Latest Posts by dreams-and-nightmares - Page 2

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

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

Adhd really is like… bedroom is slightly messy it would be nice to tidy it some

bedroom is very messy I really should tidy up

bedroom is chaotic I NEED to tidy but my brain says no. Why. Whyyy.

I guess I’ll just have to watch where I step in here for the rest of my life. The mess is everywhere. I’m one with the mess.

A sudden Need to Clean™ makes you get the room looking like some fancy homes magazine cover, and you think “I’ll never ever let it get that bad again, and then…

bedroom is slightly messy (uh oh)

Jane O. Wayne // Kate Jacobs

Sanna Wani, “Who is the Sun, Asking for Sleep?”, My Grief, the Sun // Brenna Twohy, A Coworker Asks Me If I Am Sad, Still

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

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 

kill the shift manager in your brain

shout out to me in 5 years…hope shes doing something cool i’m rooting for her

lord grant me the serenity to do my laundry, the courage to do my laundry, and the wisdom to do my laundry

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.

mom can you come get me things are getting bad again and i feel every insult like a sharp tooth and i feel my dreams rotting under my fingernails and i feel too much all the time or else i feel nothing at all and it doesn’t seem to matter if i drink and dance and party or if i stay at home curled up to study

mom are you sure when i was born i was a person and not just a vortex. always hungry. always swallowing. no matter how much goes in me i always end up empty.

when hands touch..

The best drawing advice I can give to anyone who wants to improve quickly is to use cheap notepad paper and ballpoint pens. I know it's tempting to buy the cool fancy supplies but then you'll feel pressured to not waste them. Use garbage materials and burn through them with zero thought. Only use pen because it forces you to commit and stops you from second guessing your lines and redrawing them over and over. Learn how to use your mistakes and then learn how to get it right the first time. I took numerous art classes and nothing taught me more than buying a big pack of Bics and legal pads and sketching anything that came to mind without hesitation. Fill a few pages everyday with the first thing that comes to mind. Don't rip out pages you don't like, just flip to the next page and try again. Watch yourself improve. If you really want to be a good artist, you need to learn how to draw from the ground up without relying on quality materials.

Okay, new cleaning strategy.

Bad at self-discipline, good at acts of love through service. So I'm gonna clean my house pretending it is the house of someone I love who's been too depressed to clean. She's gonna be so surprised.

He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

going on a girls trip! (me and my earphones to the supermarket)

— Albert Camus, The Possessed

droplets

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

i spend my days waiting. waiting for the water to boil and my tea to be ready. for spring to come back. for more daylight. the oil in the pan to heat up. a “hey i miss you” or “can you help me out for a second?” or “you want to hang out?” text. for my phone to finish charging. for good news. flowers on the table. the next hug. “hey, you got the job!”. waiting for the sun. to set. to rise. to see both. for summer to be around the corner. a good song. a falling star. a text back. i spend my time waiting to be remembered. i spend my time repeating that tomorrow will be better. tomorrow will be better. i spend my days waiting and waiting and waiting. i spend my days waiting unbearably.

I leave, I leave— At the end of this story, I walk into the sea and it chooses not to drown me.

— Jihyun Yun, from "The Leaving Season," Some Are Always Hungry

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.

small swims ^_^

Who makes the porn bots. Where do they come from. What do they hope to achieve.

calm

cr: a quien corresponda

Franz Wright, from “Our Conversation” [ID in alt text]

i exist, i exist, i exist

kačka chmelíková // holly warburton // ? // image from pinterest // letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke

Frank Bidart, from Half-light: Collected Poems; "End of a Friendship" // Marya Hornbacher, Waiting //  Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada // Rita Dove, from "November for Beginners"