So I Will Think About Nothing 

Anne Sexton, from “The Truth the Dead Know”, The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

Chelsea Hodon, The End of Longing // MARINA, Teen Idle // Mitski, Townie

"Have you ever had that feeling—that you'd like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?"

"I’m still wandering through the streets, looking, sitting by the sea, enjoying the sunshine. I am entirely alone. I don’t know anyone, no one knows me, and for me that is a great pleasure."

hanya yanagihara, a little life / haruki murakami, the wind-up bird chronicle / stand by me (1986), dir. rob reiner / donna tartt, the secret history / phoebe bridgers, i know the end / daniel clowes, ghost world / j.d. salinger, the catcher in the rye / nikos kazantzakis, from a letter to galatea kazantzaki / lora mathis, how to disappear in the modern age / moonlight (2016) dir. barry jenkins / richard siken, the torn-up road / sylvia plath, the bell jar

“So many scholars have spent so much time trying to establish whether Arthur existed at all that they have lost track of the single truth that he exists over and over.”

— John Steinbeck

hope girls grow up knowing that there are infinite ways of being a woman. hope girls grow up loving themselves for who they are.

feels like every few weeks I have to relearn how to exist, that I do need to sit in the sun and move my body and not drink too much coffee and dress in clothes that make me feel good and talk to my friends and journal and get off my phone sometimes and eat vegetables and drink more tea and generally reclaim the space in my life for myself ya know

we still have the moon.

Enomoto Seifu-Jo, tr. by Kenneth Rexroth, from Written on the Sky; Poems from the Japanese / Tomoharu Okamura SUI-GETSU Japanese paper, Metallic foil, Mineral pigments, Pigment 2017 / Emily Skaja, from Brute: Poems; “No, I do not want to connect with you on Linkedin” / Still falls the rain, Daichi Takagi / Adonis, ‘Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea’ / Winter night in the Netherlands -  Stefan  Bleekrode , 2018. / e.e. cummings, from “the moon looked into my window” (excerpt from Is 5), Complete Poems: 1904-1962 / Golden House Nocturne   -  Christopher Burk / The Door, Margaret Atwood / Lois Dodd, New Moon Through the Trees. 2015 /

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.

take figures out of their boxes btw. sew patches on your favorite jacket. go to bed with your favorite plushes. wear the pants you usually save for special occasions. draw something cool on your wall. put a sticker on your laptop. dye your hair and pierce your lips. glass is meant to break, metal is meant to rust. items are meant to be used. that's how the world knows that somebody loved them.