#including ones that are tragic and full of sorrow and toxicity

[mswyrr]

love stories are literary works, inventions of fiction, not a personal wish of the reader/writer. it can be present in a narrative for a bunch of different thematic, aesthetic, or character/plot reasons. love stories can be used to probe at all kinds of corners of the human experience, including extreme ones. it's poetic; it's not meant to be taken literally.

even when a love story evokes things the reader/writer finds emotionally or sexually attractive (as it's intended to a lot of the time in the genre of Romance proper - though that genre is a recent invention historically and a narrow sample of what love stories can do narratively and even there not all readers/writers are engaging in a specific way) in that case it's a fantasy not a wish. but also i sometimes read and watch stuff that i don't find personally appealing even as a fantasy but moving as a story. those things can overlap--different kinds of pleasures in the narrative--but don't have to.

i don't find most of the male leads of mf love stories i read and watch personally attractive, actually! usually i find the heroines more attractive, though not always. sometimes it's just moving as a story.

the fact that people debase an art form that women's art often occupies and OR is shoved into by force (e.g. Wuthering Heights was considered a brilliant work of drama with insight into the extremities of the human soul... until people found out it was written by a woman, and then it was more popularly judged by the set of mean and small, literal minded standards women's "romance" gets subjected to) is so gross

without the warping lens of misogyny over the whole enterprise--from the origins of the novel onward! and the various moral scares about "scribbling women" and women readers over the centuries--people wouldn't read these particular kinds of stories in such a literal minded, insulting way

[ststevanofdecani]

Will Our Children Keep the Faith?                                                                                                                                                

the catastrophe of modern education

I have already written on multiple occasions of the urgent necessity of creating Orthodox parish schools in America. Our nation’s public schools have degenerated into prison-like institutions which have outlawed all mention of Truth (the Second Person of the Trinity), which forbid any public prayer to the Lord God, which teach sexual propaganda and promote infanticide to kindergarteners, which lead students to believe that they will likely be brutally massacred by their own peers, and which on top of everything else no longer even educate our children in any meaningful sense of the word at all .

The situation gets no better when it comes to so-called “higher education.” Even half a century ago, Fr. Seraphim Rose wrote the following words with sorrow:

The academic world — and these words are neither lightly nor easily spoken — has become today, in large part, a source of corruption. It is corrupting to hear or read the words of men who do not believe in truth. It is yet more corrupting to receive, in place of truth, mere learning and scholarship which, if they are presented as ends in themselves, are no more than parodies of the truth they were meant to serve, no more than a facade behind which there is no substance. It is, tragically, corrupting even to be exposed to the primary virtue still left to the academic world, the integrity of the best of its representatives —if this integrity serves, not the truth, but skeptical scholarship, and so seduces men all the more effectively to the gospel of subjectivism and unbelief this scholarship conceals. It is corrupting, finally, simply to live and work in an atmosphere totally permeated by a false conception of truth, wherein Christian Truth is seen as irrelevant to the central academic concerns, wherein even those who still believe this Truth can only sporadically make their voices heard above the skepticism promoted by the academic system. The evil, of course, lies primarily in the system itself, which is founded upon untruth, and only incidentally in the many professors whom this system permits and encourages to preach it.

a toxic culture

With each passing year it grows harder and harder for our children to keep the faith. Indeed, such a thing is now scarcely possible for a young boy or girl, especially one who has not been given the foundation and protection of a true Christian education. America’s youth culture is spiritually toxic — and that is to put it mildly. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you didn’t hear about the Teen Vogue article which taught kids how to sodomize each other “the right way” (don’t worry, the link is not to the article itself). The same publication recently put up a slideshow on its website celebrating a nine-year-old drag queen, who has been pictured holding signs so lewd that I utterly refuse to include a link. Nine years old. This is a generation whose social media app of choice, Snapchat, has recently introduced a channel dedicated solely to pornography — with of course no way for parents to block access to it.

This is a culture which, thanks to the all-consuming reality of social media and smartphones, is with our children twenty-four hours a day. It travels with them everywhere, in their purse or in their pocket. It sleeps with them in the bed at night. Like one of the ancient Sirens, it constantly calls them back to itself with flashing notification lights, gentle vibrations and soft chimes.

