[sbs44]

it is tiring

trying to make friends. 

it feels like so many first dates and no chemistry, 

or a little bit of promise, but not enough to make you 

want to upend your everything, when you’re already dealing with so much,

barely have time to yourself, are overworked, overwhelmed. 

It is hard to find a match, a clicking. A reciprocal “this must be the place.” 

I am exhausted from the hunt, from the delicate handling of those first friend dates you don’t end up wanting to take to the next level, the all of it, really. 

you keep trying and trying and I feel that, but maybe it’s okay to take a break from the hunt for a while. It makes me very unhappy, all this effort and hurting. Maybe it’s okay to just exist for a while. the rat race will still be there. 

“you’ll find your people.” like, maybe. I really don’t know about that. but I’m so tired of looking for them. 

[sbs44]

A person can get used to almost anything given enough time — personality will grow around adversity the way tree roots will grow around a rock, shaping itself in response to the immovable.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/12/opinion/how-i-learned-the-art-of-seduction.html

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BERLANT: This isn’t giving anything away, but there’s something early on in the show that teases some kind of secret, some kind of confessional, which is a trope, sort of, of the one-woman show. This idea of a confession, or a secret, or something that’s going to be revealed, or something that’s inherently autobiographical. So there’s this secret. And the show’s very vulnerable for me, and I think that, in many ways, it reveals a lot about myself. Sometimes I’m surprised by, or just really interested in, any kind of reaction that gestures towards some kind of disappointment that I didn’t really reveal myself. Or that Kate Berlant didn’t really go there. FIELDER: And that’s the thing. Just because you’re not saying everything literally and explaining it, it doesn’t mean the performance isn’t communicating deep insecurities and deep vulnerabilities. It’s interesting that people have a certain idea of what sincerity is sometimes.

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/kate-berlant-in-conversation-with-nathan-fielder

[shockfemme]

Untitled By Abby Carney

Big fan of the subtle wave weighing in here. Cousin to the slight nod and the grim smile - the one that is simply pulling the bottom left corner of your mouth to the side to say - “Human acknowledged, beep beep. Bye.”

Odd, strange, that a misanthrope and a glitter wielding fairy are raging inside me, sending me on panic missions around shopping centers, hiding behind clothing racks and holding large bottles of shampoo in front of my face simply to avoid speaking to someone from my past. The pleasantries and chit chat just burden my soul, and I cannot. I fear that I’ll start maniacally laughing and flip a switch, yelling, “You don’t even know me! You don’t like me! Why are you talking to me about the weather - GO AWAY!!!”

But the fairy flutters within too - she has me bounding down the sidewalk flashing my toothy grin to every Tom, Dick, and Harry - asking men at bus stops if they want to talk, “Tell me something interesting,” and they never disappoint.

Lately, I’ve kept myself cooped up inside, putting in long hours at work and rarely venturing out into the world to see humans. The agoraphobic fear increases the longer I let it play out. Every day that passes without getting “out there,” my belief that I’m undesirable grows. It spreads like a cancer in my chest; at times it takes a shot or two of gin to simply arrive.

But then I’m out - I’m out and I’m toothy again - a ghoul in love with fun and begging for adoration. I bat my eyelashes and pout a fair amount; I can’t really help it. I fall to pieces speaking with a Cancer - literally crying as I tell him, “I just don’t want to be poor anymore. I want to be happy. I want to be normal,” and realize as it’s happening that I have unleashed the vulnerable monster within, wreaked havoc on the social taboo - to cry in front of a friend, a new friend at that. I never adhere to these rules - it is why I feel like a forever fringer, doomed to walk alone.

But he tells me “everyone” loves me, and they want me around.

“Why don’t they call me then? No one invites me or texts me, you know.”

We didn’t solve that conundrum, and whether it was fact or fiction, hearing him solidify my place in the group made my heart leap. Little heart that feels always so lost and alone - not even fit for the stable, certainly not the inn.

Tonight I think about texting Laurel - maybe I will ask to cook her dinner tomorrow. But something stops me. I want to be wanted. Want so much to be wanted - I am always the proactive one. Can someone not just once invite me? Say, “I want to see you. Please, can we hang out?”

If you’re loved from afar, but not up close, does it even count?

[sbs44]

a little personal writing I did for Shock of the Femme, back in 2015. I went through the hermitage and deep wells of loneliness and isolation long before covid. Really painful stuff, but it built up my ~*resilience*~. 

[sbs44]

truly, I have no idea how people who work on staff at magazines and websites manage to get their shit done. I typically schedule meeting days and writing days but when my organization gets totally blown up due to last minute assignments and such, and I have to do interviews in the morning and then in the evening but then also have writing due... it’s the worst thing. How on earth do people work like this regularly?? Thanks I hate it. I’ll be up all night because I can’t fully focus until I’m done with my calls.

