How serious, How gorgeous

[depressed-suicidal-teens]

I have never read something so accurate in my life

[muddaskuntarchive]

not eating as suicide has become a part of my body make up. my appetite has never forgiven me for my attempts

[scurrilizzie]

[serious-gorgeous]

sometimes i ask myself if i'm strong enough to do the work i'm doing now. a "research question" - how does violence circulate through a family or a household? - is not just research, but memory. the answer is there are a million, ordinary ways violence moves and surrounds. the answer is sometimes it moves loudly, sometimes quietly. but i already knew that. the answers bring more questions and more memories. flooding. there is no "life of the mind" that doesn't also affect the body. there is no study of black histories for the sake of knowledge alone, because we already know. so i hope the things i'm learning and doing add up to something else. i hope the answers to the questions I've been asking myself for some time bring some kind of healing to somebody.

[chimis-changa]

It’s a beautiful garden.

[i-am-bi-myself]

Nova & Chantal in Episode 7 - Queen Sugar

[bostonpoetryslam]

But one day your shit will be unbelievably together One day you’ll care a whole lot you’ll always take vitamins And exercise without bragging and words will fit perfectly Into your mouth like an olive soaked in gin

Morgan Parker, “Please Wait (Or, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé),” published in Prelude (via bostonpoetryslam)

[nakeyab]

Born in Flames // Lizzie Borden // 1983

[nakeyab]

Bettye Lane // Select works // 1960-1986

[neverthewiser]

[eliasericson]

spacing out into anxiety as the lights flicker

a commission! this was lots of fun to do! for @artisinmysoul :^)

(if you’re interested in commissioning me, send an e-mail to eliasericson(a)live.se!)

[serious-gorgeous]

mememememememe today

[serious-gorgeous]

flashbacks three days straight. my chest feels empty and full and flying. I am elevated and impaired. feeling too much is a shock I can't cover up. I keep thinking my house is invaded. it has been invaded. I don't want to be here, or anywhere else. I'm trying to live harder than the quiet child I was. but I am still. I am still as soft as I ever was. everything feels too much. I'm not sleeping enough. most days I am someone who believes everything ugly has value. except when I see what is ugliest in me.

[jmjafrx]

For two decades I have tried to untwist what is declared “unthinkable” for women within the “normal” historical narrative of the United States. But as I try to imagine how that history might be truly transformed, I am confronted by how my own training and mindset, my “disciplined” mentality, limit the possibility for other paths. What are the limits of our radical historical imagination?

#Ginzberg, Lori D. “Mainstreams and Cutting Edges.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 2 (2016): 319–25. doi:10.1353/jer.2016.0020. (via jmjafrx)

[jmjafrx]

Enslaved women appear [in the archive] as historical subjects through the form and content of archival documents in the manner in which they lived: spectacularly violated, objectified, disposable, hypersexualized, and silenced. The violence is transferred from the enslaved bodies to the documents that count, condemn, assess, and evoke them, and we receive them in this condition.

#Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. (via jmjafrx)

[serious-gorgeous]

[octopussoir-]

[serious-gorgeous]

women's shampoos be like: coconut; honey/milk; rose; tropical fruits; aloe vera

men's shampoos be like: ARCTIC ICE; DARKNESS; GUNS; TESTOSTERONE; PAIN

[jmjafrx]

“Reconstructing Folks’s life did not simply include stories of success. It also meant trying to understand her pain—a historic pain born out of social conditions, legal policies, and popular constructions that were anti-black, anti-woman, and for the most part anti-black-women. In essence, I found myself often in mourning. Mourn- ing her experiences; mourning her losses; mourning the conditions of those who were enslaved and never freed. In addition to the emotional toll that reclaiming her story claimed on my psyche, I also experienced severe health problems while working on the project. Other scholars have been less public with their experience but can recount the psychological stress and physical symptoms related to producing a book on African American women.”

Millward. “Black Women’s History and the Labor of Mourning.” Souls. 2016. (via jmjafrx)