#12 Making a list of things that you look forward to in life.

I know what it's like to feel hopeless, to think that the whole world would be better off without you. But you know what? That's not true. Your heart is beating and you are breathing and you are in this world for a reason. So grab a pen and a piece of paper and make a list of things you've always wanted to do in life, save it and look at it every couple of months and try to make these things come true.

Here's my list:

#1 Watch breakfast at Tiffany's for the 100th time. Know all the dialogues by heart.

#2 Choose the perfect wedding dress. Have a really crazy, unconventional wedding on the beach full of surprises and absurdities and polaroid pictures because that's the way I like it.

#3 Travel to Peru someday.

#4 Stay an atheist for the rest of my life.

#5 Go to lots of Renaissance exhibitions and fill my apartment with these beautiful paintings.

#6 And also with fairy lights.

#7 Collect books throughout my life so I can have my own private library when I'm older.

#8 Buy a typewriter.

#9 Write a book.

#10 Buy an apartment in Paris. 

#11 Plant roses in my garden.

#12 Keep looking forward to that first refreshing glass of ice cold water in summer.

#13 Make pancakes for my love on a rainy Sunday morning while listening to Sunday Morning by Maroon 5 / Banana Pancakes by Jack Johnson.

#14 Learn a new language.

#15 Get a new tattoo.

#16 Overcome my depression.

#17 Go to festivals.

#18 Go to San Francisco.

#19 Dye my hair an absurd color.

#20 Make this my regular breakfast.

#21 Buy a polaroid camera. Take lots of pictures.

#22 Watch my scars heal.

#23 Lose a lot of weight just to know what it feels like to be superskinny. Then gain it all back.

#24 Try drugs at some point in my life. Not try them again.

#25 Buy a really old copy of a book I love.

#26 Teach my children how to bake cookies.

#27 Visit the clinic I've been to. Tell the patients that it gets better. 

#28 Buy a rabbit for my children and name it Snow White. (Yeah, I'm not making any compromises on that. :-))

#29 Paint something. Hang it on my wall.

#30 Visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando.

And always, always remember this:

#11 Capturing the instant.

Everyone of us takes pictures from time to time, but capturing the instant is something completely different. It means you carry around your camera with you all the time and take pictures of the most valuable moments you come across; capture them because that's the only way that they can last forever. Infinity is a long, long time, but through the lense of a camera it seems almost tangible.

And isn't it wonderful and reassuring to know that years from now, you will look at these pictures and be completely caught up in the moment?

Pictures can take you back to a certain moment, a certain feeling, a certain time of your life and make you re-live it all over again. Photographs are the closest we'll ever get to the invention of time machines. They are way more than ink on paper or pixels on your computer screen, photographs are memories. And the best thing about them is that no matter how much the people in the picture have changed, when you look at it, they are still the same and it's such a beautiful, bittersweet nostalgia to look at something that does no longer exist.
As beautiful and bittersweet as life itself.

#10 That little smile after a first kiss.

Most of us know that feeling and those of you who don't, can easily imagine it. It's the greatest feeling ever. It feels magical, invincible, as though nothing but the moment mattered. As though the world around you stopped turning, as though life stopped altogether and the only people alive are you and the person you are closest with in that very moment. Eye to eye, thigh to thigh, lips to lips. And you feel perfectly fine. You feel as though you could hug the whole world and stay in that moment forever. And the best thing is: you know that the other one feels the same.

If this isn't something that makes life worth living, then I don't know what is.