Given all of this (and really, I have only begun to scratch the surface), it should be no surprise at all that the youth are deserting Christianity in droves. And with this situation in view, can we honestly believe that allowing our children to be raised by the public school systems is anything other than throwing them to the wolves? As Matt Walsh writes:

If your kid is thrown into a world of deviancy and moral chaos while he’s still wearing pull ups, he will conform to it. In fact, I have never in my life met a child who is totally “in the world” — that is, completely submerged in modern culture without any parental controls or barriers in the way — and yet not of it. I don’t think such a child exists, has ever existed, or can ever exist… whenever I am accused of keeping my kids in a Bubble, it is always because I have taken some step to preserve their innocence. That is the one thing we absolutely must not do, according to society. Let the TV and the school system decide when its time for your child to stop being a child. That time, by the way, is right around their second birthday and getting younger.

parish schools: our christian duty

Yet even if we leave aside the moral filth and unspeakable depravity which characterize modern life, consider the fact that Orthodox parish schools are the historically normative reality of the Orthodox world. According to Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron:

The Church has always covered the people with her protection, and the people are the guardian of the truth of the Church. This was why, when our people found themselves in foreign parts, they would immediately build a church and next to it a Greek (Russian, Serbian, etc.) school. That was how we lived during the Turkish occupation; that is how we live today, even as far afield as Australia. The Church helps us in freedom and in servitude, in the village and throughout the world.

But how has it possibly come about that the only place in which the Church does not help her children is here in America, the richest and most privileged nation that the world has ever known? How is it that we have abandoned them at the one moment of history in which they unquestionably need such help the most? How have we allowed ourselves to fail so colossally? Archimandrite Vasileios thunders forth the truth:

Who gave us the right — or on what basis have we assumed the right — to condemn all children in one stroke to the darkness of ignorance?

Who says — or where have we found it written — that all children are so naive and insignificant that their expectations, their thirsts, their desires and demands fit into the narrow and dingy limits set by the education given to them?

Who says that their one ambition is to become mere technicians—accessories for the continued smooth functioning of this machine which sees man as it does, which so organizes his life, which builds his cities in this way? This machine which turns man to pulp and makes a prisoner of him—of the nobility, the crown of creation?

And who says that the potentialities, the flights and desires of the human soul reach only as far as the vision, the sentimentalism or the romantic humanism of any idealistic or materialistic theory?

The ecclesial life reveals to you hidden and unexplored areas of your being which it knows about. You yourself suspected their existence, but the upbringing you received discounted them.

Why not light the torch of the child’s life now? Why not give all children the possibility of approaching these fire-bearing and God-bearing people, our Saints, so that they too become living people, spontaneous, terrible to their adversaries, fearless in the face of every danger, every threat; terrible to death itself?

At the same time they can be delicate, sensitive, a comfort to everyone who is persecuted and wounded, to every creature, to the whole creation which groans with us in travail, also awaiting to receive its freedom from the liberated children of God.

Why can we not in this way give each person the possibility of following his own way, his calling, his love? To become craftsmen, scientists, manual workers, farmers, businessmen, artists. And to feel that everything is holy, dignified, full of light, grace, and eternity — even ephemeral, small, material things — when it is blessed by God. To do all these jobs, to practice these professions, arts, and sciences as sacred obediences, as their handiwork, as a form of prayer, a way of offering and showing love for the Other.

To these beautiful and God-inspired words I have nothing to add, except this: what are we waiting for?                                                                                                                                             

Hieromonk Gabriel

[njawaidofficial]

The Sexy Sadness Of Sufjan Stevens

https://styleveryday.com/2018/03/05/the-sexy-sadness-of-sufjan-stevens/

The Sexy Sadness Of Sufjan Stevens

Between the ages of 14 to 17 (and, if I’m being honest, even now) I spent most days looking out the window and crying while listening to a Sufjan Stevens song. “Casimir Pulaski Day” — a song about cancer, God, queerness, and Michigan — rattled my emotional cage so much that even hearing him count at the beginning of the song makes me well up. (That I had never had cancer, knew anyone with cancer, didn’t believe in a Christian God, was not queer, and have never lived in Michigan didn’t matter.)

Sufjan’s music was the soundtrack to all my heartbreaks and all my sadness. I listened to him when I was dumped (often!), when my parents dropped me off for university for the first time (I feel weirdly blessed that Sufjan’s didn’t release his latest mom-themed album, Carrie & Lowell, in 2015), and whenever I wanted to languish in the comfort of feeling sad (often!). At Christmas, a holiday I have no attachment to and no real interest in, I’d listen to “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” and feel as if I, too, had a terrible Christmas. Listening to his music was a frequent routine; my gentle bedroom sobbing would only be interrupted when my mother would knock on my door and say, “Well, now what?” and I’d lift my head off my pillow and eke out nothing more than, “It’s Sufjan, mother.”

