Nikki Giovanni, From “Adulthood II”

droplets

it astounds me even until now how i can come to this blog and go with a piece of my soul back in place. i was wondering if you had any poems on 'ghosts' and their 'haunting' people and places, romantic or otherwise. there is a ghost, you see, and she haunts me even though i know her to be alive and well. i am unsure of which terrifies me more: her being in and out of my reach or my hope that i too am her ghost.

so these are not all poems, but:

“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 

— Valeria Luiselli, from Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)

— Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

“But the fall—the falling / of it / even after it’s done—”

— Jorie Graham, from Overlord: Poems; “Omaha (Lowest Tide, Coefficient 105, Full Moon)”

— Jessie Lynn McMains, To Be Haunted

— Dorothy Allison, from Boston, Massachusetts (The Women Who Hate Me, 1983)

“it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing / to shy from, this is not / nostalgia, you must look at it,”

— Carl Phillips, from Wild is the Wind: Poems; “Gently, Though, Gentle”

— Nikki Giovanni, from “[Untitled]”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

— Adonis, from Selected Poems; “A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

—James Baldwin, from Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems; “Conundrum (on my birthday) (for Rico)”

My relationship with content creation and hobbies, in general, got a lot better when I started learning to reframe it as a simple act of human creation, and not a metric of my own self worth.

We’re taught competition, and perfectionism, and shame. If I say “I cook” I must add “(but not well)”. If I say “I run” I must say “(but I am not good at it).” I say “I code (but I mostly know frontend).” I create and express and my first impulse is to guard against embarrassment. Lest I fall so short of marketable competence. Lest I subject myself to the mockery of being caught creating poorly. I wound myself first so others may not.

Even the advice that fights against this says “your only goal should be to be better than yourself yesterday.” But why must I be in competition with her? What happens, after the initial rapid climb in skill, when I plateau? What of injury, and atrophy, and depression, that flake these skills away? Must I return feeling compelled to over-achieve? To wallow in embarrassment until I can surpass my own previous record? To hate my work until the reception, the notes, the engagement outperform an ever rising bar? I do not want to be paralyzed by the mountains I built behind me. Why should I look behind myself when there’s a wide swath of untilled Earth that stretches far out of sight ahead of me? I want to enjoy my work, and my mediocrity, moving forward with all its ebbs and flows.

At my worst, I was nothing. I was not a writer. Because I had forgone writing for all the fear and stress and damage to my self-worth that it wrought. I was not a coder. Because I was only useful for the niches of my job, and didn’t have the heart to create something badly, on my own, for fun, lest it confirm my suspicions of mediocrity. I was not even a runner - despite the extreme and exhaustive amount of time I sunk into it - because I fell short of my previous self, and I could not hold a candle to the actually-skilled runners, and I was forced to speak of this hobby in all those guarded terms - “but i am not good” - because of how much that ate at me. 

I was no cook, and no homemaker, and no creator, because when I did those things, (I did them poorly.) 

And when all these came together, I wallowed in emptinesses. (I still do, sometimes. It’s hard and complicated). Because emptiness is what was left when I stripped myself of the things and the pursuits whose lack of value could be used to hurt me.

The change for me - the change, I think - came at the time I started to recognize that I do not deserve self-punishment for my mediocrities, for the failings of my current state of being. It was not a revelation all at once. It was a slow and progressive flirting with the idea, found almost by accident on self-help youtube channels of a very particular ilk. It came with the recognition that I had trapped myself, wiling away my time and my energy, in a state of constant apology, and shame, and self-correction for the mediocrities I dare not unleash onto the world. I boxed myself up with the promise “once I am good enough, I will be allowed to come back out”, and that was a lie. I would never have come back out. I was chasing punishing metrics of self-improvement that I did not need, and would never actually catch and maintain, and which would never love me back.

