solitude

You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows. For the creator must be a world for themself and must find everything in themself and in Nature, to whom their whole life is devoted. For ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.

But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things. If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees, then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. Therefore, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. Don’t ask for any advice from others and don’t expect any understanding. Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. What is necessary, after all, is only this: to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours – that is what you must be able to attain. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands. And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But the only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own.

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. So you mustn’t be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.

- Letters to a Poet, Rilke

our source, our spark

I hate how whenever the depression strikes it sucks up my soul and discolours my view of reality and the world. But I just basically summed up depression in a nutshell, didn’t I?

I wish to examine this.

More to come soon when I feel more coherent.

coming down

Another week. Another month. Another hiatus.

I cycle in and out of pure despair and elevated enthusiasm; cynicism rearing its ugly head and idealism peeking meekly from between its eyes — is it safe yet?

I use up all my energy trying to focus on one project, and then spend the next days and weeks finding strength to muster it all back again, my soul spread thinly over the desolated landscape. Where art thou, inspiration?

I think about taking care of myself, of loving myself more; of the various ways of undertaking this seemingly major task. It is an ongoing fight everyday, which I do not wish to extenuate. When I say, “I know that doing all of these things will not make me feel better, but they make me feel better all the same,” do you understand what that means?

I love: all-encompassing, hard and fast, and then I retract my heart again. The fear is overwhelming: of being hurt, of being shunted, of being hated and betrayed. I self-destruct by stripping naked and ripping my heart out, wide open and vulnerable for you to examine and see, and then, almost like a spring, I curl up into a ball turned away, the farthest I could ever be. Could I let you in?

Herdcore. Really? No, really. No. We need to build webs of community, of sustainability, of love and hope and anarchy. What constitutes a herd? Why do we do these things? Ask yourself and answer, honestly. Is it self-aggrandizing, for the greater good, or to construct networks of solidarity? Where does herdcore end and where does hardcore begin?

My mind peers outside of the darkness, and a light shines in, blindingly. I see that the darkness and the light co-exist, and that there is no one without the other. The black hole is omnipresent. So is the light.

I will not admit defeat.

25 Things

1. I find deep cleaning very therapeutic.

2. I am very interested in abnormal psychology.

3. I am trying to gradually get rid of the cop in my head.

4. I am currently learning German.

5. I look much younger than I am.

6. I am easily overwhelmed by high intensity situations, stress and crowds.

7. I don’t especially like gossiping.

8. I want to be able to travel and explore the world in my lifetime.

9. I believe in unschooling.

10. I am extremely fascinated with Japanese culture.

11. I can be quite a cynic, but at times also painfully idealistic.

12. I allow very few people to get close to me.

13. I love the smell of books and pencils.

14. I do not have concrete plans for my future, and I am ok with that. I am not ok with people who think I should not be ok with that.

15. I am uncomfortable with public displays of affection.

16. I have intentions to eventually go vegan.

17. My parents and I have never articulated our feelings for each other in my entire 22 years.

18. I am extremely selective in choosing my company; there are only a small handful of people in this world that I truly enjoy the company of.

19. I want to eventually be conversationally fluent in at least 4 languages.

20. I find the idea of non-monogamy extremely beautiful in theory, but am not so sure how to navigate it in practice.

21. I do not mind spending days on end at home doing nothing but reading.

22. I am neither an extrovert nor an introvert. I am both.

23. I believe that a lot of my politics (feminism, anarchism, anti-speciecism) are intrinsically intertwined.

24. I do not like people infringing on my personal space (both physical and mental) uninvited.

25. I’d rather wash the dishes than cook.

we’re not here

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

— Anaïs Nin

saving all that turns feral

It’s me in the tiny bathroom stall, staring at my arm. My stomach twists; my chest is tight. When I find myself tangled in my life, I want to cut my way out of it. I cut on my body so I can return to it. There’s a sliver of shame that I am even imagining cutting, the quick emptying of feeling from my body. I still want to, after all this time, It’s not the action of cutting I find so disturbing; it’s the persistence of the desire, the need.

