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@stillthecleverestever
I think this is my last post on tumblr. If you want to find me, I’m on Instagram: @ashequest or on substack ashequest17, or threads ashe_quest.
Thanks for all the years here, it was a good run and I met many amazing people I’m still friends with.
All the love. 🖤
*
joy sullivan
A good day.
I’m sitting on my couch drinking coffee and listening to my favorite show, Old Gods of Appalachia (season 5 if you follow it!)
I’m on the cusp of a huge event tomorrow. My first baby is getting married. There’s a LOT still to do.
I have an unexpected but thrilling job interview in the middle of today that I am greatly manifesting I WILL get. Dropped into my lap at a time of great need and would be a game changer for me.
Before that, I have coffee and donuts with my mom, my eldest, her younger sister, and my middle son. A treasured moment of quiet and celebration for our family. My mom lives in Philly and we haven’t seen her for a collective four years.
Then after the interview I have a long drive home, food to make for tomorrow, flowers and pumpkins and decorative gourds to pick up.
My mind is so filled with anxiety and saying “it’s going too fast! I don’t have time to process!” But I’m comforting my body. Reminding myself that, even though it’s all a lot, I don’t need to dissociate.
Stay in your body and savor every moment, even the anxiety. Even the busyness. It’s all a part of it. This is life. I do have time to process this, I have all the time I need, and it’s not going too fast.
“Remember, remember, this is now and now and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.” ~ Sylvia Plath
Don’t you love how I turn up every few months and just write five million posts of vulnerability and then disappear?? 🫠
This is just stream of consciousness note taking to barf up my brain, don’t be alarmed for me. 😂
I’m also going through Melody Beattie’s book Codependent No More for about the fifth time, a thing I like to do for myself every few years, and it always brings up these nuggets of self truth that I alone can fix in me. It’s a good self practice, mining my own depths, but always jarring.
There was some other point I was going to add which I’ve now forgotten.
Like, who am I? And who do I want to be? And what do I want?
Being raised in the evangelical world as a “girl” who then grows up to be a queer masc “woman” (human? what the fuck am I?) just leaves me feeling so much despair and grief and desolation. And isolation. The only thing I’m sure of is that I long for therapy. The irony is that one of my BEST best friends is a therapist and seeing her would obviously be unethical and yet she’s the one I’d trust to talk to.
All the things I was taught are so fucked up and I don’t know how to change that perspective. In myself. And also, I’m codependent, and in a way I never thought I was. I thought codependency was being small and acquiescing, and it can be, but it can also be controlling. Trying to manage challenging partners. Excusing their embarrassing behavior and gaslighting your closest people by trying to tap dance and clean it up. Not telling the truth to yourself. Or others.
I’m just so confused. Life- the whole of life- is so different from what I thought it would be, was taught it would be, dreamed it would be. Some people get it, and some people don’t, and some people is me, and man that sucks so much.
I started listening to the audiobook of Jen Hatmaker’s new book Awake and it has me questioning myself about so many things that it’s confusing and healing and just… deeply provoking. But in a good way. I think. Maybe.
The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
Tennessee Williams
Angels of the Get-Through
by Andrea Gibson
This year is the the hardest of your whole life. so hard you cannot see a future, most days. The pain is bigger than anything else. Takes up the whole horizon, no matter where you are. You feel unsafe, you feel unsaved. Your past so present you can feel your baby teeth. Sitting on the couch, you swear your feet don’t reach the floor. You keep remembering the first time you saw a bird’s nest Held together by an old shoe lace and scraps of a plastic bag You knew the home of a person could be built like that A lot of things you’d rather throw away You keep worrying you’re taking up too much space. I wish you’d let yourself be the Milky Way Remember when I told you I was gonna become a full-time poet And you paid my rent for three years? Best Friend, Angel of the get-through. All living is storm chasing. Every good heart has lost its roof. Let all the walls collapse at your feet, Scream “timber” when they ask you how you are. “Fine” is the suckiest word. It is the opposite of HERE Here is the only place left on the map Here is where you learn laughter can go extinct and come back I am already building a museum For every treasure you unearth in the rock bottom Holy vulnerable cliff God mason, heart heavier than all the bricks Say this is what the pain made of you An open, open, open road An avalanche of feel it all Don’t ever let anyone tell you, you are too much Or it has been too long Whatever keeps a stutterer from stuttering when he sings a song, you are made of that thing That unbreakable note That photograph of you at five years old, the year you ran away from school, because you wanted to go home. You are almost there. You are the same compass you have always been You are the same friend who never left my side during my worst year You caught every tantrum I threw with your bare hands chucked it back at that blood moon said “it’s okay, everyone’s survival looks a little bit like death sometimes” I wrote a poem called “Say Yes” while I was cursing your name For not letting me go. Best friend, this is what we do. We gather each other up. We say, the cup is half yours and half mine. We say alone is the last place you will ever be. We say tonight let’s just stay inside reading Pema Chodron while everyone else is out on the town Pema will say, “only to the degree we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found” You’ll say Pema is so wise. And I’ll say yes she is, and we are too.
Angels of the get-through. We are too.
This past week I got a drunken phone call/voicemail from the only “dad” I ever knew.
I didn’t even recognize his voice, it was the most slurry I’ve ever heard it, and only one tone sounded familiar.
My two younger sister’s dad. The one I called “my dad” until Thursday when he said “I miss you, I love you, bye bye” after telling him two years ago that I’d “done enough, loved him enough, don’t contact me.”
I talked to a couple dear friends this week (you know who you are) about the call, and I came to this epiphany:
What exactly does he miss? It certainly was never me. He never spent enough time with me to know me.
My older sister and I share the same dad, who we never met, and never knew, and who died in 2011.
He was my dad. For good or for ill. I never met him, and I’m left with only his brother, my (our) uncle, to process who he was and what he was like.
And it sucks, and that’s life, and I’m okay. Even if I cry sometimes (like tonight).
The guy I lived with was never my dad, and the dad I had, I never met.
That’s life. That’s the way it goes. And somehow there is healing and joy in that knowing.
ICE was out all over last night. Sightings of unmarked white vans, cop cars, and pickup trucks in rows. Just waiting.
It’s not that there was anything to celebrate, but, how disgusting to be out trolling for humans on the 4th of July. It feels grossly ironic, and evil.
Oh no. I’m accidentally addicted to The Gilded Age on Max.
Never mind! It’s a trash show! (In a bad way not a good way!)
Oh no. I’m accidentally addicted to The Gilded Age on Max.
Look! I ate food!
Today I went to my adult kids (21 and 19) apartment to visit. When I used their bathroom there was no toilet paper left, and I briefly thought about not changing the roll because MAAAAN… karma. 😂
I think the worst part about J blocking me is that I know down to my toes I tried my very fucking best and she didn’t. She never approached me about anything that might have been bothering her that we could have cleared up together. I would have listened to anything and taken accountability, and that wasn’t what she wanted to do for herself. I would love to be true friends with her. We’re fucking moms together with R!! It’s the feeling that I was betrayed by a person who didn’t want to be held accountable as much as *I* wanted to be held accountable. It’s the feeling that I was willing and ready to go the distance and she wasn’t. That she saw my questions as being jabs when I meant them in love.
Some people are not willing to look at themselves fully and honestly and nakedly, like I am, and that fucking hurts.