It took a long time to internalize this. It took a long time to get angry on my own behalf. It took a long time to act on it, and write again because fuck you. To run on my own terms, at my own pace, for my own enjoyment because fuck you. To create with my hands again because fuck you. To lean into the happiness of creation that I had not “earned”, because fuck you.

I like creating because it fills an emptiness that used to be there. It’s so simple, and so lovely, that humans are like this. That we want to build with our hands. That we want to assemble and construct. That we derive joy from stacking pieces together, and stringing words together, and assembling colors on a page, and moving, and singing, and baking, and knitting. Humans love to build little worlds around them. 

So why must we so actively try to cut people off from it off from it? Why do we condition ourselves to fear its mediocrity? Why does this still our hands? Why do we suffocate it for ourselves, before others can? I don’t have an answer. I can only recognize the monster. 

I want to make bad art today. I want to make bad art tomorrow. If I am a worse writer tomorrow, I want that to be fine. If I am never more than a mediocre runner, I want to be at complete peace with that. Because if not, then I might box away my hobbies again, and my loves, and my pursuits. I might go back to empty. I might go back to nothing.

I hate that emptiness I lived through. I hate that nothing. I want to make bad art for the rest of my life. 

clio m.w. hamilton, “still life as a dreamscape on pause”

“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.”

— Deepak Chopra (via lazyyogi)

summer’s almost over so here’s some summer themed drawings~

there is not a single day i don’t think about this quote in relation to tragedies

one day I woke up and realised all the waiting and yearning was actually me living my life and it’s happening right now and it’s still good even if it’s not perfect and there is no moment when all your dreams get fulfilled and everything makes sense. like… this is it. this is life. you’ll waste away your youth waiting for some imagined future if you don’t love life for what it is now and make the most of it

a dialogue between the unloved and the loving

neil hilborn // miranda july // @orpheuslament // aaron o’hanlon // georges bataille // georges bataille “my mother/madame edwarda/the dead man” // @khariyaha // natalie wee “least of all” // @fridayiminlovemp3 // maria petrovykh “love me. i am pitch black” // “the seven husbands of evelyn hugo” // sylvia plath “johnny panic & the bible of dreams” // mary oliver “wild geese” // sue zhao // virginia woolf from a letter to katherine mansfield // trista mateer

[ID: a collection of excerpts of text.

..saying goodbye. yes, there is a place where someone loves you both before and after they learn what you are.”

“finally, in a low whisper, he said, “i think i might be a terrible person.” for a split second i believed him - i thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. then i realized that we all think we might be terrible people. but we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.”

screaming take me as I am or kill me / screaming peel my skin off like a blindfold / screaming love me despite the horror / screaming please, God, love me because of it.

“show me your thorns and i’ll show you hands ready to bleed.”

“i don’t want your love unless you know i’m repulsive and love me as you know it”

People always think we look for love at our lowest to distract us. I am convinced we do it because we want someone to look us in the eye, to look our ugly in the eye and still choose us. I didn’t want a distraction, (highlighted) I wanted you to see a mess and still find me worthy of love, to tell me that you could still love me anyway. (end highlight)

“i kneel into a dream where i / am good & loved. i am good. / i am loved. my hands have made / some good mistakes. they can always / make better ones.

 capitalized letters that look like they’ve been cut and pasted on top of overhead pictures of fields. it reads: “tell me every terrible thing you ever did / and let me love you anyway.”

love me. i am pitch black, / sinful, blind, confused. / but if not you, then who else / is going to love me?

“if you are intolerable, let me be the one to tolerate you,” i said, and then i kissed her and tasted the lemon juice on her lips.

“you have seen the rotten streak in me and you have come back, no matter how bad it was. you have always come back. can’t you see? you have taken me always as I am, no matter what.”

“i wish you wouldn’t look at me like that.” “like what?” “i don’t know,” she hesitated. “like you could love me.”

“i love you, and i am conscious of you all the time.”

in this space right here that we have made for each other, you can say anything and i will not abandon you. unwrap the worst things you have done. watch me hold them up to the light and not even flinch. 

 end of ID]