oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too.
one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.
“The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.” (mikko harvey)
…as soon as we become accustomed to the silent presence of a thing, it gets broken or disappears. My ties to the people around me were also marked by those two modes of impermanence: breaking up or disappearing. Valeria Luiselli, from Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)
Hi there 👋 I hope your well and in good health and spirits 💗 i am looking for some advice. Thank you for sharing your advice and being vulnerable on your blog. I love your blog 💗 i have been currently been going through a situation at home and feel as if I'm slowly losing myself. I don't want to become resentful of the people in my situation but I feel as if I haven't been given room to grieve and feel. That I'm being forced to grow up to quickly. I know I'm not an anomaly but it feels burdensome and angering and frustrating to know that my friends will never know not understand how I feel. How do I try to rid myself of some of these emotions like shame specifically even though there's nothing to really be shameful of and how do I feel better? It all feels like too much advice to ask for but I would love to know what you think ❣
Answer:
hi 💗 that’s a really difficult situation, and i’m so sorry that you’re going through that right now. you deserve all the time and space you need to grieve and to feel. there is no timeline on grief. it’s not a linear thing. so please know that, first and foremost. you have nothing to be ashamed of. i’ve been there. my response is a little long so more under the cut:
the especially difficult thing about this kind of situation is that while you can learn how to express your needs and set boundaries, it doesn’t necessarily help if the people around you are unwilling to or incapable of meeting your needs and respecting your boundaries. even more painful when those people are the ones who are supposed to protect you, and not the other way around. i’ve been in this kind of situation as a child with no control over my home life, taking care of/protecting my parents instead of the other way around. i’ve been in this situation as an adult with no control over my daily environment, told that my grief was unnecessary, overdramatic, bringing everyone down. i’ll never forget the kind of bitterness that simmered under my skin every single moment after that when i had to bite my tongue, the powerlessness and resentment that i felt every day that i had to wake up and exist in an environment where i was expected to pretend that everything was fine. the thing about these kinds of situations is that it’s very difficult to heal while it’s happening because it’s still happening!! the situation is ongoing!! you’ve had no distance or time away to process your experiences or feelings in a safe way. so please be gentle with yourself!! it has taken me time to process and come to terms with those kinds of experiences. it’s very understandable that you might be feeling some resentment against adults in your life who are expecting you to grow up too fast, who aren’t giving you time or space to heal, even against friends when it feels like they’re not capable of understanding the depth or complexity of your feelings/grief and you feel all the more alone. but it’s difficult to know what goes in the lives and hearts of others. when i’m in a situation like this now, i try to remember that most people are just doing the best they can with the tools that they currently have. i try to be patient with them, as well as with myself when i’m feeling resentment begin to build up. i try to remember that the best i can do is to express what i’m feeling to them when it’s safe for me to do so, and that i cannot control how they react. i can only control how i react, or whether i choose to react at all. i try to remember that i’ve developed tools at a younger age that my parents never had the resources or opportunities to develop. when i communicate, i try to do so with the intention of listening and being heard. never with the intention of trying to hurt. when people say or do hurtful things, i try to remember that they’re probably lashing out from their own pain, and it’s usually not personal. the shame that i was given for my grief was never mine to hold onto but i accepted it because i didn’t know any better. if someone tries to give you shame for yours, try to remember that it doesn’t belong to you. there is nothing shameful about being human and experiencing human emotions and feelings. i wish i could tell you how to feel better!! the most i can do is to ask you to be patient and gentle with yourself. you seem like such a kind person—try to hold the same understanding and acceptance for yourself and your feelings that you would for a friend in a tough situation. there’s only so much you can control in a situation like this. it’s ok to feel all the things you’re feeling while you’re still in it. it won’t last forever. sending you all my love. ♡
blah blah blah…all of these personal questions…what i wanna know is what you put as your name on u-quizzes
@ everyone who puts their real names, I just want you to know that you guys are a faeries wet dream and I don’t know how you survived this long, stay away from mushroom circles and pop up markets
#k #first letter of my name #that’s amount of energy and commitment i can muster #definitely have a story about the time my best friend and i tried to give fake names to a creepy guy. until she cracked #we were like 12 though so
ON EVERYDAY - 1. “Supper” by Garrison Keillor // (2)// (3) // 4. Bonfire Opera: Poems by Danusha Laméris (2020) // (5) // 6. “The Orange” by Wendy Cope // 8. “A Good Day” by Kait Rokowski // 9.Midnight Chicken & Other Recipes Worth Living For by Ella Risbridger (2019) //
…because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones. Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
#ocean vuong #on earth we're briefly gorgeous #words#lit #where does such tenderness come from
“I think ghosts are memory—memory haunts bodies, haunts places, haunts the narratives that hold our minor and miraculous lives together. Ghosts are that which return and return and return. The body has its own hauntings, too: phantom limb sensation, organ transfer memory, the traumatic self. And others.”
— Shastra Deo, interviewed by Sumudu Samarawickrama in Liminal Mag
“Try to remember it always, […] Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
Jhumpa Lahiri, from The Namesake
“Strangely together to our doom we go.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from Pietà
A Summer’s Tale (1996) dir. Éric Rohmer
“Here’s the truth: friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, “bonus” relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and, sometimes, children. […]
This was a snapshot of what my own deep friendships could lead to: transformation. I saw, on that afternoon, that it’s possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship. That a friend can take you out of the boxes you’ve made for yourself and burn them up. This kind of friendship is not a frivolous connection, a supplementary relationship to the ones we’re taught and told are primary – spouses, children, parents. It is love. […]
Support, salvation, transformation, life: this is what women give to one another when they are true friends, soul friends,”
“…the world was made so that we could find each other in it.”