[sbs44]

something about the way everyone on twitter slobbed their nobs over girls and then fleabag and ladybird and other things too, but those are the notable ones in my memory—“THIS. omg THIS.” These things were upheld as the representation of what it’s like to be human, to be woman, to be our age, to be. To see so many people relating and saying it was the end all be all made me feel...alone. Because I hated each show or film, and felt kind of appalled by some of the characters. I couldn’t relate in the slightest, my reality so opposite, so less nihilistic. I think, when everyone around you is all on one wave, and it’s not yours, you can’t help but feel a little alone. I think a lot of the pandemic has felt the same way, and I try to be my most empathetic self. But can’t help feeling that it sounds like a lot of people have not experienced hardships, or deep, enduring loneliness or anxiety before. I think they’ll be fine as soon as things go back to any kind of “normal.” And that makes me truly glad because I don’t want anyone to be suffering. But if your grief and loneliness is a little more longterm than that, I guess—I see you. I tip my hat.

[sbs44]

I grieve for all the hardships and loss folks are dealing with this year, and I’m sure it would be no comfort to them, but I can’t help thinking...if you are suffering in 2020, you are on a lifeboat as the Titanic went down. You are in good company, and you’ll never have to explain yourself. You know it’s not your fault. The circumstances are out of your control. I think, if you’re gonna hit rock bottom, going through it as the whole world goes through it is a lot less lonely. I think I’m still recovering from all the grief, housing insecurity, and underemployment of my first years of adulthood. So many snide onlookers with office jobs telling me I wasn’t good enough, didn’t work hard enough. I really wanted to die so I could escape feeling less than human for so long. I imagine having some community going through the same thing would have been a bit of balm.

[sbs44]

i’d like the time to get carried away

sometimes would rather paint and collage instead of work,,hard to not be jealous of the bored people sometimes with all the hours undulating before them

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strangers inquire about my reproductive choices

I can’t leave the house to walk the pup without ending up in an hour long conversation with a stranger it seems. Today I listened to a neighbor tell me so much, so many things about his life. And it was funny to have my reproductive choices come up for the first time in a long time. I think it’s a generational thing to feel so comfortable asking personal questions like that. But I wanted to write this down to remember, since I’m working on stories right now that are about parenthood and mental health, and not explicitly about being childfree, because I don’t want to write about that (too vulnerable), but...I want to keep record of this interaction. 

How he asked if J and I have children. No. You better get busy get some buns in the oven!! he actually said. I smiled politely and said, “Oh, we aren’t planning to have kids.” Incredulous why. “Many reasons. I just am not interested. It’s not for me.” So he told me about how he has an ex-wife like me, who didn’t want kids because all she cared about was her career and making money. I’m familiar with the trope. I told him “well, reproductive choice is very personal. Everyone has very personal reasons for having or not having children.” It was interesting to me, though not surprising, that he would assume that pursuing career and success might be the only reasons a woman might not want to reproduce. It’s interesting to me, even now, how so many articles keep coming out about millennials and the birth rate and the pandemic etc and they only root around for the obvious (and very real, but obvious) fears about climate change and the economy. It seems to boggle the mind that someone might simply...not want to bear fruit. 

[sbs44]

how to read poetry

“why not approach poetry like a hungry person walking through a grocery store, throwing anything and everything into your cart that looks like it might taste good?“ -How to write a poem (https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/how-to-write-a-poem/) 

Honestly, for a long long time this has been my approach to all learning and reading. I just supermarket sweep all manner of things into my cart and I absorb and go starry-eyed, and would like to think that I grow. I read an article, and someone mentions this book, I stick it on my Goodreads “want to read” list. Someone references a film, I put it on my “to watch” list. I am constantly having my eyes opened, and screw you if you are aghast that I don’t know so many famous directors and literary superstars. I know what I know, and I use my building blocks to swing further, climb higher, but I can only go one step at a time. 

[sbs44]

What had to be done was clear

https://electricliterature.com/neighbors-anthony-tognazzini/

I am reading and re-reading this short piece of fiction by Anthony Tognazzini for a short task related to a part-time job I am applying for. The task is to write a hed and sub-hed for the story. My process has always been to no-shame, rack the brain, put every conceivable combination on the paper, good, bad, insane. Somewhere in the heap is a winner, or at least a contender. 

Hed: We are watching her for her own good

We only want what’s best for her

We peeked through her window for the town’s collective wellbeing

It’s for her own good

We are watching

Inside she is reading and drinking tea, much to our chagrin

How Dare She

Dek: Hamilah Marcus recommends “Neighbors” by Anthony Tognazzini

This piece is so good, especially on second read. The details, the high pleasure of them, like when I order a fancy cocktail or coffee at an establishment and hold the cup so daintily, taking tiny sips of the foam, admiring the taste, the texture, the obvious beauty that I might overlook at first by being so taken with the experience at large. I cried on first read, it builds to such a crescendo. And it feels so true, that hatred and possessiveness inside most men. 

