dearv0id

[dearv0id]

“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”

— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

[dearv0id]

The effect of tiny iron filings dropped into a flame. Book of riddles and five hundred home amusements. 1863. 

[dearv0id]

1991, Jenny Holzer

[dearv0id]

“You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[dearv0id]

“People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget… There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”

— Stephen Carpenter, Killer

[dearv0id]

[dearv0id]

“No” - a single, powerful, two letter spell with the ability to liberate you if only you learn to use it unapologetically and cast it without fear.”

— Nikita Gill, The Most Powerful Spell The Witch Gave Me

[dearv0id]

[dearv0id]

[dearv0id]

[dearv0id]

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes (via books-n-quotes)

[dearv0id]

[dearv0id]

[dearv0id]

If that's what you need to do.

You don't have to forgive your abuser. Forgiveness works for some people, for certain situations, but not for everyone. There is no need to feel guilty for not being able to forgive someone for something unforgivable. It's okay. You can heal without it. You can let go of anger and pain without forgiving the person who chose to hurt you so deeply, if that's what you need to do. Focus on forgiving yourself, if that's what you need to do. You are no less evolved and no less compassionate than someone who needs to forgive in order to let go. We don't all heal the same way.

[dearv0id]

Go through it.

I’ve been seeing this quote around social media that reads: “The strongest people have a past filled with chaos, disappointment, and heartbreak.”

This bothers me and I’m gonna tell you why.

It’s not that I disagree. The strongest people do, indeed, become strong because they have endured great pain- but I’m afraid that by ending the sentence there, we aren’t sending the right message. You see, simply having horrible things happen to us isn’t what makes us strong. What makes us strong is being able to objectively admit to any part we played in the advent or prolonging of our greatest sufferings and learning to forgive ourselves (over and over again). What makes us strong is overcoming the chaos and heartbreak in our past by finding a way to let it go (over and over again). Learning from pain, and not letting it define us or excuse us, is what makes us strong. I see so many people who think having a victim mentality is the same as being strong. Being a victim is just the starting point. You’ve woken up in a dark tunnel, but you haven’t gone through it. You have to go through it. If you just sit there and whine about how dark the tunnel is, sure, people are gonna tell you how brave you are for being in such a scary tunnel. It will feed your ego for a while. But guess what? You’re still in the fucking tunnel, dude. Being stuck in a tunnel isn’t inspiring- making it THROUGH the tunnel is. You have to go through it; through the darkness, to the light on the other side. That’s where you emerge a champion; stronger and wiser, ready to trudge through the next tunnel.

[dearv0id]

Shark feels

Being in love is one of my favorite things to be. However, in my experience, being in love is a lot like being in the ocean, in a row boat, a mile from shore. At the beginning, you’re alone and you’re incredibly bored, but at least you know you’re not going to die. Then, you see a shark, not just any shark, but what seems to be an exceptionally nice shark. So against all common sense, you decide to ditch your perfectly good lil' row boat, and trust a great white shark to take you to shore instead. It's super dumb, super scary, pretty damn whimsical, and there's like a 1% chance it will go well. Somehow, the 1% chance of success is worth the risk. If you make it... you get the experience, and the story, of the time you took a leap of faith, faced your fears, and had a beautiful relationship based on compassion and mutual respect... with a shark. 

[dearv0id]

Pilot.

Remember that movie You’ve Got Mail, with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks? Yeah well if you haven’t seen it and you enjoy ‘90s romcoms, you’re fucking up. It’s really good. Anyway, there’s a quote that I feel applies to this type of thing. What type of thing, you ask? Well, it is highly, highly unlikely that anyone but me and maybe my mom will ever read this blog. More than likely, it will sit here, in the void that is the internet, existing and not-existing at the same time. Yet, for some reason, I’ve chosen to write as though I’m speaking to an audience that is interested enough to ask me questions as they read. So this “type of thing” is a blog written to an audience that doesn’t exist; a blog written to the void. 

In this part of You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan’s character is writing an e-mail to a man she’s never met, never even seen a picture. She’s having a rough time so she’s confiding in this man, but because she’s never met him, sometimes it doesn’t feel like he exists. It feels like she’s just confiding in the void...

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void.“

I relate to this in a kind of retrospective way. See, I just moved to Los Angeles from Colorado, where I grew up. I made the decision to move and then did it a month later. I moved because I, too, was wondering about my valuable, but small life. I always thought of myself as a brave person and I definitely am brave in some ways, but not in the ways I thought.

 For example, once upon a time, my roommate’s yorkie got into the coup and attacked Elfie, one of my chickens. The dog ripped open the back of Elfie’s neck but didn’t do serious damage to any of the tendons and tissue. This meant that while Elfie might have eventually died from shock, she wasn’t going to bleed out or die quickly. It was a Saturday night and there were no vets open that took birds, so I had to make a choice. We could either do nothing and let Elfie suffer for hours until she died, kill Elfie to end her suffering sooner, or I could try to stitch up her neck and nurse her back to health. I decided to try to save her. I got out my sewing kit, made some saline, and set up shop in the backyard. She was alive but in shock, so she didn’t move or struggle. I sewed up her neck and kept her in a crate in my room for 2 weeks. For the first week I had to hold her feathers and move her head for her so that she could eat and drink, but eventually she got her strength back. She made a full recovery. I took her to the vet to make sure everything was okay and she said I did a great job, “You’re going to be a great nurse!” ....(Oh, yeah, I was doing my prerequisites for nursing school at the time. More on that later.) 

