I READ INTO THINGS

A BOOK IS A BOOK IS A BOOK IS A BOOK IS A LIFE. False advertising, depression, and doom porn. By Glory Szabo.

[cheshirelibrary]

[hairtusk]

Anne Sexton, reading her poem With Mercy for the Greedy, 1973

[lovingsylvia]

“With Mercy for the Greedy”

For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession

Concerning your letter in which you ask   me to call a priest and in which you ask   me to wear The Cross that you enclose;   your own cross, your dog-bitten cross, no larger than a thumb, small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—

I pray to its shadow, that gray place where it lies on your letter ... deep, deep. I detest my sins and I try to believe in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face,   its solid neck, its brown sleep.

True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!   But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.

All morning long   I have worn your cross, hung with package string around my throat.   It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might, tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born.   Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.

My friend, my friend, I was born   doing reference work in sin, and born   confessing it. This is what poems are:   with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue’s wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

--Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones, 1962

[ireadintothings]

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[4]

Laura falls in love with the idea of men, only to get disappointed... She dresses up every arbitrary mundane coincidence into meaning, until she can convince herself that everything in her life has been leading up to this moment of meeting someone. But, before she lets herself fall in love, she cannot have sex. If she fucks someone too soon she is never able to have any feelings for him. But if she plays her cards right, before long, she will be staying over until 5 am, having deep conversations about philosophy and the meaning of life–creating a story in her head about their shared future in a spacious studio apartment, in an old house with vines running up the side, and her wearing his huge oversized shirt to bed.

[Photo credit]

She did that with you two, when you first met five years ago–loving the idea of you instead of who you really were. She finds thrill in overstepping conventional boundaries, getting attached too soon, and she secretly loves getting her heart broken. Friends always warn her that she's repeating a pattern but then she says: that's what she loves about life, the highs and the lows, but mostly the highs, and don't ruin this for her, please. "If I can't let myself fall in love, what's the point?"

Then it turns out he doesn't feel the same way about her, or that they had at certain moments an amount of chemistry, and it has fizzled out. Even if she felt the same way, she will make her exit out of his life memorable –that's her signature move. She will try to act like this is a movie, and this isn't real, and both her and him are all just movie characters. She will slam the door dramatically behind herself and wipe her face off the tears like a strong female lead.

Laura hates routine (sometimes she would take the longer walk even if it's inconvenient just so she doesn't feel like she's repeating herself), but she's a victim of her own design. And you feel that same fatalistic pull when you call.

[ireadintothings]

[3]

You’ve been home for a week now you’re itching to get out of suburbia. It’s an itch escalating into a pang.

[Photo credit]

You’ve been picking up family photos and examining them keenly and putting them down, trying to create a bridge in your memory between a child in the photo and who you are now. But the line from one to the next feels dotted like you’re a detective working backwards to find the culprit and motivation from a crime scene.

Then you come across an old photo with your ex. You must have both been around 15 on this picture, leaning up against a wall, standing next to each other, too awkward or too cool to embrace for the camera. Probably the former.

You’ve been avoiding her for over a week but you know your she is expecting a call. You always call when you’re in town. In fact, in the past, you’ve visited just to see her. The two of you have stayed friends through relationships but now you’re both single again.

You used to love her and if you’re honest with yourself, you still do. But the two of you are different and similar in all the wrong ways. Most of all, Laura is an idealist and you’re a cynic. She is a good influence on you in an extremely irritating way.

On the other hand, you could call your friend Matt. But Matt can be a judgy asshole. Maybe not what you need today.

[ireadintothings]

[2]

You put off packing until the last minute and now that you’re all packed and loaded for the car journey, you decide to drive overnight to avoid traffic and shave off a few hours. You’ve been having trouble sleeping anyway.

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Your hometown was hard to leave and it's hard to come back to now that you've finished college. But you wanted to try on the city again - to see if it still fits after so many years. You finally arrive just as the sun is rising and go to sleep in your old bed in your old room. When you wake up, everything seems off like your room is not the same - maybe even new altogether, but you shake that feeling off.

Home is shaped vaguely familiar but all the furniture has been rearranged as if the room came to life while you were asleep and decided on a new setup as a committee of furniture. Change in one's childhood home should be illegal.

Your parents are away on their annual vacation and you have the whole house to yourself. House, not home. There's no "home" anymore. When you visit, you now arrive with a suitcase full of your stuff; "home" is just where most of your belongings are stored relative to other places but not a permanent fixture in your life. Transitory. An address where you order your parcels. No sentimental feelings. You'll keep paying your share of the rental in your college town for the summer because you don't want to leave your roommates in the lurch. But you have no long-term plans on where to live, neither here nor there.

The city stayed the same, more or less. Maybe the city missed you too. You wonder if nostalgia is the past reaching forward or the present reaching back. For someone looking in from the outside, it might seem like you are trying to escape yourself, but it is just the opposite; you're trying to find yourself.