Jeanette Winterson, from Lighthousekeeping
“Don’t allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Preserve your solitude. If the day ever comes when a real friendship is bestowed on you there will be no conflict between your inner solitude and this friendship. On the contrary, that is the infallible sign by which you will know it.”
Simone Weil, from First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge
“You don’t meet the people you love, you recognize them.”
Anna Gavalda, from “Life, Only Better” (tr. Tina Kover)
The Essays of Montaigne, “On friendship”
Nikki Giovanni, from “Resignation”
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
“Everything scatters as the night wears on: / but you, don’t scatter, will you? / I think we could make this night last forever.”
Dan Chiasson, “Swifts” (Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon, 2011)
Rowan Williams, Being Disciples
Ernest Biéler, Portraits à Grindelwald (detail), 1906
Lucy Keating, Dreamology
“Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”
How do you cope with shame? I feel like I am more shame than person... It's such a awful emotion I feel I could kill myself over how ashamed I am.
Answer:
well, my coping mechanism for a long time had been to isolate myself and tell absolutely no one about what i was going through because, you know, shame. more recently i am trying to talk about the things shame has kept me silent on. i find that the more i try to articulate my shame, the more i find that there’s no reason to continue holding onto the shame (and often no reason to have had that shame in the first place). so much of being human is messing up, doing better, messing up, doing better; is being in situations we’re not at all prepared for, or situations that we have no control over. there’s no shame in that. as long as we’re alive, we have a chance to try again, to do better, to take care of ourselves and of one another. the more we talk about our feelings of shame, the more we realize that we’re not alone. shame thrives in silence. not so much when we pull it out into the light and examine it with more objective eyes, with eyes other than our own.
i’m still working on changing my thought patterns to be more positive and gentle, still working on not looking for reasons to validate my self-destructive thought patterns. it’s easy to sit alone with shame and find reasons to validate it bc that feels… maybe not good but normal; validates the belief that we deserve to feel that way; enables us to sink into familiar patterns. i know that therapy is not a resource that is accessible to everyone but if it is for you, then i encourage you to reach out. i hope things get better for you ♡
#ask#anon#suicide tw #also cognitive behavioral therapy has been a helpful resource <3
“One thinks one has cut oneself off from the world, but it is enough to see an olive tree upright in the golden dust, or beaches glistening in the morning sun, to feel this separation melt away.”
— Albert Camus in January 1936, from Notebooks 1935-1942; tr. by Philip Thody
(via tamsoj )
just wanted to chime in and say i’m also extremely grateful for these asks—i was never very good but i spent years pouring myself into an instrument that i can’t play anymore without stewing in painful memories. people expect you to perform and you just. can’t. i’m under so much pressure from my family to continue when it only hurts, now. i never realized anyone else felt this way, thank you so much for your honesty ❤︎
Answer:
i couldn’t talk about this for a long time. it’s still difficult to talk about it. but it’s been so worth it to discover that even in these heartbreaks we’re not alone. i’m sending you so much love ♡
You guys are not alone. From the ages 8 - 20 theatre was my whole life. I was in a theatre company as a child, and studied shakespeare at the royal academy of dramatic art. 2 years and 3 weeks into a bfa in acting, I had breakdown from the trauma I had endured backstage all those years and had to drop out. I haven't acted since, or even seen any plays. I'm 26 now and still worry that it's the only thing I'll ever be good at. Ppl ask me all the time when they'll see me on stage again. It hurts.
Answer:
god the “when will we see you onstage again” question devastates me without fail every time. i live in a state with a renowned opera house so i also get the “when will we see you at the [redacted] opera?” and when people ask me what i do?? do i say opera singer or [current job that pays rent/loans/etc]? i’m so sorry for what you went through. it makes me furious. i will never come to terms with the fact that art forms like singing / acting, that require a certain level of sensitivity and humanity, became rooted in abusive and exploitative structures, filled people who use their power to hurt rather than help. i am finding that there are so many of us who have had to walk away and in doing so, feel like we’ve lost pieces of ourselves. i think it’s a massive lie that performers should have to develop thick skins to deal with the cruelty of the industry. the industry does not have to be cruel; that is a choice that continues to be made by people w the power to do differently. it could be rooted in community and humanity, in connection and inclusivity. thank you for sharing your story with me. it feels like we’re all still in the dark of things, but these messages feel a little bit like a hand reached out in the dark 💗 sending you love.
#ask#anon #i am once again asking myself to create a more inclusive tag #neither opera tag or music study tag encompass this
I wish I could tell you how much your asks and answers about struggles with school mean to me. I have the same feelings as the first anon, after failing and being stuck financially, suicide feels like the only way to save myself. It's been stuck in my head. It's a horrible feeling, worse than worthlessness. And I feel so alone with it all the time, but your asks and answers are a much needed community, its making me cry, thank you
Answer:
you’re absolutely not alone!! there are so many of us!! quite frankly i think it’s a miracle that anyone is able to follow a traditional path! ok that’s it—i’m starting a support group for all of us who feel stuck and hopeless bc our society has rooted success in something that often requires a great deal of privilege. your worth is in your humanity. full stop. so please hold on to anything at all until you come out on the other side of this. your spirit is beautiful. your presence is needed. i’m sending you so so much love. ♡♡♡
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