That was a pretty brave thing for me to do, right? Not everyone can stay calm with a bloody chicken in their arms, let alone successfully save its life. Fuck yeah, I’m proud of that. 

On the other hand, I’ve never been brave enough to demand what I deserve, take what I need, or even to just ask for what I want. 

So, tell me, which is more useful? Being brave enough to perform minor surgery on a dying chicken, or being brave enough to get what you truly want out of life? or to at least try?

Everyone thought I was going to be some kind of famous singer when I grew up. I started singing to strangers who walked beneath the apple tree in my parents’ front yard when I was 5. My mom put me in choir a year later, then I don’t think I ever really stopped singing until I was 22. I went to a performing arts high school, one of the fancy ones where you have to audition to get in. Out of the 200 girls who auditioned that year, only three (including me) were admitted to the program. There, I was classically trained to sing opera and jazz-- I fell madly in love with Jazz. Ella, Peggy, Sara, Louis, Billie, the timbre of their voices resonated in my bones like nothing had before. Can I tell you a secret, dear void? I wanted, more than anything, to be a jazz musician, or even “some kind of famous singer”. Dear void, Can I tell you an even secreter-secret? I could have been, but I never even really tried.

Want to know why?

That is a very, very long story- a story for another post, I think. The jist of that story is that I went through a lot in high school, like a LOT. Because of everything that happened, I graduated with terrible grades and terrible test scores. I tried going to a local college (like a step up from community college, but still basically a community college), but what happened in high school took a very real, seemingly indelible toll on my mental health. I just couldn’t do it. After a few years of fucking around and fucking up, I got sick of letting my family down. I wanted to succeed. I wanted them to be proud of me and I wanted to be proud of myself. I didn’t want to live in my parents’ basement while I worked a part-time job and tried to “make it big” and be some kind of famous singer. I pushed that dream deep, deep down, so far down that 90% of the time, I actually believed I didn’t want it anymore. I got my CNA certificate when I was 22 and started working in a nursing home. That kind of work made me realize that when I take care of people in structured ways that ACTUALLY help them, I feel like the best version of myself. The only other time I felt that was when I was performing. So I decided to be a nurse and began chipping away at the prerequisites to get into nursing school. 

Four and a half years later, nursing school isn’t really working out. Nothing is really working out. You know why? Because I am fucking afraid of letting myself and my family down and I’ve let that fear influence every single choice I’ve made for the last five years. All I wanted was to get a degree and a career so that nobody would think I was too broken to succeed, no matter how long it took or how miserable I was. I told myself to suck it up, cause it would be worth it in the end. So they would say “Look at her! She decided to do it, she didn’t give up, and now she’s achieved some degree of normalcy! For a while she couldn’t stop fucking up, now she’s literally perfect! Phew! We don’t have to worry about her look how well she’s doing lalalaaaa..”

Lololololol whoops. 

I get that this is kind of cliché. I’m not the first person to realize that they’ve been letting fear control their life. I am not the first person to feel this way, of course, duh, obviously... but I’m not writing about my experience because I think it’s incredibly unique- I’m writing about it because it’s mine. 

After my most recent, horrendous semester, I decided it was finally time to GTFO of CO. I had no savings and no job in LA, just a place to stay and a whole lot of generous people rooting for me. Let me tell ya, besides the actual ACT of moving here, nothing has gone how I thought it would. 

 It’s been almost 2 months and I still can’t find a job. In Colorado, I got any job that I interviewed for. I was in control of my environment, if I wanted a job, all I had to do was be myself. After attending 8 interviews that have resulted in 0 jobs, I’m finding that tactic isn’t going to work for me out here. Lol... surprise, stupid! Also, my resume is shit. Since I’ve wasted the last 4 years mostly just in school, my work experience is WONDERFULLY, if not horrifically, unremarkable. The only reason I’m still here is because I have amazing friends and family who want me to succeed and believe that I will, given enough time. My friend Mila is letting me share her studio for free, pretty much. I gave her $300 for rent this month, it’s not much but it was all I had. I also buy groceries and I’m HELLLAAAA tidy, so it’s been working out so far. 

In the mean time, I’m focusing on being grateful and staying motivated. This basically amounts to going to the gym 4x/week and counting my blessings instead of counting my faults. I’m really hard on myself. I hate that I can’t get a job, and yeah, I’m still afraid of letting everyone down. But I’m trying to move past the fear. I’m trying, so, so hard, to stop being so, so afraid. 

We can talk more about that later.

Until next time, void, 

Sidda