i'm not kind and patient with people because i'm an especially good person. i'm kind and patient with people because i'm deeply flawed and have needed, sometimes still do need, people to be kind and patient with me. i'm not generous with trying to see why someone would do something that hurt me because i have some special empathy, i'm generous because i desperately need others generosity sometimes.

relationships cannot and will not be a transaction. we can put all the good we can out into the world and it may really only take one bad choice to pull it all down. you can't buy patience and generosity from others....but you can still try to BE them for others. it's not a price or a levy or something you'll necessarily see in return. it's nice when you do, because that means that it's working...that we really can change the world. but that's not why we do it.

i do it because of this: hope is my only hope. hope that we can get better, be better. hope that we are not defined by our worst actions (of which i have plenty and no doubt will have plenty more). hope that whatever we get from the world, what we give into it helps shape it too. that we can change it. that we can BE the thing we need. that it matters.

it does matter. it does. i see you trying. and sometimes we fail. sometimes we're monsters. but get back up. face it. apologize, take your licks and losses (you earned them), and then get back to it. it matters....you know that, better than anyone, how much it matters. someone's going to need you, at your best, at your most generous at your most patient at your most kind, someone out there is going to be monstrous and need you to know how to do that. and you will. don't give up. it matters.

stay strong. stay soft.

Aha! I love to see the list of folks icons in my activity when someone finds some good stuff in my old words and rebloggings. I'm so delighted you enjoyed it. People loving what I've written or re-shared is NEVER annoying and always wonderful.

We're all here doing this together. That's the whole point. Glad you're here!

my cat won’t leave me alone. i’m depressed today and she keeps climbing into my lap because i keep sitting still for a long time because that’s what depression is like for me, a grinding of gears to a halt. a feeling of quicksand. a screaming in my head to get up to move to act to do anything. anything at all. but i don’t. i sit.

so my cat keeps climbing into my lap. because she likes when i sit still. and she has no way to know that i’m depressed. she doesn’t know anything about that. she just knows that im sitting still and that is a good time for cuddles.

my cat won’t leave me alone. i’m depressed and so it is a little annoying. but her fur is soft and she is purring. she doesn’t know what depression is.

she just likes to sit with me.

it’s enough to break your heart, isn’t it. how little they know. how wise that makes them.

i simply think it should be illegal for me to have a bad and stressful day when my boyfriend is out of town and i cannot receive small supportive kisses to help me through the day no matter how brave i am about asking

Feb 13, 2024

do you ever think about the history of words? i do. a lot. i don’t just mean the etymology of a word or the perennially revisited story of how the oxford english dictionary was made. i mean how we only spoke them for so long. i mean how handwriting is shaped, changed, loved, lost. do you know some people take the time to improve their handwriting later in life? or at least....that people can (and do). it’s never occurred to me to try to change my handwriting, a messy scrawl that even i have a hard time deciphering sometimes. 

i am interested in how we make words. in the craft of words, yes the writing, but also the handwriting, the printing, the ways we play with and change words, slang and the relationship between different languages. calligraphy and illumination, the art of words and letters, how we honor them. 

in a little side quest for myself i began exploring the options for small letterpresses today, ideas for how to make one or maybe even out-of-the-box ones you can purchase. i’ll likely still pursue that because it sounds fun to me, but in my little side quest i found this video, The Last Punchcutter. it is not very long, less than seven minutes, including credits. it struck me that i have so much knowledge at my literal fingertips. i can explore most of written human history and certainly all of our modern references for how to make something, build something, do something. i can rabbit hole my into thinking i must have and do and be this or that. we do it all the time. i’ve had a thousand thousand projects sandbagged under the weight of all that information at my fingertips. 

if you asked me to sit down at a table and write what i’d need to print words on a piece of paper over and over without looking at a phone or computer or the internet or even a book, could i do it? of course i could. 

to print words repeatedly on paper:

there is nothing in this list i couldn’t draft myself from my imagination. nothing i couldn’t make through trial and error. 

we used to cut letters by hand. likely using materials and a process developed over the course time through of trial and error. the printing press was once invented by someone who had never seen one and had only their own creativity and best guess at how to do so.  

i let myself too often be too hung up on the right way to do something. on the terabytes of knowledge at my fingertips. on what everyone before me has done. on the perfect plan, researched, footnoted, cross referenced. 

we have so much more inside us than we realize, this creative little flame, this curious little red fox sniffing away at trails. i don’t listen to him enough. have you listened to your creative little flame lately? have you sat down and made something without knowing how. have you re-invented a wheel lately? we say we shouldn’t....but isn’t there some value in that? the invention? doesn’t it feel good, doesn’t it expand who we are and how we think....might we stumble into the simple beauty of it all and never come out again? 

i hope you make something today. 

stay strong. stay soft. 

Sometimes I wonder if an ADHD diagnosis and medication would change my whole life. Sometimes I imagine that maybe I’d be one of those people on the internet talking about how much better their world got when they started taking their medication. I wonder if I could achieve all the dreams, do so much more, actually start on things I delay for days or weeks AND keep momentum on things steady instead of moving in these rising and ebbing tides that are hard to predict and almost  impossible to influence. 

I have a lot of the symptoms people talk about in ADHD circles. I’m no doctor and I don’t know that I trust my own personal perspectives, not because I think doctors know more than me, but because I tend find that none of us see ourselves clearly....maybe I just want something to grab onto that helps me feel justified in why it all feels so hard all the time. I can see the vision....it’s right there in front of me. What’s stopping me? Imposter syndrome? Laziness? Some actual brain chemicals that I could supplement.....what if there’s a fix? 

It’s a bit like the chronic back pain I lived with for two years before stumbling onto the simple fix that I needed a firmer mattress. It was so easy. If only I’d known. If only I’d believed it could be solved. 

I don’t know if an official diagnosis and medication would change my whole life. But it’s a nice idea, isn’t it?