrong for distancing yourself from those things that harm you.

You're not wrong.

[thetypewriterdaily]

it hurts to let go of what you’ve grown, of what you’ve known. when you’ve nurtured something—whether it’s a relationship, a dream, or even a belief—there’s a natural attachment to it. letting go often feels like a loss, stirring up fear and uncertainty about the future. it’s easy to get stuck in that fear, thinking that clinging to the past will keep you safe. but try not to resist this change. let go, even when it feels uncomfortable, because holding on too tightly only stifles what’s meant to bloom next 🍂🧸🍄‍🟫🌅🫧

[thepeacefulgarden]

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)