Jewish Faerie Princess @faefemme - Tumblr Blog

i think it is good to warn people in advance about the circumstances that will cause you to bite them and i think that having given that warning it is good to follow through when the time comes

mtfautoandrophile

the rattlesnake is an admirable creature whose virtues we should emulate

My edit notes for this lyric essay on Holocaust memory feel so intimidating. Love this piece and the work I'm trying to do but omg

I’m back here, mostly for a sense of anonymity. to get my thoughts straight. because I don’t know where else to go. I don’t know.

I love my girlfriend so much

(but she does not see how much I prioritize her, she doesn’t see all the work I do for her. I worry I will never be enough.)

julieterbang

I am returning to this blog because my head feels over-stuffed with thoughts lately and I want to collect them

I am dating a woman and she is beautiful

I am concerned that I feel like I like her in a rare way, in a way that is comfortable but new, and I am worried that this is the same way I’ve thought I’ve liked a number of women. I feel overdramatic, claiming each instance is different from the last. it feels different. it feels bigger, better, more. but that’s what I said last time, and the time before that.

I don’t know what it is about me that craves newness, novelty. I don’t know why something can’t be just what it is and why I can’t be ok with that. does it have to be the best to be worth pursuing? (but why would I pursue something, someone, who didn’t feel like the best?)

and underneath that, the guilt that I am somehow not ready for this. that I should wait longer before getting involved with someone, or make more friends so that she’s not my sole outlet. maybe I am boring, or annoying, with my constant carousel of women I am trying to love, so many almosts of quarantine and I had the misjudgment of thinking each was something real. I wish I hadn’t told anyone about C, or L, or S. I wish I could look a friend in the eye and say that K is different and I wish that friend wouldn’t have heard me say that three other times in the last eighteen months.

I am finding lessons I have learned everywhere. I bump into them while driving, while cleaning my camping equipment, while writing a poem. I know: without C I wouldn’t own a tent, without L I wouldn’t be able to identify and celebrate my own desire, without S... maybe without S I wouldn’t know that I can leave when I am not being given what I need.

my therapist says that we are taught the lessons until we learn them. over and over, I feel like I have bared my heart open and have been rejected after months of talking. the pointlessness of it, the erosion of my trust, has left me more insecure than I can remember being before. I don’t want more rejections. I want to learn my lessons. I am trying to see what I am supposed to see in all of this. I am so goddamn tired of lessons, though.

none of this seems quite worth it, and then K sends me a message and my stomach somersaults.

I dug through my poems today, found an erotic poem to women from 2016. I don’t know why it feels like I am only discovering desire these days. it’s been within me so long, just terribly repressed. touching it now, finding the spot within myself that want lives and unbolting its door, has left me feeling like a teenager, or a runaway horse. it is a force so much bigger than I am. I want, I want.

womansart

Illustrations by Caitlin Keegan

here is what I know: I am alone in one way I chose and one way that I didn’t.

I would go crazy if I was trapped in this small apartment with somebody, but being here by myself seems worse.

I cannot imagine a life after all this is done but that life is the only thing propelling me forward.

I am alone and the world feels very small. I am alone and it is cold, and my landlord has not turned the heat on. I am alone and the sky is grey, but I did not plan to go outside anyway. I am alone and there is a cat on my lap and she is sleeping. I am alone and--

I am alone and I left N, and it will be alright and I know it was the honest choice, but I am alone.

Tomorrow I'm getting on a bus and going to a house in the woods and I am staying there, alone, until Tuesday

Thank God for that, thank God for that

I will build in whatever little scraps of reward I need to keep dragging myself forward. What a stupid existence, but what else is there to do?

gumuhit

you see the truth when you're finally ready (2020)

Jesus Christ I am so bored of myself and I'm bored of being sad and this is something like the actual worst my mental health has been, or at least the worst it's been in half a decade, and I'm bored to tears by if

Sadness isn't deep or whatever. I just feel melodramatic and absurd

I don't want to alarm anyone so I can't say it to anyone but I am very tired of being alive and I just want things to stop being so hard

I'm not going to kill myself (I keep telling myself to get a grip, that I'm not going to kill myself so I need to stop mooning around about it)

But I am so tired and so lonely and it's been a long time since I remember being really happy and I can't keep doing what I'm doing

And it's hard. It's just really hard. I can't keep doing this but I don't have it in me to do anything else really and I'm exhausted and sad and I am really not okay.

After years of feeling hopeless and barely human, one talented writer manages to find her will to live.

This feels more true to me, more connected to where I am now, than anything I’ve ever seen before

I feel very stuck and so I am going to do an exercise in lives I am not living, but could: Small town Scotland. Work in a bookshop, have customers that know my name and pop by just to browse. A cabin in the PNW. So much land that I only see people when I want. Having a brown thumb means nothing, the land wants life badly enough to take care of itself. A beach in Indonesia. Very little to do but scuba dive and catch the sunsets. Terrible internet access, which is for the best. The Faroe Islands, a severe coast line. Walks with the wind whipping around my face, at least three dogs. A chalet in the Alps, always a fire going and cocoa from scratch on the stove. Perhaps an inn, perhaps the makings of an inn but with so few guests nobody knows how I stay around. Greece, I could touch old marble every day, hold things that are fragile and unknown, and I look for answers. this is not forever, this job is not forever, this place is not forever, I am not forever. there is room to change, there is time, there are lives I haven’t lived that I could opt into. it will be okay, probably. it isn’t okay now, but I can do something else. it can be okay.

