personal blog

i deserve to let things go, to not allow them to haunt me anymore since i am constantly changing and growing

great googly moogly life is difficult

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation (Modern Library, August 14, 2018)

the interior of a panera is designed to contain a minotaur

NEVER apologize for speaking your truth, king <3

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

[ID: text reading, "No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who still wants you whole." /end ID]

“In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening illness. Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful, the same way that Dungy’s players watched him struggle.

Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier. One woman said her entire life shifted when she signed up for a psychology class and met a wonderful group. “It opened a Pandora’s box,” the woman told researchers. “I could not tolerate the status quo any longer. I had changed in my core.” Another man said that he found new friends among whom he could practice being gregarious. “When I do make the effort to overcome my shyness, I feel that it is not really me acting, that it’s someone else,” he said. But by practicing with his new group, it stopped feeling like acting. He started to believe he wasn’t shy, and then, eventually, he wasn’t anymore. When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real. For most people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters. There are simply communities⏤sometimes of just one other person⏤who make change believable.

One woman told researchers her life transformed after a day spent cleaning toilets⏤and after weeks of discussing with the rest of the cleaning crew whether she should leave her husband.

“Change occurs among other people,” one of the psychologists involved in the study, Todd Heatherton, told me. “It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes.”

The precise mechanisms of belief are little understood. No one is certain why a group encountered in a psychology class can convince a woman that everything is different, or why Dungy’s team came together after their coach’s son passed away. Plenty of people talk to friends about unhappy marriages and never leave their spouse; lots of teams watch their coaches experience adversity and never gel. 

But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. The same process that makes AA so effective⏤the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe⏤happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.”

⏤ The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg

you have seen, many times, the phrase love your body! and every time, like rainwater, it glides off you. not because you cannot love it - you mostly, like, tolerate it - but because of the word "your".

is this your body? when you were 11 you had to start shaving your legs because other girls found it gross you were hairy. when you were 12, you had to stop wearing v-necks because of your chest - people were staring. your mother didn't let you dye your hair. your first boyfriend makes you dress up in skimpy clothes for him, then hates when other people covet you. what you wear and how you present determine whether or not people find you funny or annoying or arrogant. other people get to determine if you are pretty, a court of opinion so loud it blots any good intent.

when is the body yours? magazines and instagram and tiktok endlessly advising you to "take care of" (starve) your body as if it is a weed. you must hack and slash at it, defend yourself from its wanton desires. it is a shameful, greedy thing. it is more like an art piece. you are keeping it or being kept-in-it.

you try to language it to your therapist - it's not that you don't recognize yourself in the mirror, it's more just that the thing that is in the mirror - it isn't you. that's why it's so easy to take apart: you're vaguely aware of the shape, but it feels like you are an animal hiding in the back of this cavern, snarling.

obviously you're like stuck in it. it often hurts a lot, buzzes with pain and a strange numbness. so it is your body when it's painful. that makes sense. otherwise - how many times have you been told to save yourself (your body) for marriage. for someone else. you are just borrowing it.

love your body! is so funny. somehow, without meaning to, the phrase reminds you - it isn't you. you're just inside it.

do you ever miss your own energy? like damn what happened to me

194. Work

Shoutout to everyone who can go do things sometimes but spend the next week recovering.

Shoutout to everyone who looks healthy but isn’t.

Shoutout to everyone who has put up with the “why aren’t you better” b.s.

You’re still here. You’re alive. And I’m proud of you.

i’m happy you’re alive

its really comforting to know that all the times i was at my lowest and loneliest in the past the whole time i had my self in the future and present who had survived those things looking back with love and tenderness and wishing desperately to offer comfort…i am my own guardian angel and i can use that knowledge when im struggling now and remember that somewhere there is a version of me that has survived this and is watching me with love and pride and joy in her heart