I don’t admit to crying this much freely, but when it comes to listening to Sufjan, I figure it comes with the territory. It’s hard to escape the experience emotionally unscathed.

Sufjan Stevens performs onstage during the 90th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in on March 4, 2018.

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

At 42 years old, Sufjan has been a quietly successful staple of the indie/alternative music scene for the past 18 years, even if his mainstream success is only relatively recent. He’s released seven studio albums since his first in 2000 and embarked on a number of tours (including the 24-stop “Surfjohn Stevens Christmas Sing-A-Long: Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant on Ice” in 2012). His songs are recognizable staples across different mediums, from hip-hop (Kendrick Lamar sampled him in “Hood Politics,” and Sufjan’s song “Michigan” inspired the Roots’ 2011 album Undun) to film and TV (his songs have been featured in Little Miss Sunshine, Veronica Mars, The O.C., Weeds, and Friday Night Lights). And then of course, his most recent claim to fame are his two original songs for Call Me by Your Name, “Visions of Gideon” and “Mystery of Love” (there’s also a remix of his 2010 song “Futile Devices” featured in the movie). All three songs became integral parts of the film, perfectly encapsulating the rush of new love and the heartbreak that occurs when you lose it.

On Sunday, Sufjan performed at the Oscars in light of his nomination for “Mystery of Love,” his first nomination of this scale — he’s never even received a Grammy nod before. The comparison between Sufjan’s performance — twee and beautiful, in the way things not already industrialized by Hollywood can be — is easily compared to Elliott Smith’s in 1998, when he was nominated for “Miss Misery” from the Good Will Hunting soundtrack. Smith performed in a white suit, alone with a guitar and his spidery voice. It was a stark comparison to the otherwise gluttonous event, and the eventual winner of the category, “My Heart Will Go On.” Somewhat similarly, Sufjan performed by popping out from the stage with a live band while wearing a pink and navy striped suit jacket with teal dragons running across it. It was simple, unfettered but eccentric, all-too-short, and wildly cute — an easy introduction to Sufjan if you’ve never heard him before. Both Sufjan and Elliott Smith are (or were) on the outside looking in, briefly invited to participate, quiet geniuses with cult followings and bodies of work that hit a depressing nerve.

Sufjan Stevens performs at Le Grand Rex on Sept. 8, 2015, in Paris.

Patrick / Redferns / Getty Images

His songs feel cathartic in a way, like a validation of your own feelings rather than a condemnation of them.

Ideally, a good time to find Sufjan is in your mid-teens, when everything hurts all of the time and you don’t yet have the language to articulate why. Sufjan’s music, often morose and beautiful, combined with his face — gap-toothed and boyish, make him the perfect, sexy, sad boy. His music expresses a unique vulnerability, like listening to someone recite a particularly absorbing and relatable diary entry. His songs are all about storytelling, remarkably unreliant on choruses, breathy and delicate, and even when he sings alone, he sounds choral. Though they traffic in unbelievable sorrow, his songs feel cathartic in a way, like a validation of your own feelings rather than a condemnation of them. And unlike someone like Elliott Smith, whose (tragic) image is all about whether you could save him from himself, Sufjan needs no rescuing. There’s a security in his sadness, because it also comes with wearable butterfly wings and impressive but approachable muscles. You can spend time with him in your depression without feeling like it’s impossible to climb out of it later. He has no idea how to wear a hat.

Sufjan is like the last pure response to toxic masculinity: While other men are trying to out-macho each other, (like Justin Timberlake taking to the woods and fucking robots or whatever) Sufjan is sitting in a meadow and strumming a banjo while offering up his feelings in clear, defined lyrics: “Did you get enough love, my little dove?” (Oh god, who put all these onions on my desk??) Listening to Sufjan is like getting a brief reminder that some men, somewhere, are willing to be sad with you, instead of being the reason you’re upset in the first place.

Sufjan Stevens performs during the 2016 Panorama Music Festival in New York City.

