gloriousexpertjudgehuman

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

Do you choose to love? Or is love something that comes to you unconsciously like how your feet is suddenly frozen at the bottom of the ocean, unable to swim back up and save yourself?

you can’t choose love. love chooses you. love burns in your lungs. love creates a soul in your soul. love is so boundless you can’t look the other way. i can’t look the other way.

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

Interior Portrait

You don't survive in me

because of memories;

nor are you mine because

of a lovely longing's strength.

What does make you present

is the ardent detour

that a slow tenderness

traces in my blood.

I do not need

to see you appear;

being born sufficed for me

to lose you a little less.

Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by A. Poulin)

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

I thought I had been surviving, and yet, what I was really doing was hanging by a string, loosely holding myself from collapsing. I was always on the verge, and I could feel that friction in my soul.

Fariha Róisín, from Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

I was a sick child in so many ways, always bent with allergies, forever frozen, bloated, out of my body. Because there was no refuge anywhere, I believed that I had to adapt to my shitty life, so every year I tried to accept it, accept the turmoil, the suicidal ideation my mother’s presence left me in. The way her groping fingers left my body forever in a state of distress. I didn’t know peace or reprieve. I only felt an anger I couldn’t express, and the more I wanted to, the more I grew fearful of doing so, inevitably shutting down.

Fariha Róisín, from Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

Rosamund by Walter Crane for Jeffrey & Co, 1908. Block-printed wallpaper.

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

a soft brush of lips on your cheek, the warmest hug you could imagine. a hand in yours, someone sleeping next to you.

a friend leaning onto you as you're sitting on the carpet. their arm around your shoulders.

being human, for the sake of loving. loving, for the sake of being human.

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

Going There by Jack Gilbert

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart.

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood [originally published 1987]

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

“This is the time of night when I feel like lying down into the deep dark earth.”

— Helaena C Moon 

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

these bedrooms & these thoughts, repulsed by repugnant depth,

I am sick, I am sick, I am so fucking sick, I need some medicine:

I need some peace, some sense of solace, some time away;

one which I cannot corrupt with my vast blackened mind.

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

I am hurt, I am hurt, I am hurting, within these wax statements,

I am endlessly tortured, frail veil woven to dissolve the hollow:

fragmented psyche of an inner amnesia, my visions are dark,

decaying my mind in the strange decalcified inner motion,

the blood which runs through my veins is light refraction;

& as seasons come to pass I find myself in the marrow,

an adolescent child still too young to understand why.

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

Cristina Peri Rossi, tr. by Diana P. Decker, from These Are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women; from “Evohé”

[Text ID: "tired of the flesh, / its tremblings and yearnings, / like a hermit, / I took refuge in words."]

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

one of the most important things i’ve learned in therapy is that when you’ve experienced prolonged trauma in your childhood, pleasure feels uncomfortable. like, not that you don’t feel it, but that when you do feel it there’s an impulse to make it stop, because it’s extremely unfamiliar. and pleasure can mean many things, as simple as feeling cozy, and as complex as feeling loved. the neural pathways for feeling good have not had a chance to develop, and the neural pathways for feeling bad are quite practiced. feeling good, too, takes conscious practice.

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

Else Lasker-Schüler, tr. Eavan Boland, from After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets; "In the Evening"

[gloriousexpertjudgehuman]

Madeleine L'Engle, from The Weather of the Heart: Selected Poems; "The Mermaid"

[Text ID: "My father gives me everything. / That's just sea water in my eyes."]