autumnblood

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Photo Laura Sfez

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Sadness can make you Strong, as long as you greet it as a friend, listen to what it has to say, and let it know when it’s time to leave

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Bruno Dayan for Balenciaga Fall

L’officiel n°828, 1998

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I would be fine for the rest of my life if Walter never appeared anywhere. If he was no one and just lived the rest of his days somewhere else completely away from my spheres of interests and my communities but he orbits around various things and I naturally react like an opposing magnet pushing away from everything to do with him and I find myself having to distance myself from potential circles and areas and it’s not fair because I don’t even know he’s connected to someone and then suddenly that person is contaminated. And the shock and the loneliness kills. Why do I care? Why does it bother me? It’s not in my control. And it was traumatic. It was. I know I was the worst victim in the world because I’m so blameable, and I immediately blamed myself and found ways to excuse him so my best friends ( who should have known better) just agreed. And that made it all so much worse. What is that saying, what you resist persists. I was trying to be brave. I didn’t know how to cope with being sexually assaulted by someone everyone likes, someone my best friends idolised, someone who had the power to put me in rooms and projects with amazing people, someone who is obviously charming and interesting, someone who was connected in the fashion industry, someone who acted like nothing awful was happening. Its so cliche but it’s cliche for a reason, everything was so quiet but my body felt like it was screaming!

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Nobuyoshi Araki: 写真論 (1989)

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Robert Bly, from “A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, and Addiction; ‘Depression’”, edited by Mark S. Bauer.

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somehow the world has pulled itself together again

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Tracey Emin

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I cried because I don’t want to be desired by someone who is abusing me, my body wants someone to love me, love me physically. But no one is doing that, no one has done that in so long. Having sex is a way to feel power over what happened to you. When you physical love is absent, when you don’t feel desired by a partner, you turn to the other times you have felt desired, and if you have a history of sexual abuse well

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it really is in bed with the curtains drawn where I feel safest, but stay here too long and I rot.

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Cat Power by Mark Borthwick for Vanessa Bruno FW03-04

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Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness 

#f

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being desired and being abused are conflated in my mind, and in my body. which is a hard thing to acknowledge.

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Madonna by Lee Friedlander

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The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (tr. Benjamin Moser)

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The Dracula Saga, 1973, Leon Klimovsky

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what is a person to do when the wound can't heal? when the help they have signaled for and need is out of reach? I have used a lot of what I have uncovered in therapy, I do go out and seek resources to heal independently. I have worked hard at it. I don't know. I don't know what else to do or how else to come to terms with it. am I always going to feel a desire and compulsion to hurt myself? am I always going to feel unsafe when he comes out of the blue? am I always going to feel this shame? it's been six years when does it stop.