I have a new therapist and I thought I would hate her when I met her. She’s blonde, and speaks like every girl in high school who was ever rude to me. But she’s insightful, and I’m taking this on the chin as a lesson to be less of a judgemental asshole. Anyway, we talked about my hang ups with prestige in work. She asked me why it matters to me that what I do is important. It is not because I think I am important, I really hope I’m not important because I don’t think I’m very good and I would rather important people be better than I am. But I have spent my life being told that I am smart. I don’t know if I am or not (I suspect I’m not smart, merely very quick at intaking information and faster than most at synthesizing it. I am not making anything new here, I don’t think I have the imagination for that, but I can get from point A and B to point X fairly fast), but I want to take whatever it is in me that can be useful and apply it to the world. To be important? my therapist asked. To be useful. I am just trying to be useful. I could do something useful and die without anyone knowing my name and that would be fine. It would be enough to shift the universe over a bit, with whatever in me that can do it. She told me that the universe shifted when I was born, when I first breathed. I wanted to scream-- that’s not what I meant, that’s not enough. Existing shifts the universe in a baseline way-- I do not deny that butterflies flapping their wings change wind currents, but if you could flap a butterfly wing or blow a fan the size of a building, one would make more change than the other. But there is so much ego in that thinking, I know, and I’m rooted in an unhappiness that I’m causing with it. I put pressure on myself to be useful in a way that I haven’t defined and may not achieve, and take any failure in that as personal. I hate my job. I am actively keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive through my work, which is something I always thought was useful and important, and it is not enough to give me joy because I hate my job. And I thought I hated my job because I was bad at it, but it’s been eleven months and I am honestly not terrible at it anymore (I know which excel sheet has what data, and I made a budget for a half a million dollars for our office and it got approved just fine) and I still hate it. I fantasize about quitting and running a bookstore. Quitting and living alone in the woods. Quitting and being something that isn’t so useful to the grand scheme of things, but just is. I want to know if I could be happy shedding career aspirations, but I couldn’t know until I quit and did it, and what if I leave this museum job and there never is one again? I’ve seen the statistics, I know a job like this is very hard to find in the field. But I hate it, I hate it. (I do not trust myself to land on my feet. When was the last time I was happy with the work I was doing? I know the answer to that, it is bookselling. I know that’s what I should do. But I did Fulbright and I worked at the Times and my mother screamed at me about what I am throwing away to work retail. And I know, I know, I know it doesn’t matter, but what if it does? What if there’s something else I am supposed to be doing? I could be a butterfly flapping its wing, but am I limiting myself?)

weltenwellen

Rainer Maria Rilke, Journal of My Other Self

keepingitneutral

Jung Lee, Take Me Away From the Series ‘No More’ 2016,

C type Print, 128 × 161cm,

One and J. Gallery

I am very not okay, this day and this whole past week

and I found the energy to go to a doctor that zocdoc said took my insurance but then the office didn’t take my insurance and screamed at me for going and I just feel very small and very anxious and I don’t want to do this anymore, though I’m not sure what this is

Odds are low that I will get an interview for the Rhodes

But I will know in the next two weeks, and then I'll have two weeks to prepare and then it will happen. It is a notoriously difficult interview; I have been spending time I should spend on other things looking up previous questions interviewers have asked and imagining how I would answer them. In yoga, I think about "What was your most embarrassing moment?" while watching TV, I picture myself cleanly naming the last three novels I've read. I can't actually remember three novels I've read this year, so I open Goodreads to check. Yes, I've done the reading. Very little of it is brag worthy, I wonder if I could just name three novels I love and pass them off as recently consumed.

I am reading Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror now. She writes about the collapse of self perception and self, the way we become outside observers of ourselves. I, in a twist of irony that isn't lost on me, imagine telling this to a panel of interviewers.

Somewhere, in all of this, I am trying to find a way to be genuine. I imagine them asking what I will do if I don't get the scholarship, I've drafted an answer about how I will work a few more years to save up the funds and then go to the program anyway on my own. I imagine that level of determination being impressive. Here, I want to tell these make-believe questioners, here is how little your award means to me. Your decisions will not stop me. But still, choose me. Please choose me.

Somewhere in the world, a committee is reading my essay and my letters of recommendation and my transcript, and they're passing judgement on me. I want to be the person, inside and out, that they'd take a chance on. I want to be good enough, and I am keenly ashamed of the parts of myself that likely aren't. Would a Rhodes scholar spend a Sunday watching Love Island?, I wonder. When the answer is a clear as day no, I leave my apartment with a book in search of a latte.

Perhaps lattes are too soft. Maybe a Rhodes scholar drinks coffee black. Maybe a Rhodes scholar can talk about self consciousness and crafting an image in a way that doesn't sound silly.

I am deeply aware of my own deficiencies. I find myself wanting to say that to everyone I speak to. I know when I am not doing enough but I promise I am trying. But, isn't it all supposed to look easy? Isn't that part of the game?

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