#on suffering

[lastnightinlasvegas]

suffering and religion

(references coming soon)

[metamorphesque]

"In the empty words ...", Vahan Teryan (translated by metamorphesque)

[newvision]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Yellow Wallpaper // skeleton pleading (c. 1600s) // Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind on Blood On The Tracks (1975)

[tamsoj]

Charles Bukowski, "the creation coffin," from The People Look Like Flowers At Last

[funeral]

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . . .

Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

[arsanimarum]

Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

[inber]

if you do not suffer gracefully, your suffering still matters. if you suffer and learn nothing, your suffering still matters. pain is not a tool to be harnessed. it is not a measurement of divinity. there is no shame in suffering loudly, suffering undignified, suffering vulnerable.

[ever-sempiternal]

From My Drafts

[waitinqroom]

ocean vuong / vincent van gogh - wheatfield with crows / google arts & culture - the last works of vincent van gogh

[outof1emons]

Bittersweet Life (2008) // Extremely Loud and Incredible Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

[lover-praxis]

quick thoughts on "grand unified theory of female pain" bc i promised myself to read critically and actually write down the thoughts i have about content i consume.

felt really seen by it. i am not a melodramatic person, but i am, and i always have been. my ex-boyfriend disdained me for crying over books we read in ap english lit. i spent a lot of high school crying over everything, every piece of media, often to the point where i'd make myself nauseous. i still do this, occasionally. i hurt, and i feel the hurt, and maybe i even revel in it.

on the flipside, i'm about to hit my 20s, and my therapist keeps having to remind me that i've been through a lot, so i should show myself some grace. i've stopped languishing in my wounds but overshot, to the point where i now refuse to process any trauma in the hopes of just being able to move on.

re: art. i haven't written any poetry since november. i've done some writing, some fanfic, some journaling. i've done a lot of work with choreography--fitting, since words seem to have failed me. fitting, too, that my last poem that i wrote and performed felt like a desperate cry for attention, that same feeling of look at my ribs, can you not see that i am struggling, that i am in so much pain? in the end, i don't think my pain was seen.

also, maybe another flipside, i've been saying i'm in my rom-com era this summer, and i mean it. i'm tired of being the girl you fuck but not the girl you date. i'm tired of "falling in love" with every boy but never really loving them. i like the fall; i struggle with the love, despite how much i want it. there's the wounds, in the way. my blood that i can't love, so how could anybody? that mental, emotional, physical, spiritual block.

so. finding a balance between acknowledging my pain and loving through it? there's a strategy i think i've developed, of feeding my pain to some beast inside of me, a thing i think of as separate but inextricably linked to who i am. last week, the homily went that if we, hasty humans, try to pull out the weeds that the devil has sown in our hearts, we will pull out the good wheat too, so we should wait for god to weed us, in his own time. in the meantime, then, what do i do with the beast?

in the meantime, listening to fiona apple and taylor swift and halsey and women who have been mocked for writing and making music about their wounds. if i can do that without shame, maybe i can start to learn to be unashamed of my own state of woundedness. i think that shame is the worst enemy of all.

[fragmentedessence]

What brings us together is our suffering. It's not love. Love does not bow to the mind, it turns to hatred when it is tough.

~The Unchained

[whereheinsertedtheblade]

(dostoevsky)

[voicedwords]

[the offertory], from red skies at night, sailors delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning, Michelle Cadiz

[tamsoj]

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.

Edvard Munch

[funeral]

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Canto IV