a bramble rose; @ameliorates - Tumblr Blog

James Baldwin, from Nothing Personal

been having this strange feeling lately that i'm.... enjoying being myself? that being me is a lovely and fun and exciting thing? wild. what's that about

gingergordonn

regarding the röttgen pietà, elle emerson

#words

die-rosastrasse

Hoping I will visit Tate again one day 🖤

#art

replanting

sometimes im like…..what is the point of all this ??? and then i hang out with the people i love, and for a brief moment, i see

puffsaddy

papapiusxiii

From Leonard Cohen’s final letter to his dying muse, Marianne Ihlen. She died in July 2016, and Cohen followed her shortly after, dying in November 2016.

“Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

— Leonard Cohen

#yeah

smartlovingunitedtough

Wood block color prints by gustave baumann

#art

sorry, hi, more personal diarying over tumblr. maybe it’s because i’m mildly tipsy, maybe it’s the 30c heat, maybe it’s the fact of being somewhere new again, of the idea that my life in australia isn’t super stable and samey the way it was last year. it was important, i think, to find some kind of grounding, but i also feel like i got so sucked into the day in and day out. i missed the chaos of disruption, the unpredictability, the spark of never knowing my next move

i’ve tapered down off my antidepressants over the last few months and it’s been a wild experience. good, in that i’m crying again, i’m feeling horny again, i’m FEELING again, everything is so big and raw and MUCH. but it’s been a lot to level with too. all these thoughts of “was this the right move??? am i really stable enough??”

like. maybe not. but i have the tools, the support, the language to express when things feel massive. i didn’t have that before. antidepressants took me away from wanting to die when the world felt impossible. but now, the impossible feels like a challenge again, the world feels big in a beautiful way. maybe things will get bad bad again and i’ll need to go back to them. for now, i think i’m okay randomly tearing up on buses, wanking over filthy fantasies, feeling spikes of frustration over the tiniest shit. i feel like i’m relearning myself in strange ways. it’s not always easy, but mostly it’s good

#cw suicidality

ameliorates

i’ve been thinking a lot lately about social media which….. duh, yes, i have made a foolish decision to get a phd studying it. why did i do that. (it’s heaps of fun.) but anyway, yeah, thinking a lot about how when i write my thesis i talk about joy and connection and loss and nostalgia and feeling in these spaces but how i haven’t felt a lot of those things with regards to most of my social media in quite a while. they’re kind of empty boxes i go to to read and consume and i’m participating less and less. and part of me gets all “oh god, not the ‘social media is toxic we all need less screen time or society is doomed’ rhetoric, has it got to me??” and like… no, i still love social media spaces and don’t feel the need to do some detox in the name of wellness or whatever.

(and sidenote, i don’t think it’s any coincidence that that sort of discourse works so well with neoliberal wellness bs because it’s so individualising + focused on actively cutting off forms of community and support? like…. there are people for whom ‘less screen time’ means cutting out whole social lifelines. but i digress.)

and with the Fall of Twitter i’ve realised how much i’ve kind of grown to hate a lot of the platforms i’m on and self-censor myself there. like i’m deleting tweets, imagining i’ll be perceived in a certain way, all the things i’m reading and writing about in other areas of academic work those are the things i’m feeling

without the social element, the active engagement and community and conversation, it sometimes just feels like inhaling information and forgetting to breathe

i’m wondering about making tiktoks of my cat, sharing her cuteness with other strangers. about going back to my sewing instagram and seeing if talking to people there helps me keep up my creative habits. if maybe coming back here will change that, to a softer place where i’ve always felt i can just ramble freely, my little internet diary that may or may not get read

maybe?

ameliorates

i read this post out to a stranger today as part of a queer studies masterclass i’m taking part in — it’s two weeks in sydney amongst a bunch of other queer scholars from across the globe

it’s the first “work trip” i’ve ever taken, in that i got funding from the hosting institute and my uni to be here, but i also feel weird about claiming academia as “work” because i hate the demands of professionalism and it feels like it goes against everything i study and love about theory and thinking and producing worlds through academic thought

but yeah, we had to reveal something about ourselves as part of delving into critical intimate practice and this was mine. i also, in the spirit of the post above, created some tiktoks for the first time — one cat video and one weird little montage of various videos in my camera reel. and despite all these thoughts i name above about worry and being viewed in some way and not wanting to reveal bits of me online in case i’m judged, it was fucking fun. i want to make more. i want to be in the world again, both online and off