#haley nahman

[hiding0utinadream]

[luxe-pauvre]

What does it mean to participate and benefit from a culture you also want to denounce? Is denouncement enough? It’s a question that’s dominated another arena of online discourse over the last year: literary criticism. There was Lauren Oyler’s viral criticism of Jia Tolentino’s popular book Trick Mirror, where she accused Tolentino of pointing out problems in culture as a means to an end, as if she had no option to actually resist them through behavior. “Tolentino’s elective self-confinement,” Oyler wrote, “is supposed to make her seem like a martyr, but what she sells is not herself; it’s a shoddy mode of thinking that says everything a person does… remains a matter of ‘survival’ rather than a demonstration of priorities and desires.” You’ll find a similar line of thinking among those who defend ‘selling out’ with the idea that it’s everyone’s right to “get their bag,” no matter how much doing so compromises their stated moral framework. Last month, in a piece for The New Yorker called “Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?,” Katy Waldman made a similar point to Oyler, but about novelists instead of essayists. “These self-conscious times have furnished us with a new fallacy,” Waldman writes. “Call it the reflexivity trap. This is the implicit, and sometimes explicit, idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance.”

Haley Nahman, #24: The Emily Ratajkowski effect

[noodledesk]

#164: Rethinking “self-care”

Especially what it's missing

My friend Michelle did that for me a few months ago. She came to my apartment and watched me clean out my coat closet, offering opinions and words of encouragement while tucked between pillows on my couch. Technically speaking, I was capable of doing this on my own, but for unknown reasons, felt unable to do it. Her presence transformed the chore into something else—a creative project, a laugh. My college roommate and I had a term for this, “quiet company,” coined when we discovered it was inexplicably easier to do things with someone else hanging around, even if they didn’t technically help at all. Sometimes I forget what social creatures we are. How much of a difference it can make to not be alone—to help or be helped through the mere act of coexistence. - Haley Nahman

[dk-thrive]

I think this is very sweet and pure. Almost spiritual.

“It helped that my life slowed down. Quitting my media job played a big part in that, then Covid, then my cat’s sickness, and then eventually it felt like a choice—to invest more in my immediate surroundings, to learn to cook, to read more, to post less, to dream differently. The relief in that shift was recognizing how much the little stuff always mattered, even when I treated it like a nuisance. These days I really do believe that chores give my life meaning. Not just because they present texture and struggle and a necessary counterpart to rest (all true), but because maintenance is in itself profound. Caring for ourselves, for other people, for our homes, for plants and other animals—these are the unfinishable projects of our lives. We do them over and over not to conquer them, or for personal gain, but to maintain and nourish them, with no greater expectation. Given how swayed humans are by the pursuit of growth, wealth, ownership, and power, I think this is very sweet and pure. Almost spiritual.”

— Haley Nahman, #118: Mark this off your to-do list (Maybe Baby, October 18, 2022)

[wnine]

I’d crawl into your bed and there we would lay, our faces inches apart, our legs entangled and our minds engaged for hours. 3 a.m. came and passed, then 4, then 5. We had a knack for saying everything except for everything we really felt. How we existed on so little sleep those days still confounds me. We were all nerves, all blood and guts and adrenaline. You were skipping to work in pure joy, you told me, and I was running out of reasons not to love you.

Haley Nahman, Love in quarantine

[ladylachic]

La Chic/ Street fashion

[unconquerablesoul7]

Why I Ended a Happy Relationship

By: Haley Nahman

Full link:

http://www.manrepeller.com/2017/03/should-i-break-up-with-my-boyfriend.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mrxbustle

I knew I loved him when, a few months into our relationship, I told him I had sharp stomach pains and he tenderly suggested I go sit on the toilet and wait. The memory of that day still makes me laugh, because in that moment, I remember feeling loved in a way I hadn’t known possible. And I felt that intense, transformative emotion while perched atop a toilet.

That was the special thing about him: He never made me feel like I had to be someone else. Something about that felt infinite. It still does.

When I ended our relationship six years later, the weight of that infinity crushed me. Worse, it crushed him. Our spirits felt separate in a way they hadn’t since we’d met. It was an unfamiliar kind of pain. More visceral than all of that was the lump of uncertainty that sat in my throat. Because I wasn’t breaking up with him, per se, I was breaking up with the quiet war I’d been waging against myself for years about whether I should. And while I hated the ambiguity of it, in time that uncertainty felt like a decision in its own right.