Kris Connor / FilmMagic / Getty Images

That Sufjan is an enigma, especially in an industry that demands access to our preferred musicians, makes him even more appealing. He has no social media, gives few intimate interviews, and rarely makes music videos. (There’s one for a remix of “Life With Dignity” for the Cancer Support Community, an animated tiger cartoon for his 2014 song “Year of the Tiger,” and a stop-motion video for 2017’s “The Greatest Gift.” Predictably, he doesn’t appear in any of them.) Even Bon Iver, Patron Saint Of Reclusive Sad White Men Everywhere, made a few videos for his breakout album, For Emma, Forever Ago. Sufjan doesn’t even give that much. You’re often left to figure out the meanings of the songs yourself, which is maybe why people like him. You can attach yourself or your experiences to one of his songs without having to consider too much of the song’s original purpose.

Sufjan’s music was the soundtrack to all my heartbreaks and all my sadness.

Because he’s so unrevealing about his personal life, beyond what he sings in his music, his music sparks a lot of conjecture. Wide swaths of Sufjan’s songs have to do with Christianity, or also, maybe being in love with a man, which has sparked a cottage industry of thinkpieces (“We Can’t Stop Wondering if Sufjan Stevens Sings About God or Being Gay”) and playlists (“Is This Sufjan Stevens Song Gay or Just About God”). I spent half my teens pining for him, while also thinking that if he were gay, we could just be best friends, the kind who sometimes share a bed.

But Sufjan’s music is impossibly rife with meaning, however you want to look at it. “Casimir Pulaski Day,” off Illinois, is one of his most layered. The title is a specific nod to Chicago, while the song is at once about forbidden love, his maybe-lover getting bone cancer, and the ensuing crisis of faith that happens after they die. It also features references to a father’s possible suicide, the Illinois state bird (a cardinal, also a harbinger of death), and, possibly, Dante’s Purgatorio. Breaking down a Sufjan song is a near-impossible task, since most of his songs are rich with detail — from the personal to the literary to the geographical. Even his Christmas music (there is, truly, an ungodly amount of it) swings dramatically from fun, frolicsome joy (“Mr. Frosty Man”) to a much more morose tune (“Justice Delivers Its Death”). And I guess, if you’re going to be the most depressing artist in the world, you might as well carry some whimsy along with it.

Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan’s most recent full-length album, is the closest Sufjan has gotten to writing an autobiographical album. It’s a lot more dour overall than his previous work, but because it’s so intimate, it’s also full of affection and warmth. The record is about Sufjan’s mother, Carrie, who abandoned Sufjan as an infant and was in and out of his life before she died of stomach cancer. “She was evidently a great mother, according to Lowell and my father,” Sufjan told Pitchfork in 2015. “But she suffered from schizophrenia and depression. She had bipolar disorder and she was an alcoholic. … But when we were with her and when she was most stable, she was really loving and caring, and very creative and funny. This description of her reminds me of what some people have observed about my work and my manic contradiction of aesthetics: deep sorrow mixed with something provocative, playful, frantic.”

Sufjan Stevens performs during the 2016 Panorama Music Festival in New York City.

Kris Connor / FilmMagic / Getty Image

Which is exactly what makes Sufjan so lovable. When Sufjan isn’t coming off as the most depressing man in the world, he’s the human equivalent of a tiny bird landing on the tip of your finger and singing a sweet little song. Everything is twee, homemade, pure, innocent. At his live shows, he’s often in neon stripes, angel wings, sporting a sideways visor while playing in front of two horns, two drums, and countless guitars. It’s DIY-cute overload, but entirely self-aware. Take this song title from Illinois, for example: “The Black Hawk War, Or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, Or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You’re Going to Have to Leave Now, or, ‘I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!’”

Ideally, a good time to find Sufjan is in your mid-teens, when everything hurts all of the time and you don’t yet have the language to articulate why.

It’s this duality that keeps Sufjan from sounding myopic or navel-gazing in his sadness. Because he has moments of real humor (“Super Sexy Woman” from his 2004 album A Sun Came, is about an attractive, farting superhero), you don’t feel like Sufjan is in need of fixing. He’s secure in his complex, contradictory feelings. Which is why he was perfectly suited to write a few songs for Call Me by Your Name, a movie entirely about men coming to terms with their feelings. (But even having him involved in a movie soundtrack was a hard sell; Sufjan is generally picky about which projects he gets involved with, and largely played hard to get with director Luca Guadagnino. Initially, Guadagnino wanted Sufjan to appear onscreen, and read voiceover passages from the teenage protagonist Elio, but from his perspective as an adult. Sufjan convinced him otherwise.)