[sbs44]

this is a test

My perception has been that... no one uses Tumblr anymore. If that’s true, then I’m gonna start blogging again, but maybe I’ll just switch to my anonymous username. I’m kind of tired of the same things coming up again and again, feeling like I’m too much, like I’m not allowed to express myself, etc. I have worked hard at trying to create and strengthen friendships that can give me space to express the heart stuff, but it’s not really in the cards for me. So writing things down and sharing them in a safe way, is such a cathartic practice for me. I just don’t want to be judged for it. So I’ve started using a secondary, private Instagram account that I don’t allow anyone to follow me on (I guess that makes it a diary, but it takes care of the impulse I have to post on social media, because that is pretty engrained at this point. Insta stories for no one somehow deliver more than jotting it down in a paper diary), and I figure, I can start penning and posting whatever the heck I want in a new/old private corner of the internet. Stay tuned, or rather...don’t. <3  

[sbs44]

My dream is to have a daily routine like Patti Smith’s.

“Patti Smith: New York Is No Longer Welcoming to Artists and Dreamers” - Elle, by Kristina Rodulfo

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I gave myself a month. I assigned myself 50 pages a day. These were commitment devices that would have once filled me with shame. If I was reading 50 pages a day because I’d decided to, that meant I was failing to have the kind of unforced experience I’d come to fetishize as “authentic” absorption: as if the book would exert a kind of gravitational force to which I’d be utterly enthralled. But in reading those 50 pages a day, I found that any binary I might draw between absorption and intentionality was far more porous than I’d imagined: I moved constantly between rapture and effort; often these modes were entangled and simultaneous. That month of commitment ended up mattering not because I was always immersed but because I often wasn’t, and kept reading anyway — because I was perpetually recommitting myself to the novel, and because that recommitment was an act with great wingspan and grit. I was invited into a different understanding of what authentic literary absorption might look like: neither struggle nor bliss but a strange weave of the two; not completely “losing myself” in a book but feeling myself more deeply in the act of reckoning with it — becoming aware of my own attention, becoming an agent in its application. Difficulty often becomes an engine forcing intimacy between a book and its reader; that expenditure of effort and attention becomes a kind of glue. I don’t like to unthinkingly valorize the impenetrable, but I do appreciate the attempt it necessitates — the duration and density of that process. When we read a book that requires that effort — when the act of reading becomes rigorous and self-aware, rather than effortless and transparent — we get to have a history with what we’ve given ourselves to, a history etched into us by the demanding friction of its difficulty.

Leslie Jamison on reading books, “Do We Mistake Inaccessibility for Brilliance?” - New York Times Sunday Book Review

[nuclearbummer]

[sbs44]

Gordan Ramsay’s advice to a cook who wrote in on Reddit - 

I’m working in a Michelin kitchen right now, toiling away, hours after hours, days after days. My dreams are nowhere to be found as I scale and portion salmon after salmon, shelling pods after pods of broad beans.

The closest thing to feeling any kind of joy I get is those rare moments when I walk through the dining room near the end of service to get some coffee for everyone, and there will be a few diners left, idly sampling those little petite fours that we’ve painstakingly ensured are all perfectly round, identical, and just plain delicious. Then, one of them will stop the conversation they’re having with their company, look up from their food and say, ‘Thank you, chef. This is delicious,’ and making the previous 14-hours of sweat and tears kind of worthwhile.

My question is, how did you deal with it? How the fuck did you deal with all the bullshit, Gordon?

//

I related so much, because you could just sub “writing” for cooking. Taking time off is so crucial, even though I’m still learning to not feel guilt when I do take time off. I still recoil when someone says it looks like I’m “having fun,” and I’m retraining myself to not bark back, “FUN? FUN? It looks like I’m having fun?! I’m working my arse off, man. Lay off.” Learning to be more chill.  

via Fine Dining Lovers

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One of the most delicate moments between the writer of a personal essay and the person commissioning or editing it can come in the form of a request for more details. "When I think a writer is holding back, I try to find out why by asking questions,” Martin explained of her process. “Lots of gentle yet detailed questions. A first pass on an essay might be nothing but me asking questions in the comments, along with a few strategic cuts; no line edits yet.” Chung said that she tries to frame questions like these in terms of her own curiosity. “I try not to push for more personal details,” she emphasized. “I might say ‘Do you want to write more about this particular thing?’ or ‘I had [these questions] reading your piece’–but that doesn’t mean the writer has to address all of those things in the essay. I can ask more questions, but ultimately the writer has to be in control of what and how much they share.”

The Washington Post - From private experience to public testament, how editors handle personal essays by Alyssa Rosenberg