We were happy. The comfy love, the deep respect, the weird quirks, the shared dreams, the comedic rapport. The memory-bloated cocoon we’d built around ourselves and the familiar rhythm with which we inhabited it. So often I thought I could stay there forever. We were us. We were perfect. Why would I leave? I’d asked myself that question a hundred times. The problem with persuading myself to stay was never that I didn’t have the data points, it was that I had to do it in the first place.

The first seed of doubt was planted a year in. It made a habit of returning every once in a while — weeks, months or maybe a year later — like an old, unwelcome friend. With it came the disorienting maiming of my own perception. Maybe this wasn’t it, maybe we weren’t forever, maybe I wanted something else entirely. The thoughts always hit me like a ton of bricks. Panic-stricken, I took care to fall back in love. Quick.

I loathed that roller coaster. All in one day and not the next, with nothing to blame but my own twisted paradigm shift. It felt like such a waste of energy to experience, each time, a tiny hypothetical heartbreak. I was desperate to make it stop. I reasoned that my doubts were delusional, anxious, a side effect of unrealistic expectations. Quietly I feared, with every fiber of my being, that they were my undeniable truth.

Relationships are hard, I’d mentally counter. Doubts are normal, I’d repeat in my head. If I really don’t want to break up, I’d write in my journal, that must mean I want to stay. And so I would. And we’d cook a cozy dinner, goof around and snuggle into bed like we’d done so many nights before. And I’d mistake the myopia of pain avoidance for the utopia of doing what felt right. I’d convince myself that safety and comfort were the same as fulfillment.

One day, after years of this intermittent cycle, I confessed to my mom I was having the old familiar feelings. It was a hot summer afternoon when I realized, in tears, I was done. Not with him — I still loved him a lot — but with it. The battle. The conflict. The denial of what I was beginning to recognize was my gut screaming for my attention. Suddenly it became stunningly clear that no matter how robust my list of reasons to be with him, none of it mattered if I simply didn’t want to.

It’s easy to misconstrue reluctance to leave as desire to stay. Especially when the source of our itch feels frustratingly nebulous and capable of destroying something precious. It doesn’t help that, as women, we’re constantly fed the notion that we ought to hold on to something good. To listen to everyone but ourselves. Cheryl Strayed of the column Dear Sugar once famously said, “Go because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough.” Those words had a profound effect on me when I first read them, but what I didn’t understand until much later was the voice saying go wasn’t some mysterious desire I couldn’t help but follow. It was me at my most honest.

When I eventually ended things, I was plagued with a sadness so intense I almost can’t remember it now. It wasn’t long before the answer to my tortured question — Why would I leave? — began to emerge, no longer handcuffed by fear. With healing and distance, our mismatches came into sharper focus. It all made stupid-beautiful sense. Just as I suspected, and as is so often true in life, clarity was waiting on the other side of the hard part.

[luxe-pauvre]

The primary tenet of neoliberalism as it’s currently employed is the idea that societal problems can be solved through individual action. But we know by now that these issues are systemic and will persist even if the majority of us learn to behave. So what does liberation actually look like? If it’s not simply personal choices—whether as a means to reclaim one’s power, as Ratajkowski might argue, or as a means of survival, like Tolentino might argue, or in one’s own disinterested pursuit of pleasure, like Stagg might argue—then perhaps it’s something much bigger and disruptive. Something that would challenge our beliefs, and completely revolutionize our desires, rather than simply justify or recontextualize them until we can live with ourselves. At the end of her piece about Natasha Stagg, Husain put it this way: “[If] political agents, rather than exposing venality only to bemoan it as a given, [were] to commit themselves to more emancipatory forms of (ideally collective) action, then it seems reasonable enough to believe that the contours of a desirable career and covetable ‘lifestyle’ might eventually look different from what Stagg as a writer and we, as readers, are currently able to envisage.” I think she means that instead of focusing on “putting the ladder down” so that we may help more people escape the toxic runoff of a toxic culture, we move the ladder to safer ground. Or perhaps get rid of it altogether.

Haley Nahman, #24: The Emily Ratajkowski effect