quotes

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives."

-Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not A Luxury

quotes

Dorothy Allison says that the early Feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change."


http://www.dorothyallison.net/

read these three books: Trash, Bastard Out of Carolina, Skin: talking about sex, class and literature.

crush and crushing depression

Sascha says on the phone to me - we each have our stories that we repeat over and over.

It's true and our stories are similar - the letting someone fall in love with us who we know we're going to hurt, then feeling shitty and falling for someone who will never love us how we deserve. I don't want to repeat the story forever, and I don't think we have to.

It is one thing to see the story, and then another thing entirely to unlearn it and write a new script.

Here is what I am trying to do:
1. recognize what it's about - like how I like to be either in control and safe that way, or totally out of control and safe again, in a different way. the familliarly safe feeling of wanting more than I'll ever get. I know I won't get it. safe. sucks.

2. what is it about the out of control? what is it that is similar in the people who make me feel that way?
there is a thing in it about masculinity and ego, butch players and bad boys. wanting famous eyes to fall on me, to pick me, to count me special.

3. what is it inside of me that holds that part?
Inside me there is this too - this person who I neglect. and it's a little more boring to make inner peace than to look for it out there, so maybe a little of both.

Instead of beating myself up for repeating this story, I say - thanks for letting this in to my life, for letting me feel this way. this crazy way of crush. thanks for letting me some insight into this pattern. Maybe I will still repeat it, but maybe I'll be on a spiral out, on a further tragectory out of the spring loaded place that holds this need.

so if I was good good good I would go to a yoga class, forget the crush, get grounded, talk to my inner butch, but I don't really want to. There are reasons for this defense, this fun thing. so I compromise.
I will go get a vest, a tie, some boy glasses. I will nurture that inside part some, let him out.

4. also, what project can I work on when I can't think and can't write? Draw, interview people. In this whirlwind between crush and crushing depression, the most important thing is to keep something in my life that is worthwhile and outside my head.

journal

Carefree AZ.
It is so sad to me the way people grow old in america, so many people. this loneliness and isolation. My grandma saying it's not fair, still being alive after her husband died. My grandpa. A few weeks ago. No funeral. There is such close feelings, deep sadness and new love. That can't eat feeling and can't focus and hard time sleeping. I am pretending to have new love, but it is makebelieve, faking to cover up something else I don't want to feel.

How do you mourn someone who you never really loved? but maybe grew to love a little bit in this last year. someone who did nothing while the daughtors were beat and abused. Wash your hands of it. Wash your hands of bad memories and eachother.

I never understood my family, the way they didn't look out for eachother. The sickness inside all of them. I wanted a different kind of family, still do, bigger than me and my sister and her partner. I want the family promise of punk and feminism, the promise that I can't seem to ever quite get a grasp on, and is it me, am I washing my hands when other people are holding close? or is it just the incideousness of capitalism and individualism and isolation that is so fucking hard to break out of.

The sadness is the sadness for a whole generation of my family, and for me, and for my dead mom. The sadness is for being so scared I won't create something better after all.

quotes

"People are really, realy hungry to feel some hope about anything. The simple idea that because of challenges people face with the environment, over the next 40 years things must change is daunting. But if you say it's a great opportunity (for this generation) to build a new civilization - that generates hope. We've spent the last two decades being so discouraged and detached, that need to feel some hope is a latenet urge that has been long neglected. In the end there is no practical alternative to hope. Only a certain proportion of people are montivated by despair. The rest of us are motivated by hope."

(I ripped this out of the paper and forgot who it was quoting)

getting out

How do you get out with your soul intact, away from your family who maybe loves you but wants something different for you, away from friends who want to sit still, away from mindsets that want to hold you close, close you off, defend shallow thinking, defensiveness.

you can let life happen to you, or you make it your own. please make it your own.

i remember when every sentance I said, I wanted to apologize for. when I thought I was so stupid, and half my struggle was unlearning that. Learning things helped. learning physical things that I could feel confident in - like how to fix broken radiator hoses, how to use a chainsaw. learning history helped, understanding that it was not just me, but a world based on keeping us stupid feeling, keeping us wrapped in a silence of competitiveness and gossip and feeling never enough.

When I was too shy to talk, I used to copy articles I liked, political essays and poetry, and put them into little pamplets with beautiful covers and set up tables at anarchist gatherings, selling pamplets for donation. Sometimes it seemed like there was so much talking and not enough poetry, and no one reading black women's words, and I wanted to change that.

As much as there was too much talk and not enough poetry, I remember how amazing it felt to be around lots of people wanting to change things, lots of people who thought along the same lines as me, and it gave me strength to go back to where ever I was from, where I couldn't find the right people. It gave me hope that I would find them someday.

I remember when I started to take more responsibility for my life - when I saw how my self-hate protected me, kept me from challenging myself in fundamental ways. And I knew I had to take these chances - to learn to say what I thought, to learn to say what I felt, to learn what it was that I thought and felt outside of what I thought I should feel and think because I thought that's what someone else wanted me to feel and think.

if that sounds convoluted, that's because it was. that's how my mind was. how a lot of our minds are.

to take responsibility for yourself. deep self-reflection. deep self-forgiveness. taking on a daily practice of become human and strong and fragile. stop hanging out with people who don't want to go beyond shallowness. start risking real conversations. learn. teach.

quotes

"I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood."

- Audre Lorde

read Poetry is Not a Luxury. read it.