Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir Of Healing From Complex Trauma

Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

love as recognition

anna gavalda / friedrich nietzsche / clarice lispector / jandy nelson / rebecca perry / mhairi mcfarlane

Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

Fernando Pessoa // Anne Sexton

“Reading can be hard, or at least it can present the sort of challenge that modern life is supposed to ease or optimize away. Reading is harder than streaming Netflix, watching a movie, listening to music, or playing video games. Hardness, on its own, is not a virtue. It does, however, matter. It matters to be a disciplined adult. It matters to sit still, to think, to escape the flotsam and be alone with yourself, with another world. It matters to grapple with language, theme, plot, and characterization. It matters that the conclusions aren’t simple, that literature—good literature—is murk. It’s the dark of the wilderness, a lighted match showing that, in fact, there is only more, a vastness you can only begin to comprehend. Reading teaches you that life is not an algorithm and that the certainty of your opinions, neatly sorted into a 2020s rubric, is very much unwarranted, with eternities stretching before and after you. Reading is meeting another consciousness that is not cable television and never will be, that exists at a complexity many lightyears beyond self-righteous pundit panels, the red versus blue, your new spin on the midterms. Reading is knowing those you would never know otherwise. It is, perhaps, the most human thing you can do.”

— You Should Read Books

be busy. busy not checking messages. busy reading those books you never started or finished. busy having a good night of sleep. busy taking care of yourself and your skin. busy moving your body. busy helping your community. busy reflecting on your life and what you can improve. busy doing things aside from the capitalistic viewpoint of “productivity.” busy slowing down.

Franz Wright, from God's Silence; "Why Is the Winter Light"

[Text ID: Empty me of the bitterness and disappointment of being nothing but myself]

paintings of me trying to get out of bed in the morning