In the last scene of Call Me by Your Name, Elio sits in front of a fireplace and cries contemplatively after finding out that his lover Oliver has gotten married to a woman. The scene shows, maybe, a young person accepting the terms of this sadness, making peace with the inevitable ache of lost love. Sufjan’s “Visions of Gideon” swells alongside the sound of a table being set behind Elio. He cries for nearly three minutes until his mother calls him, pulling him out of his trance, and the song ends.

Even if Elio isn’t exactly listening to a Sufjan song, watching a young person cry silently, resigned, while a Sufjan song plays is such a teenage moment, one that a lot of (sensitive) teenagers have likely had in their own lives, while actually listening to a Sufjan song. Even in adulthood, Sufjan manages to connect with those most basic feelings that we (especially men) tend to lose touch with as we age: Feeling love deeply, mourning loss, and wallowing in those feelings because they’re worth experiencing and talking about. Sufjan validates having feelings, any feelings, even when they’re ugly or traumatic or painful. Isn’t it a relief, for once, to feel our feelings and have a precious, twee baby hold our hand through it all? ●

[opalmothnightingale]

Trauma Taint

2- 7- 18 - 

I don’t like to be too well versed in psychology, which tried to bring its boxes and use them on me, if you fit the box, good...  If you don’t, we’ll try to pretend you do...  We’ll tell you that you fit this box therefore you have all these symptoms and behaviors and problems, even if you say you don’t.  We know your experience better than you.  

And because you fit this box you can’t have these experiences, because people in your box don’t have that...  And I went from therapist to therapist, and a psychiatrist as well...  They all had this condescending box blindness of “I know your reality and you must be lying about your experiences” kind of thing going on..

I know I don’t use correct exact terms when it comes to psychological labels but psychological labels are not nearly as concise and accurate, scientific nor all encompassing as they pretend.  It’s almost like these kind of old time snake oil salespeople...  We have your remedy and if you dare say you don’t need it or it doesn’t work, too bad...  

We will claim our expert experience and knowledge and others will bow in awe to our product, our experience, our prestige as doctors.  Though in this case the remedy is the box, the box with all the treatments dictated to go along,...  accordingly,...  sending a fat chunk of money into the pockets of the diagnosers....  

I might not be experiencing trauma but I have read enough about it to know that I think I experience trauma issues...  I don’t like to put the official label of what it might be usually...  But sometimes I want something more technical and accurate sounding even if it’s not accurate.  So I prefer switching between weird sounding terms like “trauma issues” and inaccurate names such as “trauma”, which might not be accurate, but might be... 

I don’t respect science enough to bore my mind with the tedious details of whether my labels are exact...  All I know for sure is that science often hasn’t helped me despite their overconfident pushy opinions and advice and methods they say will help me...  Some people aren’t helped by science but science won’t shut up and sit down for those people, oftentimes but just continues to insist it knows how to deal with everyone’s problems that fall under their area of expertise or specialization (in this case, mental issues...  

Psychologists and those who adore and bow to them insist it’s my problem and my fault that psychology hasn’t helped me...  And if I say the available therapies don’t help me, it has to be because I’m too close minded and haven’t tried hard enough or searched long enough into the field of miraculous psychology).  

Ugh.  How boring and exhausting and wasteful of my precious resources to fight such tedious debates and be put on the defense when I know enough about myself and don’t have to prove my experience to anyone.  

But what I can see is it’s trauma related...  That is all I know for sure and all I feel I need to know right now.  

I’m not saying science and psychology has nothing more that could possibly be of value for me, but I’m not saying that of new age, religion, nutrition, energy medicine, holistic therapies, etc, etc,...  As well as kundalini mysteries, prayer, divine intervention, realizations at the mental level and,...  from there, changes at the emotional level because the mental level isn’t affecting me so much now that I see it in a whole new way...

And physical therapies too,...  Body based actions that stem straight from my intuition on what to do physically to deal with traumatic related feelings...

And then, imagination too...  Aspects of self I cal up..

And I have a few inklings and know some of this already is considered new trauma therapies in psychology...  But they want to say that you have to go to a doctor to be treated, or a therapist but I want to say so often I can do just as good or better at home.  I went to college, took sociology and several psychology classes,...   

And so...  Yeah I know a few things about how qualified you really are or are not based on a degree at a good college.  With some things, not so much.  

It makes me very tired.  I have read plenty of books that therapist might use as well, only to find them so lacking for me, compared with my own ideas and experiences of what works for me...  Adding little to nothing to my coping skills when it comes to my mental health issues...

