Sometimes It’s Hard To Know When To Be Tough On Yourself And When To Be Kind. 

september, s.t.

breaking news: ur actually gonna make it through and everything will turn out just fine

i love my therapist but i hate being in therapy. 10 minutes before my appointment, i'm in a meeting with my boss - we discuss my artistic choices; my boss recommends i artistically choose less. 10 minutes after therapy, i wash my hair and think about everything that was said, and then i have to switch it off, like a lamp, and go back to work again.

i was on a walk the other day and someone had the perfect combination of his cologne and whatever-else. it was almost exactly his scent. i fucking hate that. after all these years, i remember that? i tell my therapist - i feel like a fucking wolf. try telling a middle-aged blonde lady. oh i scented him on the air. i'm 30, and i'm having a panic attack over something that would be a plotline in the omegaverse.

what they don't tell you about mental illness is that if you are lucky enough to survive it into adulthood; it becomes a weird slice of your life. because you do, eventually, have to build a life. i realized in a panic somewhere around 22 - oh. i don't know what i'm fucking doing, because i always assumed i'd just go ahead and die. i didn't die, and i'm grateful for that, and i'm very happy about that choice. but it does mean that i am an adult in an apartment, living with my conditions side-by-side like. oh, that's my roommate, adhd. ignore the glass, bytheway, that's ocd.

so you pick your stupid life up by the scruff of the neck and you're, like glad for it (so much laughter and light and friends you would have never thought possible, when you were in the worst of it). but it feels so strange to be dancing around these odd little microcosms, these patchwork moments of your symptoms. if you have a panic attack at night, you still need to wake up and walk the dog in the morning. if your depression is making everything boring, well, you don't have any sick days left, and a job's not really supposed to be that exciting anyway. your ocd tears out each individual leg hair, and then, an hour later, you sigh, patch up the bloody bits, and go get dinner with friends. and the life is kitten-quiet, mewling and pathetic, but it's also like - it's yours, so you're fond of it.

and it's like - you're real. so you still enjoy pushing the shopping cart really fast and then riding on the back of it down an empty aisle. and you're not, like, so sick anymore that when you accidentally drop a mug you burst into tears (except for the days you do that. which are bad). and no, you're not allowed around certain items anymore. oops! but you've learned to be good about brushing your teeth most days of the week. and yeah sometimes in the middle of the day you have a little freak-out about how fucking unfair it all is, how fucking hard, how other people can just do this without having to fucking hurt the whole time. and then you sigh and force yourself to sit down and fucking journal about it so you can tell the nice middle-aged blonde woman yeah i had a hard day but i practiced grounding. you still sometimes want to burst out of your own skin, but you force yourself to eat kind-of healthy and to take your vitamins. you let yourself chop off all your hair in the sink in a dramatic poetry of control and relief - and you also have developed good hobbies that help you move your body more frequently. you feel helplessly behind, lost in the shuffle - but you also practice gratitude, taking stock of what you have garnered. because you're trying. even if you're never gonna be normal, you have something... close enough.

and the little kitten of your life, this mangy, starlit tigercub, this thing you expected to rot so young: in your arms, it turns itself over, belly-up. exposing this new soft part, all the organs and guts. like it's saying i trust you now. you won't give me up.

i do it all for you, kid

1. @trainthief x 2. finalfanjessi x 3. me 4. x 5. @plumslices x 6. me 7. jessica czapalski x 8. daksdays x 9. me 10. rina sawayama, phantom

1. bathe by hailaker

2. art by maggie stephenson

3. ocean vuong, night sky with exit wounds

4. art by charlotte ager

5. banana yoshimoto, goodbye tsugumi

the thing that gets you sometimes is the frustration. for every time someone else sees you being late, losing something, forgetting something important: there are hours in your day dedicated to it.

you have strange, fae-like rituals. the keys have to go in their special bowl, because if you forget even once, they will be gone forever. you stack items on a stool in front of your door so that you can't leave without touching them. you can't take your wallet out of your bag, ever, it will simply fade away.

everything has to be written down. everything, everything. whatever you need to do, you need to do it now. you check and re-check the busmap only to still get lost on the same route you've always taken home. you start getting ready to go 3 hours early and still end up 15 minutes late, unsure even of where the time has gone. don't sit down, there's something strange about your bed or the couch or the floor - once you sit down, you'll get stuck.

