☘️ juni-personal ☘️

wk_11; minumental

tonight, i managed to sit down for over an hour, and watch 4 episodes of anime with my brother.

yes, a truly minumental (i'm going to keep that typo, i feel it quite perfectly encapsulates the ridiculousness of both that statement, and my feelings around it) achievement, indeed.

but, relative to the last two months (or longer, even), it's safe to say that it kind of truly is. minumental. i can count the number of times that i've "managed something like this" (god, it does seem ridiculous, doesn't it) over that time period on one hand. which is, quite frankly, rather depressing to reflect on.

but reflect on, we nonetheless, do.

i went back to hospital today.

i walked the corridors that i know like the back of my palm at this point. i took the duck lift to level four. i met the eyes of the the egregiously-overpriced vending machine that greets you as the doors open. i stood in front of my psychiatrist's door, and let my stomach collapse inwards, all at once.

i sank into a chair cushioned with shame, regret and a quiet, desperate pleading. two overlapping voices, each vying to win the approval and trust of my mind.

"you don't deserve to be here."

"you can't keep going on like this"

"you're not that bad. you don't need to be here."

"you know things aren't working right now."

"you're. not. sick. enough.

"you can't keep putting off your life."

i heard the door open.

i heard my name.

i... asked for help.

and i'm terrified. truly terrified. of what (i know) that means.

for both myself, and for the ones whom i've burdened.

afflicted.

with my love.

~ juni. [1/??]

this week's "curated collection":

(now with 50% more categorisation ! ! !)

| 🌟🎶 Musical Pick(s) of the Week! 🎶🌟 |

taking back curation from algorithms: one human recommendation at a time.

( ) - Album • 2002 [8 songs • 1 hour, 11 minutes]

quotes pt.1:

The problem isn't that you waste time. The problem is that you beat yourself up for it so much that you can't even enjoy the time you're "wasting". So you end up in this awful middle zone where you're neither resting, nor working. You're just Guilty. Anxious. Numb.

To combat this - try and let yourself be bored, for even just a few minutes. Let your brain exist without input. And then if you're trying to avoid something, name it. Speak it out loud. And try, with your wise mind, to ask of yourself, why are you anxious/avoiding it? Why does it matter? Does it really matter, in the grand scheme of things? In the grand scheme of you, and who YOU are, or want to be? And then you can honestly figure out what you need in that moment. Whether it's avoidance, or tackling it head on. Or resting. Just ask yourself what you need in the moment, and be honest to yourself about it.

The problem is not "wasted time." But the guilt that comes with it. It's okay to "waste time", as long as you're honest about it, and give yourself permission to be present for it. ****

When our oldest daughter, Maud, was a toddler, she used books with author portraits on them as her dolls. She had Crime and Punishment in a baby stroller, Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking in a diaper, and on the sofa, Maud herself sat, breastfeeding Thomas Bernhard.

"Motivation often increases after you begin. The lesson is not to wish you had more motivation, but to make starting as easy as possible."

thought pieces / smolweb:

tech stuffs:

privacy/reclaiming the web:

quotes pt.2

It is through the compulsive avoidance of deepest pain, the need to deny it or suppress it or rationalize it away, that our lives become truly unbearable. I wonder if I can, at times, use cultural criticism to this end: to stay constantly in despair and yet keep my mind away from hell. To know myself as part of a long human lineage of shattering loss and unending grief is painful in a different way than it is painful to hate Facebook; it might even be more painful, not least because it is far more frustrating, far less cathartic. I can always hold onto the fantasy that I might one day lob a pipe bomb into a server farm. I cannot convince myself, no matter how hard I try, that I might smuggle my loved ones away from death.

You don't have to hold on to everything so tightly. What lasts is whatever refuses to leave. The rest, was never yours.

The moment doesn't need your supervision. It doesn't need to be curated, captioned, optimised for future consumption. It just needs someone to be in it while it's happening. Fully, poorly, without thinking about how it might read to someone else. Including yourself.

When the Internet was first introduced, it felt like a magical place you could visit from the comfort of your home. There was a ritual to enter: checking all the connections, dialing into your service provider, and deciding what website you would start from.

The Internet is still a place, but it’s been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.

So what would it take to reclaim the Internet as our space? Maybe it starts with having places where we can go to just hang out? Not to status signal, scheme a job, or consume content. Just a place where we can sit for a while, watch the virtual scenery change, and see cursors flutter by.

The air smelled of linden blossoms and hot pavement, so I went to have a citron pressé down by the river. While sitting there, I saw that two of the big quay trees, poplars that were downed in the recent storms, had been chopped up and stacked, ready for removal. In their place was a bright shock of empty air, a nothing, where once a whole moving world had amassed of shadows and birds and scrambled light.

I felt an affinity for that space, where a tree’s branches had swayed for over half a century, if not longer, and now did not. These gaps exist in so many of our lives, our atmospheres vibrating with the aftershock of lost particles.

I am like that air, I thought, shimmering with lack.

this post was last edited 6 months, 1 week ago.

|

Reply via email here ~ ! (◕‿◕)

...& if you so choose, leave a little piece of your existence here in my guestbook!
← proudly an indieWeb webring ~ ! 🕸💍 →

#lucid-thoughts #weekly