I can’t remember the first time. I remember this: when I was fifteen I was suicidal. I took out a knife and wrote a note. The feelings were real, the intention perhaps less so. It’s the feeling that remains significant, an ocean-sized despair, claustrophobia, and hurt, like my whole life was a bruise from falling down during cross-country. I am not sure why I hurt so much, and I am not sure it matters why. My family was intact, we were not living in poverty by any means. I went to okay schools and did fine in them, sometimes very well, depending on my mood each time. I had friends, I had talent, I was ambitious — I was just like any other teenage girl. But my life was divided into two: the outside which looked good, and the inside where I was suffocating. I couldn’t make sense of them, how they could exist together. Cutting aligned the mismatched reality, brought the chaos to surface and appeared to control it. I could see what I felt by looking at the scars and scratches; they brought to life all of the inner turmoil I could not express.

When I was seventeen I discovered alcohol, and all the missing pieces seemed to fall into place. It transformed me into a movie star. The daydreams I had moved from my mind into my limbs. Booze made me feel like I was running downhill, eyes twinkling, hair flying. If I stopped, I’d fall, so I’d run faster and faster, laughing and scared. When I drank, it felt like going to the theme park; in one night, the familiar became the strange. All of a sudden I didn’t care — I just was. I proceeded to drink until I blacked out, wishing to fall into a fairytale-like slumber and wake at some future point where people and the world made sense to me. But I didn’t wake up. I continued to cut amidst the drinking. I also took to burning. I found living in reality a restraining and nonsensical proposition.

What was so hard about not self-destructing was that they worked. It made the invisible story exist on the outside, and it never seemed to hurt that much. The damage always healed. The drunkenness always wore off. The body is so resilient.

Space grew between my two lives. One where I wrote and made art, another where I cut. One where I was responsible, another where I drank too much. One where I accepted my sexuality, another where I had sex with people I didn’t really want. One where I smiled, another where I starved. One I could control, one I couldn’t. One where I wanted to help. Another where I didn’t. I became raw from having no skin and no edges, no truth I could withstand.

I’ve been sober for more than one and a half years now. I still cut sometimes, but very rarely, and almost never. Sometimes during my darkest moments I still wish for escape through alcohol, but I restrain myself because I know the cycle it can perpetuate, how it can make me feel: instantly better but worst for wear after the fog wears off, and then where do I go?

I’m falling off sometimes; into what, I don’t really know. Birds in love with fleas and wolves among the flock. Climbing and climbing, but always looking down. There are days when all I see are the branches and stones I’m sure to hit during the plummet. But I’ve been to my bottom before, and I try my utmost not to go back there. Today is new. The rest is out of my control.

And I’m ok with that. It’s ok, it’s ok.

what is the what

I’m lonely and other people are hurt and I’m smashing my head against the rocks of a cave, trying to break through the walls between us, trying to connect our naked suffering minds, trying to get to the place where we can fall safely together.

somniloquy

20 inches smaller and I’d be a Christmas film elf that steals all the toys. All the happiness in the world, at least maybe some of it, I’d give to the people who are hurting, to the people who are scared and huddling in the dark, to my favourite person in the world.

After four weeks, four months… maybe, I am beginning to be good to myself. No more cutting the heads off of hope! We need all we can get: cold rainy days, curling up in bed under the covers, shivering with hot chocolate as it warms our stomachs, sketching, scribbling, planning; always planning the future move, finding new ways of laughing at despair. Idleness, a kind of silver betrayal that will be fruitful in time, maps of ideas and thoughts and ways to itch and scratch away at something greater.

Hey death, you ain’t got me yet.

The Velveteen Rabbit

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. ”Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. ”It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ”When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. ”You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

overture/finale

I had a dream of an experience with an elephant last night.

I remember being so scared, I thought it was going to attack me. It surged towards me, I cowered, and instead of lashing out at me with its trunk (like I presumed it would), it licked me, repeatedly. I was huddling with knees up to my chest, my face on my knees, and the elephant kept licking my back, over and over and over; I still have vivid memories of it, and for some reason it makes me shudder. After that I somehow managed to run away from the elephant, but it kept following me, its trunk always within sight of me, somehow managing to still touch my body every time, while I frantically fished out my mobile phone and called my friend J who works with animals, to tell him of my predicament and how I could get the elephant off me. I don’t remember what he said, but I woke up shortly after.

With that said, I don’t have a specific fear of elephants, but I wonder what this all means. In other news, 2008 hasn’t been exactly a fantastic year, and I can’t wait for it to be over.