you are very used to operating without instructions. people say you're good at winging it but really you've never really known where the rules are coming from. you have to live in constant strange anticipation - when your brain does fail you, how can you predict every horrible outcome. maybe today you will have a minor curse, and forget to brush your teeth. or maybe today you will wake up - and no matter what you do, your whole body begs to return you back to sleep. maybe today you will break a glass and then just stand there, surrounded by the shards, frozen in place - because you need to go to the bathroom, but you also need to sweep.

and everyone else seems to have gotten the memo, and it's easy for them, and it never, ever gets easy for you. make plans and keep them. they roll their eyes when you say sorry it's too messy we can't go over to my apartment. they ask why did you leave something so big until the last minute. on instagram, your friend makes a reel where she says if they cared, they would change. they literally do not care. someone says it's a symptom, and in the comments, all they get is then go to therapy! it can't control everything you do!

so you go to therapy. and you work out to calm down and you do your self-care and you try to be grateful for the small things. and you structure literally your entire life around it, around the ways you can't live right. you have failsafe over failsafe over red flag. you have shelves of organizational manuals. you have alarms for things like did you remember to eat that you still manage to figure out how to snooze. you have time-blocked sites and deleted apps you get lost in and you are constantly trying. because you also want a life where you are not stepping over laundry. juggling knives, you spend your whole life feeling like you're ice skating.

and still. she sighs at you. i mean, it's just. i don't understand how you constantly miss all the small stuff. i mean, this is the easy part. you're just not trying hard enough.

longing for a home that doesn't exist ࿏

giovanni's room, james baldwin / the girl who chased the moon, sarah addison allen / @electraheart2012 / mercy, mercy, me, john murillo [art: @heavensghost] / my tears ricochet, taylor swift / the graveyard book, neil gaiman / biome, ryan galloway / there is a light that never goes out, the smiths / don't throw out my legos, AJR / mad, bad, & dangerous to know, samira ahmed

image descriptions below the cut

1. Blue text on a white background reads, "you don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."

2. Black text with yellow highlight on a white background reads, "I'm homesick all the time... I just don't know where home is."

3. Black text on a white background reads, "being alive is like: you want to go home. you don't know where home is. you want to go home. you don't know where home is. you want to go home. you haven't known for a long time. you want to go home but you don't know where you'd go. you want to go home you want to go home you want to go home"

4. A grid of six images. Clockwise starting from the top left, the images show: a hand holding three white flowers on a blue background; dark green leaves; a green bush with white flowers; a blue sky with clouds; a house with an empty porch; the side of a building and adjacent sidewalk. Individual words in various colours and fonts are pasted over the images. The words read, "Maybe memory is all the home you get"

5. Black text with grey highlight on a white background reads, "And I can go anywhere I want / Anywhere I want, just not home"

6. Black text on a white background reads, "bod said, “if i change my mind can i come back here?” and then he answered his own question. “if i come back, it will be a place, but it won’t be home any longer.”"

7. Light coloured text on a dark green background reads, "and… that’s what i fear. that nothing will ever make me feel like i'm safe again. that once you leave home, you never get it back."

8. An image of a white car driving on a road, facing the camera. In the background, there are green trees along the horizon, and a dark, cloudy sky. Lines of black text on a purple background is pasted onto the image. This text reads, "Driving in your car / I never never want to go home / Because I haven't got one anymore"

9. Black text on a white background reads, "Oh no, I'll come by when I'm grown / It won't be the same though / I can't go even go home, go home"

emotional processing is so funny because sometimes you’ll be violently sobbing on your bedroom floor over something that happened 4 years ago and then you’ll just. get up and make coffee. and go to the grocery store. and take all this fundamental sadness for a walk. and ponder the cosmic experiences of humanity while eating a sandwich. and that’s healing.

when lorde said “i knew that teenagers sparkled. i knew they knew something children didn’t know, and adults ended up forgetting. since 13 i’ve spent my life building this giant teenage museum, mausoleum maybe, dutifully wolfishly writing every moment down, and repeating it all back like folklore. and now there isn’t any more of it.”