So this is just a venty post or more of a disclaimer, perhaps...

I know I am perhaps inaccurate when it comes to psychology but this is just my personal chronicle of spiritual related things, including my mental health trail through the dark and murky and black of nights treacherous and frozen dead, rotten swampy and desert and all those places I go, hard to put in words...

I think it’s a triumph for me I’ve had trauma extract flavoring my days...  It’s like trauma winds, trauma rain, trauma pain, trauma hail, trauma tornadoes and trauma wreckage and rotten mirey bogs...  

But it’s not full on all the way trauma all the time...  It’s just trauma aftershocks, trauma pockets of toxicity that were buried and being revealed again sending up their stench drenched fumes on me, making me go into spins, reeling and confused and miserable and agonized..

But if it was full of trauma it would be much less full of healing...  Instead it’s trauma shaped, trauma flavored, trauma interspersed,...

Just, trauma embroidered, but with lots and lots of healing things and realizations and space from the trauma to seize those realizations, make them real, mend them to my side... 

...  And to so become a new woman, with new parts of me now accessible that were cut off, or immobilized or numb, now usable, or getting there...  

I would might like to write of things that helped me with the healing of the trauma feeling stuff too...  But I’ll see...  I will see how if I feel that is the best priority, top priority, heaviest priority or first priority...  or not...  Exhaustion and the continuing surfacing realizations and healing methods are getting my attention..

And much of those realizations there are not related to the trauma in a big huge, obvious, tightly bound manner, but they are indirectly, through long tangled strands...  

The trauma webs and cords and binds tangle and they strangle me...  Through so much, taking so much down in their ropes that bind aggressively, stupidly, violently, angrily, disrespectfully, disowningly...  Making me to see that I’m wanted to be, buried in a box, wrapped in ropes, hurled in a lake, forgotten, unwanted, give up, die, go away, die unknown, murdered...  

So it feels the trauma might say to me...  

Go away and die a slow endless living death without being able to speak a word...  That is what we want of you, say all the people who added their mark to the trauma wreckage, marking my whole body, mind, emotions and heart, and soul...  

But much of the realizations are just the aftershocks that permeate across my whole world...  

That is the only part of trauma, the fact the trauma leaves my whole world terrorized and insane, debilitated, dissociated, fearful, unable to think,...  Till I find ways to comfort it, infuse it with energy, guidance, healing, faith...  The feeling of sudden, secret, surprise escape...  Dissociation...  disorientation...  dislocation...

Place and time, inner child, teen, inner lover, inner supplicant to the divine, inner lover of the divine, inner worshipper and devotee...  And inner self lover, inner god who accesses her own miracles and sees it all falling into place that I know everything will be ok...

More and more I know and see, it will all be ok, every single thing accounted and prepared and cared for, now that I have seen the power of loving spirit and loving higher self and the power of alignment...  And the power of guidance and intuition...  And am accessing these things, so well...  

Now that I’ve made a life with my daughter, inner childhood, childhood found, joy and freedom, lightness, airiness, fire, true self, joy, creativity, sensory nature...  

Wrested from those who negated, belittle and push it to one small box of the warehouse of linear, methodical and productive, efficient, materialistic life they live...  

But I can’t bear the burden...  

So I have found a new life and world and as long as I can keep it maybe I can gradually heal and free myself from all the illnesses, lacks, negations, delusions, traumatic reactions and dissociations, memory failed, precious insights lost, buried insights in piles of all the insights of all the healing I need to do, so heavy burden in my already so slow, tired, overburdened life as it is... 

But I think I hope, I will get there...  So gods will you help me get there?  And if not well maybe this life is a practice life, to prepare for the healing that will come in some other form or some other realm or life maybe...  

I just want at least that much dignity and joy to call my own, instead of seeing my life as one big endless tragedy...  Not too light and cheery a tune about me, but not too apologetic or sorrowful or regretful a song either...  

Sweeping it under the rug of “so sad”, “so sorry”, blah blah,... 

just only someone else’s mere tragedy.  Their tragic life, that I can make a kind and sympathetic comment about...    I am not just a tragic story for them to feel sorry for.  There is joy and meaning and it’s all that is worth holding on to,...  Or all that is worth focusing on ...  Yes, when to focus on anything but the joy or meaning is only for the purpose of healing myself, not any pity or philosophy about my misery, please...  Pity drags me like a stone, and I have no room for such a ridiculous beast of burden.