To Be...

Nicole

[whoneverknewlove]

Support Nicole Newman's Overnight Walk Fundraising

I'm participating in the Overnight Walk in Boston on June 22. Please share in my vision to #StopSuicide and donate today!

This year I am going to be participating in the Out of the Darkness Overnight walk on June 22 to help raise funds for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I would really appreciate it if you could donate to this incredibly worthy cause!

What this cause means to me: I struggled for most of my teenage years with anorexia, clinical depression and attempted suicide. I was lucky to have friends and family who saw my fight and who fought for me. Without them it would have been impossible for me to get the help I needed to be able to be here today. I was lucky to find a team of doctors who were able to assist me and get me healthy again. I want to take part in this walk to both remember what I have grown from, as well as to help raise funds to allow others in crisis access to the help that I was lucky enough to have. Many I know around me have also been affected by suicide and mental health issues, and this walk is also to honor the legacy that those people have left behind in my life and in the life of people that I care about more than anything in the world.

Thank you so much for caring about a cause that is so unbelievably important.

[whoneverknewlove]

https://soundcloud.com/lolita21/im-into-you-live-instruments

[whoneverknewlove]

https://soundcloud.com/lolita21/im-into-you

[whoneverknewlove]

I feel like something that I once knew inside me is nothing more than a shell, being tossed over and over again on the shore. Gradually turning into sand.  I thought I lost my words, that they had tangled themselves up with my sadnesses and drifted somewhere far out of reach with them.  Maybe, though, the words aren’t gone. Inside me I wrote dictionaries of sadness once. They were filled and the pages were crumbling from use, the smell of old books existed from the start. But now these dictionaries collect dust. Little bunnies hopping around at their feet whenever the wind happens to blow them open again, those few days where I remember the dictionaries I once spent so long buried in.  I wonder if my words are still here, it’s just I haven’t learnt them yet. I haven’t learned how to speak of things that are good, how to describe a smile, how to describe jigsaw piece bodies. Maybe I need to craft a new language. My sadness was not my words. Nor were my words my sadness. So as one poured slowly out of me, the other may have stayed. Waiting again to fill a library.  

[pincuo]

[whoneverknewlove]

I’ve learned more about what society believes masculinity to be through the drinks I order than I have in, I think, any other way. I am a proud drinker of caramel lattes, caramel macchiatos, Smirnoff Ices, cocktails and margaritas. And I am constantly amazed at the fact that, apparently, this defines femininity. That to drink such things is “girly”. 

The drinks have neither sex, nor gender. They just taste good. And men and women alike deny themselves the privilege of a tasty drink because they don’t want to be... girly?  A male friend of mine ordered a white peppermint mocha one day and said “don’t judge me for being a white girl”. And I looked at him in amazement and simply said. 

“If your sense of masculinity is fragile enough to feel threatened by a flavoured coffee, maybe you need to relook what it means to be a man.”  Don’t let society tell you what you can or cannot drink based on ridiculous gender ascriptions. It’s just a liquid, you’ll pee it out soon enough. 

[whoneverknewlove]

Sometimes the world turns itself around and inside out. Each year we watch fire raining from the sky, celebrating the end of one Puppy Calendar and the beginning of another. And just as strange and beautiful as it is to watch fire rain, it is just as unbelievable to think about the fact that I am here to watch it at all. I spent so long not wanting to be. I never thought I'd see 2014. Let alone 2016. And yet here I am, several Puppy Calendars later. And every day I am so so happy that I am still here, still crossing off days adorned by cute little dogs. Still watching the world turn in and out on itself. If I could tell the old me that I would go into 2016 feeling the most incredible love, the most amazing happiness, the most excitement for what I do and most importantly the deepest love for myself and who I am, I think the old me would have been able to see the fireworks through the eyes that I now can. It's the most beautiful and complex and simple thing.

[whoneverknewlove]

I want to capture this feeling so that I can never forget it. To wrap it up beneath my sheets and hold it there to keep me warm for the times when you can't be there instead. I feel so full. As though inside of me a forest has started to grow. And inside that forest are the lives and understandings and feelings of every tree and animal. But really it's just me. Whole at last. I used to think that love was about digging out all of the little plants trying to grow inside me and planting them in front of someone else. I was left empty. But now I see that you are a forest. And that I am a forest. And together we can grow.

[whoneverknewlove]

https://soundcloud.com/lolita21/chasing-pavements-soundalike

[alicante-lullaby]

[theanimalblog]

[tastefullyoffensive]

[whoneverknewlove]

[the-awesome-quotes]

[whoneverknewlove]

Red

Red in the morning, shepherd’s heed warning. Red at night, shepherd’s delight. A reflection of the orange and cranberry juice I have spilled fills the sky. And yet, gloriously, it doesn’t drip down, doesn’t require cleaning. I wonder to myself how many hearts have combined beneath this beautiful artwork, how many lives have been colored by this shepherd’s delight.  I open my mouth to taste the Sex on the Beach of the evening. Sweet and intoxicating, my body moving into a state of drunken excitement for the natural mop up of this spill. The fade to black.  His fingers lift mine up and for a moment our skin is stained with falling sun. We too are the passing between two phases. The beautiful transgression from day to night. How rapidly it fades, nature cleaning this innocent mess it made. I sometimes wish I could catch the sun on its fall down, stop it. Hold it there to keep up this naive moment.  But, inevitably it falls.  As, I guess, do we. 

[daydreamsandirony-deactivated20]

[floatingiseasy]