🛼🍰✍🏻

[stumbling-after-happiness]

For the artists who need to hear it (including me)

You do not need to compete with other artists, you don’t have to play that game. You’re allowed to step away from the pressure to sell work or make things for a business or prove yourself to someone who pays. You can make art because you want to.

[stumbling-after-happiness]

My favourite person, in pen

[stumbling-after-happiness]

Figuring out identity

What am I supposed to do with the parts of me floating untethered?

Do I cast a net,

Hoping to catch their fluidity and drag them in?

How do I understand these fragmented identities

Elusively swimming in a haze?

It seems cruel to try trapping these pieces,

To inspect, clean, and consume them.

Because their beauty rests in mystery,

Away from mundane tasks.

So, aside from snaring them, how do I see these illusive gems?

[artist-henri-martin]

The Lot at St. Cirq-Lapopie, Henri Martin

[animentality]

[guerrillatech]

[unwelcome-ozian]

[stumbling-after-happiness]

I don’t want to sleep. If I sleep, I enter the place where breaking from terrors isn’t a thought.

There, a fever can grip my nerves, yanking my body into the morning. I’ve fought for a life

Where I don’t have to sleep,

Where my experience stays firmly on the surface and I ignore time

Time pulling me by the hair, making me face the farcical darkness.

I will write to buy moments where I’m not risking my relaxed muscles,

Words bob into view to break the seal

But I’ve made a promise,

A promise with biology, genetics, reality,

That I will sleep so that I don’t miss

Future nights to gamble against biology, genetics, reality,

By writing away the weary eyes and heavy body.

[stumbling-after-happiness]

What PMDD is like

It’s when thoughts about my life’s purpose chug into my life like a rubbish truck. They’re slow and immovable when they stop, yet somehow grossly necessary for processing lingering trash in my mind.

Sometimes, the whirring noise, stench and near-lawless dirt stays too long and my senses pine to get out my house. I think the filth will never leave. So, I wait out the siege and eventually the cyclical clanging, beeping, and whirring fades into the distance. Afterwards, a silence floats with birdsong.

Soon, I forget about the disruption for a few weeks. And then one day, I wake to the distant rumble, my body already tensing to the oncoming process.

[stumbling-after-happiness]

Finding Spring Again

Tugging at the edges of spring,

Weeding out winter with muddied hands

Thinking through the gaps

Between erect shoots

Waiting to become flowering tulips.

The sun moving like clock hands on my back

As I tilt my view to windows of the ground

Hacking at fluffy-dead stalks,

Clearing space for the brown

Which promises such persistent green talk.

The compost bin goes from hollowed

To filled.

I roll back crackling grass, following

Secret hollows between leaves.

And in the new spaces,

I let my thoughts wind themselves around budding bulbs.

Facing nature,

Time is no longer a creeping subject

It wafts with the landscape, fertile.

[stumbling-after-happiness]

I feel a frustration with the day in and day out stories that bob about on the surface. Where is the depth? I skim the lines, finding vapid explanations tied to snooty attitudes.

Sometimes, the work brings swooping, voluminous voices. Sometimes, the pebbling syllables land with the right sound, splashing up feelings. But often, I listen to mundane yet over soaked problems, predictable in their vapidity.

I think of people who need light in the murkiness and ask what these words add.

[stumbling-after-happiness]

Slipping back into old habits when my mind is unruly. Sleeping later and later. Taken by a current, grasping out of the past. Fragmented thoughts float to the surface, their tail ends bob just out of reach, like broken twigs in rapids.

[stumbling-after-happiness]

6 and a half ish years ago

I tripped and fell through a long summer. It was shrouded in dirty sheets, moths on cream ceilings, and lucid warm air.

When I think back to that summer, my shaking hand putting a tiny parcel in my mouth, I see someone looking for something to deliver happiness. What I didn’t realise was that a package isn’t the messenger.

For a while, the joy almost, nearly, might have been real. This artificial high was so close to the real thing. It was static, electric light, a little too bright to be comfortable enough. I saw through this yellow-orange glow and stared at an elaborate red-toned and matted carpet. It wasn’t the real sunset I was seeking.

Soon, realising my mistake and taken by the hot air rising, I cried. I cried in a void that didn’t belong to me, an empty place separate from my body.

Outside the bubble I saw wide-eyed faces their cheek muscles slack, knuckles tense. Someone with short curly hair got close to my face, her big pupils betraying her own void. We tried reaching into each other’s black holes, but they were impenetrable to all but the creators.

My teeth clamped themselves as if desperately hugging one another. The tightness felt so natural that I forgot the ache. My jaw hasn’t quite felt the same since, something broke through that night.

As it was past dawn, I smelt my sweat. The stench fired my nostrils. Shivering, the void was replaced by a separate damp river that was slowly mingling with my body. I sat up to mistakes I’d made, clinging to my boyfriend who had been blissfully in a cosy sleep. I cast out the mistake to him and our relationship changed for many months until we learned to trust each other’s bodies and minds again.

And I lie here about 6 and a half years later. I remember me, untethered and uncatchable. I lie next to the same boyfriend, feeling my body’s gravity gently pressing into the mattress. He breathes with a quiet confidence in his sleep. I have found the ground again and haven’t seen the void in over 6 years. Thank goodness for growth.

[stumbling-after-happiness]

On Melatonin

It winds my mind into a lulling lake

Thoughts bob around my ears, peaking with flashes of energy.

Then I swoop lower, down with the melatonin

And my body gives in to time’s tidal rhythm

It’s high time for sleep.

My body drops a few degrees

Into the cooling, cushioning water

With diamond lights glinting for brief moments

Before I slip into darkness.

[landsccape]

[lanndscape]

[stumbling-after-happiness]

For the ones rebuilding their lives

Anyone else tired of rebuilding? Of dismantling your life to renovate the parts you want into it? I know I am. Here’s to the people shovelling through the grimy trauma, faces smeared with flashbacks, clearing space for their dreams.

I see the way your hands pick up another heavy tool, how you practice using it - growing the muscles you need to keep clearing room.