“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?” — Virginia Woolf, from Selected Essays (via thesecretsits)
May, 20 
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favorite quote virginia woolf i definitely need to read more of her stuff bc i love her tw
Are we special or just weird?: My takeaway from The Office and its final season is something I’m...
My takeaway from The Office and its final season is something I’m going to try to remember every day for the rest of my natural life and I think it’s really cool that a televised situation comedy that admittedly saw a visible dip in its consistency during its latter years can do that for me
Essentially what I feel the show is trying to tell us is that we really need to consider what our definition of personal success is and maybe, from time to time, give ourselves a break and give credit to all the different ways we quantify success
If you weren’t on board with the show this past year, I’ll catch you up - the employees of Dunder Mifflin have been made aware that the documentarians filming their lives have got all the footage they need and will be wrapping up shortly and now they must face a very important question: what happens when the show about your life ends? What do you do after?
For Jim and Pam, two characters who essentially hit their emotional zenith half a decade ago, this means wondering how much of their lives are sitcom kitsch - in the original British sitcom, Jim’s counterpart, Tim, does in fact manage to get the girl, but the (much shorter) series is still very honest about his situation - he still hates his job, he still thinks he was meant for something better, and he still believes he will not attain that something. For Jim, the show essentially posits the idea that somewhere along the line (arguably the third season finale), he had to choose between his career and the love of his life, and it now starts toying with the possibility that maybe, just maybe, he made the wrong choice.
For the Halperts, and everyone else at Dunder Mifflin, by the show’s finale, their arcs are about realizing they are cyclical creatures, some in good ways like Jim, Dwight and Andy, or in the case of characters like Kelly and Ryan, bad ways, repeating the same mistakes out of sheer self-obsession (something Michael Scott manages to break free from doing to obtain essentially the only thing he’s ever really wanted - a family)
I guess what I’m getting at (and by my argument/interpretation, the show itself is getting at as well) is that we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves with this idea of “running in place”, that personal definitions of success are allowed to be fluid and maybe even move in a sine wave pattern, and that the people we love and the people we see every single day factor very much into whether or not our situation can be seen as ideal
That’s important, probably