In a few days, you know, that feeling of nostalgia will wear off and you'll be crawling out of your skin with boredom. But for now, you enjoy the quiet suburban streets. Sitting on your porch at night as you listen out for joggers walking their dogs; the intensifying reception of barks as they pass neighbouring blocks gives away their approach. You see them on the well-lit street but they don't see you, only a floating disembodied amber light bobbing and flickering at the end of your cigarette. 

[ireadintothings]

[Chapter1 Pg1]

It's 4 am on a Sunday and you're lying in bed with your eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Your mind is racing at a million miles per hour but you're unable to will yourself to get out of bed and extricate your body from the bedsheets.

"You use your depression like a crutch." 

One can only say this to people who are so depressed that they don't even realize that anyone who says this is in all actuality an asshole. It's punching down; it's pushing someone into a whirlpool of feeling like shit for feeling like shit ad infinitum. 

Yet, that's what your best friend (Matt) said when you saw him last and that makes you angry now thinking about it.

Now it's 9 am and you're sitting on the living room sofa in nothing but your underwear and a souvenir T-shirt from Japan. You've never been to Japan. The T-shirt was a gift from your dad when he went on a business conference - he bought the T-shirt at the airport because he didn't get to see much of the country himself. At any rate, you're back on the sofa sipping some instant coffee and eating hummus with a spoon. 

The instant coffee has a malty taste to it. You consider instant coffee its own stand-alone category of hot drink, not really a type of coffee. You know you must pack for your car journey tomorrow but you put it off until the evening.

LIKE: Pack later

COMMENT: Pack now

[ireadintothings]

Hello... is this thing on?

Does anyone still use Tumblr? 

After a 10-year hiatus, I am back to writing. Yours truly has started a Wattpad account. Check it!

xoxo G.

[ireadintothings]

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Helen Keller

[ireadintothings]

Derealization and depersonalization have been my status quo for a while. I look in the mirror and I wonder what happened to my life; I am a shell of the person I used to be. Certainly in looks. Yet I know I will only get older. It vaguely feels like it already happened before and it's happening again. It vaguely feels like I am on my deathbed, replaying my life in my head and I am in that memory instead of actually living life. 

Plot twist.

People who I thought were my friends were watching me from the sidelines like background characters. People who I thought were my friends were fading into the pale of the four walls.

Inertia is bad but making decisions is difficult when you're depressed. Throw a dice, lean into your destiny. In a sense, you already know your modus operandi but is that the best way forward? It brought you to this point and now you're under so much pressure like your head is in a vice. If all the options are bad then no decision should be made... but take comfort in knowing that there’s no such thing as free will.

Just because I am coherent and can articulate clearly, just because my reactions are normal and proportionate, it doesn't mean I am ok - despite what my therapist says. But maybe I will be, just need some distance; distance in time and physical distance too.

[ireadintothings]

A person can be lying perfectly motionless with their eyes closed and you’d have no idea that their mind is racing a million miles per hour in overdrive. To the observer, someone can look so peaceful and internally, they can be screaming at the top of their lungs, all at the same time. 

I’m at a danger of falling through that gap between external perception and internal reality.

Everything has been too much and too loud and so I decided that I will spend the day in bed with the curtains drawn. I’ve piled my pillows high and drew the blanket over my head. Today, I’ll say “yes and thank you” to depression.

On Monday, when people’ll ask me “how was your weekend” I will say “very chilled out, thanks.”

Is this me giving myself a break or is this me giving up? All I know is that I am tired in ways that I can’t sleep off and I’ve been barely eating all week.

He knew he had to intervene though and entered the room at noon. Switched on the himalayan salt lamp—its ambience flooded the darkness. “I made you cappuccino and even put cocoa powder on top.” Sometimes that’s all you can do for someone else - show them a bit of kindness.

[dictionaryofobscuresorrows]

ringlorn

adj. the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales—a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a battle for survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

[ireadintothings]

Brows furrowed, typing away, concentrating... what I want to achieve is to get out of my own head... and download all the clutter to a page. I need some mental space for myself; I am drowning in my own thoughts.

I attended a webinar by a life coach and she said that you have to take active responsibility for your life and mental health and manage each area as if you were pulling levers; checking in with yourself, understanding your own needs, then actively fulfilling the right need. If your most urgent need is to exercise to manage stress, if you spend that time with your family instead you will be stuck in your own head, not being present, and not making memories and you’ll be irritable with your spouse. That’s just an example but you know what I mean.

That makes sense to me - although I’ve felt more like a spectator in my life than an active participant. Like I checked out somewhere a while back and I need to refocus to live with intention. Or is that bs?

An endless stream of present tense - some hazy punctuation of significant life events and no clear path in time to follow (the illusion of free will does creep in). All the time that is within grasp ends right now.

We meditate, because we want the brain chatter to stop. To think absolutely nothing (I can still hear my inner voice saying; “think nothing, come on, think nothing!”). Thinking nothing is like the death of the ego; we fear death but we crave it too.

[ireadintothings]

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https://www.instagram.com/gloryszabo/

[ireadintothings]

https://www.instagram.com/gloryszabo