“You are incredibly afraid of feeling your emotions. But once you embrace your feelings instead of hiding from them (and low-level, overcast-skies depression can be a manifestation of hiding from stronger, less acceptable emotions like shame and anger), you’ll finally see that being broken and scared is beautiful. Hiding and shutting people out is what’s ugly. Letting your friend move away and never thanking her for telling you the truth is ugly. Confusing real love with quicksand is ugly.
Feeling unfixable and saying so, out loud, is beautiful. Saying “I feel small” is beautiful. Saying “I need you” is beautiful. Saying “I have been hating you,” and crying, and knowing how much you care, feeling that, for the first time in years? There’s not much in this world is more beautiful than that.
In that moment, you feel exhausted and erased and scared and crumpled and hideous, but you can also see, through your tears, that you are loved. You are a razed house, a pile of bricks and splintered lumber, and the sky is bright blue and the air is clear and bracing and you are loved, loved, loved. You can feel that instead of just recognizing it intellectually. Even when you can’t see yourself at all, even when you are blind, he can still see you. And he’s not going anywhere.
You will feel grateful for him, once you dare to look at yourself, once you dare to let yourself truly fall apart, once you dare to say, out loud, “I have been hiding.””
food is THE love language. let me bake you some fucking bread.
I don’t have a body…I am a body….I don’t own my body….my body is me
not 2 be fake deep but…capitalism commodifies everything, even the self. You think about your body as though you are outside of it. You assign a value to it based on how well it can help you move thru the world. I stand outside of myself saying “at least this body is still young, at least this face is still beautiful. These are things that will help me make it.” Your body becomes a thing. But the whole time your body has been you, and so you become a thing.
René-Antoine Houasse, Apollo pursuing Daphne (detail), 1677
Le voyage de Babar. 1932. Endpaper.
cerbères et un homme-âne
zrom:
Ivan Bilibin
