"I Had A Room To Myself As A Kid, But My Mother Was Always Quick To Point Out That It Wasn't My Room,

““When I ask you about your first love I am always secretly hoping that you will say your own name. Now, wouldn’t that be beautiful – to above else have a heart that was proud of itself.” - Bianca Sparacino”

—

Feelings are feral things

Half of them want to be free

Half of them want to stay in their cage

Thing is

You can't leave the door open halfway

.

And you can't take the sound of them

Banging on the bars

Shrieking to be loosed

And you can't look them in the eye

Or you'll go insane

.

Feelings are feral things

Half of them want to be free

Half of them want to stay in their cage

Thing is

You can't open the door halfway

.

You can visit them sometimes

The pieces of you that live in a zoo

Just remember -- don't feed the animals

And never give the tiger the key.

“Losing your appetite because you’re sad is the worst feeling ever.”

—

Sometimes I feel like I am in a bathtub filling up faster than I can drain it. And lately, the drain is clogged and I am drowning and drowning and drowning.

I am losing air faster than I can handle; killing me slowly, suffocating me with black spots filtering over my eyes, decorating my room’s walls.

It’s a strange sensation, that of time running out. Who chained me to the bottom of this bathtub in the first place? Who is turning on the water, was it me?

I am the hand of ruin; the catalyst to my own destruction. Salvation seems beyond reason and unfathomable beneath the water.

Writing was my drain.

It breathes fire into my lungs and ice into veins. It’s the only time I feel in control, powerful… alive.

Now, the doubt, guilt and shame ties me to the silence. It weighs me down and binds my hands below. I don’t think I can tell which way is up anymore.

Words are losing meaning and the space between them is an abyss.

I am told to have hope. To write of the sun after rainy days. But what do you write about when the sun burns you charred and the rain soaks you to the bone?

God, I need five more minutes of peace.

I know it’s too much to ask, I haven’t been your favorite for years.

I am drowning, lost and fearful.

My heart has turned to solid as my body sinks further. Is floating up even worth it at this point? Or should I let the darkness continue its course? After all, who am I but a hollow vessel to tell it to stop.

“So the myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature and that they are individualistic and that they’re selfish. The real reality is quite the opposite. We have certain human needs. The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognising that there are certain human needs. We have a human need for companionship and for close contact, to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted, to be seen, to be received for who we are. If those needs are met, we develop into people who are compassionate and cooperative and who have empathy for other people. So… the opposite, that we often see in our society, is in fact, a distortion of human nature precisely because so few people have their needs met.”

— Gabor Maté

Franz Wright, from God's Silence; "Why Is the Winter Light"

[Text ID: Empty me of the bitterness and disappointment of being nothing but myself]

Loneliness is a Dangerous Thing

‘Everyone knows there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul.’                     - Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Rootlessness and homelessness, though similar in nature, are also quite different. A person who is rootless may very well have a home, but does not have a sense of belonging, they identify themselves as ‘the other’. 

Since the end of World War II, migration has increased significantly with people opting to set up their life somewhere new, whether this be for a job, education, religion, or whatever opportunity this may provide. A person disentangles themselves from the ties and bonds that they have with one place and form this relationship somewhere new… this is now home.

But home for you may not always be home for the new family that you set up. I have mentioned this before in another post so I won’t go into it in too much detail, but when looking at those with extremist and ‘radical’ thoughts, we find that they are often children of those who have migrated. The parents have chosen to build home in a new foreign land and build a relationship with that place, but the relationship is not so straight forward. This relationship is a half way house between assimilating and holding onto one’s culture; the migrant chooses which parts of the new culture to adopt and which parts of their old culture to hold onto. This might vary from eating and drinking habits, clothing, social life, it could be anything. 

The child of the migrant however, having not chosen but instead having been brought up with this conflict between the two cultures feels lost. This is something I have thought about for a long time, but Arendt put it into the words I have been searching for for so long. 

The child feels a sense of rootlessness. 

Arendt argues that those who feel rootless or homeless will seek out a home for themselves at any cost, which can have disastrous consequences. 

She states that for an individual who feels rootless and homeless, often with this comes the feeling of having an existence that is not meaningful or fruitful. To find this sense of belonging, individuals often turn to exclusionary movements and groups, which actually only increases the feeling of alienation and rootlessness. Now they are in a group that only contains people such as themselves, perhaps from one place, class, religion, etc. all together feeling like outsiders, because of the absence of others of a different background. 

Arendt says that uprootedness has been ‘the curse of the modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution’.

Loneliness is a dangerous thing. When a person is lonely, when they feel their roots are not in any ground but sort of drifting from place to place, a person is not themselves. Who are we, after all, without a background against us? Just an entity, perhaps? 

‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.’

“I can’t tell you exactly what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when it happens. I want to be breathless and weak, crumpled by the entrance of another person inside my soul.”

— Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.”

— Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)

I found this on Pinterest and am crying for some reason-