“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one… just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

I’ve been reading a lot of controversy surrounding Gala Darling of late. Personally, I love her attitude on life and her fashion blogging. I love reading her blog and I’m excited whenever there’s an update. She has similar beliefs to me, and I love that she champions magic making and manifesting. I feel that she’s really doing what she was meant to do, and with some people, it really shows that they’re on the right life path and I find it very inspiring. Ellie Goulding is another person that I feel that way about recently. You can tell that she’s doing what she loves and she radiates happiness. It’s a little hard to explain what I mean, but I feel that people who are on their right life path just radiate it, and I think it’s really important for those people to put their work out into the world.

Unfortunately, with anyone like that, you get controversy, or people trying to tear them down. Gala, in particular, reminds me of the Great Gatsby. There’s a few scenes in the Great Gatsby at his large parties that he throws, where people are suspicious of him, even though he treats everyone well and just tries to be the best that he can be;

“It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too–didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?'”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 3

I feel that Gala’s haters are like these party guests. The thing is, Gatsby is wonderful. He replaces a woman’s torn dress at one of his parties, and is gossiped about maliciously in return. He lets people assume he’s an Oxford man, but really, he went to Oggsford. It’s not that it’s any crime that he went to Oggsford, or that he lets people assume it was Oxford. In the grand scheme of who he is, and what he then does with his life, that counts. He is good to people, and he is inspiring;

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 3

Gala inspires us because she does believe in herself, like we would like to believe in ourselves. Her ‘self-love’ has been called narcissistic, but I expect it’s by people that don’t love themselves half as much. She does a damn good job of encouraging her readers to love and respect themselves, and I can’t see anything wrong with that.

Gatsy, like Gala, is a self made man, and the book details a schedule he devised as a teenager to better himself, including reading and exercising to improve himself daily. This reminds me of Gala’s lists and plans for self improvement. I admire anyone that gets off their whining ass and actually makes things happen!

“His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people–his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God… and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6

It is later revealed in the novel that Gatsby, as well as stretching the truth about aspects of his life and changing his name, might have gotten to where he is through illicit means. Did I mention already that he did this all for love? He may have shed some half truths along the way, and may have had a criminal past, but he never deserved the pain he was handed in the book. People who knew Gatsby were determined to take him apart, bit by bit to see how he worked and what he was made of, instead of just appreciating who he was, and the spirit, determination and love that held me high.

So Gatsby and Gala changed their names, and reworked themselves into the kind of people they wanted to be. I can’t fault that. If your intentions are good, and you care for others, then I believe you can be excused an awful lot. You may call me naive, but I’m seeing the bigger picture, with proportions that I believe fit. I’m inspired by the spirit and hard work of both Gala and Gatsby, and I empathize with their quests.

“He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 8

“And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out Daisy’s light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 9

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning– So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 9

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams–not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5

Trust fund or not, honesty or not, or what ‘foul dust floated in the wake of (her) dreams’ – I really don’t think it matters. Sometimes I wonder what became of Amy, in the same way that I wonder rather personally what became of Susan. Perhaps it’s an evolution. Oxford, Oggsford. Striving to be the best that you can be, and helping others is what matters. Believe in your own green light, whatever that may be, and don’t stop striving for it.