souls.

Over the past few years, I have been struggling to find happiness and only recently have I been able to say I am figuring out what exactly true happiness is. One thing that has been helping me find that is getting to know people for the souls that are inside of them. Unfortunately, I have noticed that a good portion of people I meet never make it past their judgments of a person's outward appearance and they miss out on truly getting to know people. People are judged for being too fat, too skinny, too ugly, too pretty, and the list could go on and on. My question is, what person in the world can match our current ideals of beauty and perfection based on appearance? There are not many, and even if there were I have learned that someone can be nearly perfect on the outside, but if their soul is tainted with judgments and preconceived notions then all that "perfection" disappears instantly.

So many people in the world are lonely, and I truly believe it is because of the fact that a lot of people decide if they are going to talk to someone or not depending on how they look. People are not as genuine anymore because being genuine is hard when you are judged before you even open your mouth. I always wonder how different the world would be if this was not the case. I like to believe that if we could see people's souls before making judgments there would be a lot less lonely, unhappy people in the world.

Stop caring about what people look like, how old they are, or where they have or have not been and let their souls speak. You will never have any idea what someone is thinking or why they do the things they do until you ask questions. Figure out what makes their soul happy, sad, motivated, and discouraged, because otherwise you might miss out on a potentially beautiful soul because all you could see was their lack of physical beauty. I promise if you weed out the people who only care about outward appearances and get to know the souls inside, you will start to find genuine people.

"Souls recognize each other by the way they feel,

not the way they look."

real talk.

This year, I am focusing on getting to know myself. I am figuring out what makes me happy, sad, excited, and frustrated. I have never focused on myself this way in my whole life but the more I do, the more happiness I seem to find. One of the big things I have been working on is expressing myself fully without giving a damn about what anyone thinks of me. Part of this expression involves talking to people. Getting to know others' personalities helps me get to know mine, but something sickening I have noticed is that people do not know how to talk anymore.

Technology has allowed us to "connect" with people all over the place but the sad thing is, we are not actually connecting with anyone. Since we can see our friends' statuses and tweets, I think we come to the conclusion that we know what is going on in their lives. We come to the conclusion that we know them. A Facebook status or a tweet on Twitter tells nothing about what makes a person laugh, what makes a person cry, what makes a person light up with passion.

"I hate small talk. I don't want to know "what's up." I want to hear about your childhood, your favorite scents, what types of music you like, and your religious views. I want to know what keeps you up at night, how much certain things mean to you, your insecurities, and your fears."

When I was in high school, I remember having conversations with my friends for hours. Conversations that could go on forever if we had the time. I felt like I knew my friends better than I knew myself simply from what we talked about. Sometimes the conversations were light and made us laugh, while other times the conversations got serious and we talked about the deeper parts of ourselves that we would not share with just anyone. During these times no one was scrolling through social media, pretending to listen. We actually looked at each other, really listened to each other, and truly connected with each other. I did not realize at the time that finding someone who is interested to know what makes me, me, would be a rarity in the future.

The sad truth is, people do not know how to truly get to know someone anymore. Long conversations that I used to have with people have now been replaced with worthless small talk, over and over again. People bring up accomplishments that are shared on social media, but do not bother to dig deeper and ask about the things that are not posted on the internet. Even though we can talk to people with the push of a button, we are missing out a lot on face-to-face interactions. We are missing out on actually talking to people.

"Our generation has lost the value of conversation. Sadly, small talk is the new deep."

So next time you talk to someone, put down your phone. Look them in the face, and listen. You never know what demons they are fighting that could easily be solved if someone would just listen. Finding someone who knows how to carry on a conversation and knows the value of actually talking should not be a rarity. The world would not feel so lonely if we could go back to getting to know people without assuming that everything there is to know about them is on social media.