if you only listen with your ears

i can't get in

[ymutate]

Will Barnet

[shewaslight]

fleeting

[vivianveil]

build a fire

[weltenwellen]

Hanif Abdurraqib, "Glamor on the West Streets / Silver Over Everything"

[mysterium-solis]

The Radiant Meteor Storm of 9 October 1933 from the Larousse Encyclopedia of Astronomy

[freedrawing]

Analyzing Children’s Art, Rhoda Kellogg 1970

[benlovesdogs]

Some late nights feel super lonely for me. I’m happy spending time alone most of the time, but I don’t have any close people who are night owls in the way I am. I’m not a terribly social person by any means, and I don’t feel the need for connection most nights, but when I do, there’s rarely the opportunity.

If I could change one thing about myself, I’d absolutely be a morning person.

[nevver]

Hotter than July, Ada Zielinska

[scratchy888]

@les-palais-de-lumiere ( your son)

[angelicdewdrop]

[red-lamb]

[jogoraz]

[lensblr-network]

photo by jogoraz (jogoraz.tumblr.com)

[nemfrog]

Bumblebees and other bees. The insect book. 1905.

Internet Archive

[nevver]

Behind the curtain, Shawn Huckins (because)

[rob-art]

David Hockney - ‘A Room Full of Straw’, 1969

[arylleth]

i know most people try hard to do good and find out too late they should have tried softer

[benlovesdogs]

People who spend their childhoods trying not to be a burden often become exquisitely sensitive to any suggestion that they are one.

I learned that one way to earn safety, approval, and stability was to minimize my needs, minimize my impact, and become easy to accommodate.

As a child in that position, I developed a quiet internal goal: Make life easier for everyone around me. The trouble was that I couldn’t do that forever. I mean, can anyone?

Eventually you have adult relationships, a marriage, a house, health issues, emotions, limitations, bad days, preferences, and needs. You take up space because you’re a person. But then one day someone says something that sounds like:

“I’m carrying a lot. I take care of us.”

Even if they’re expressing their own exhaustion, it can collide with that old programming and activate a fear that runs much deeper: Have I failed at the thing I’ve always tried hardest to be?

Not “am I a good husband?”

Not “am I contributing enough?”

But: “am I making someone’s life harder?”

That’s a brutal question for someone who spent decades trying to do the opposite. The fear isn’t arising because I’m indifferent. The fear exists because contribution matters enormously to me.

Part of the reason that fight has lingered is that it challenged one of my core identities:

I am someone who helps.

If someone attacks a quality I don’t value, it bounces off me. But if someone attacks a quality that sits at the center of how I understand myself, it echoes for years.

If there should only be one person uniquely positioned to experience me as a burden, should it not be my spouse? Not because I’m unusually burdensome, but because marriage is the place where nobody gets to remain low-maintenance forever.

A partner sees all of it. And I see hers. That’s part of the bargain.

The real question isn’t whether my wife has ever experienced me as a burden. Every long-term partner experiences moments where their partner feels burdensome. The real question is whether she fundamentally sees me as a burden.

Those are very different things. One is: Sometimes this is hard. The other is: You are the problem.

While those aren’t remotely equivalent, the terrified part of me has spent years treating them as though they are.

In an attempt to separate these two things, what I finally communicate is this: “There’s a fear I’ve been carrying for years, and I think it’s affecting how I hear you.”