IT'S SARAH

I walked in the room dripping in gold

[overwhelming-thoughtss]

there is something so comforting about sadness. about throwing things on your bedroom floor and not picking them up. about binging reality tv in the dark for 14 hours straight. about lying in your bed and not moving while the world continues to turn around you. overwhelming and heavy depression is comforting because it’s familiar. it allows you to sink into yourself and rot there for as long as you want. thats the vicious cycle with depression, it takes everything to not give into the comfort and familiarity that comes with it.

[whirlwindofstuff]

[privit3]

[quotespile]

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

[arieefineart]

Dying to help (never enough) by Ariee

[veryilliterate]

“But what am I supposed to do with all of the parts of my heart that are only there to be given? What am I supposed to do with all of this nothing that I see? Those parts of the heart, they really aren’t for me, they are not for my home or my body or my self-love. They are for you, and wherever you are, you are too unknown to be in my daydream.”

— Jenny Slate , Little Weirds

[dizzyduke-deactivated20130328]

[pagewoman]

[jinxingrief]

[8-bitfiction]

[25436445767787687676786-deactiv]

“I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn’t even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn’t talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.”

— Yiwei Chai, The Jacaranda Years (via crowsummer)

[haverst]

source

[ttakahashis]

by jeewon park

[praying]

[wisdomfish]

“Because you know how the story is going to turn out, your grief in this moment can be tempered by hope. You can grieve with one eye on your present loss and one eye on your future. Yes, you will still miss your loved one greatly. You will feel the stinging pain of loss. But your pain does not have to give way to discouragement, depression, and desperation. Even this moment of pain can be colored by your hope. Leave room in your tears for little quiet moments of celebration. The darkness of death will someday end forever. In your present sadness, let your eyes gaze on the future. Let your heart have moments of gladness, knowing the beauty of what is to come.”

— Paul David Tripp

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“I have folded myself forward and back again to find you. Bent diagonal and straight, till I am nearly torn apart. I have raised up a mountain of mourning, furrowed a valley of sadness, pleated my cries in repeated corrugations, reversed and pleated again, fashioned whole pockets of lamentation, then tucked myself into them, turned myself inside out, crimped my pain into sharp points. And still no boat, nor goldfish, no paper crane, no likeness of you. All I want now is to undo myself, lay me flat again, like a sheet on a bed of healing, smooth out the creases of my grief, and sleep.”

— Jeanne Emmons, “The Origami of Grief,” River Styx (no. 100, May 2018)

[literary-structures]

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (p. 188–9)