my Eternal note to Self

yurie nagashima + ariko inaoka

i have to tell you by Dorothea Grossman

from walking home alone at night

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown s2e1 - Jerusalem

We have come to a point where any insistence on expecting others to care for our needs and vice versa [is seen] as being both unrealistic and burdensome. A lot of people don’t see themselves as individuals worth fighting for, even in their private lives and have allowed that to influence how they view themselves within a larger context. Allowing things to just happen to you or others in your community in the face of unrelenting cruelty or even just small discomfort isn’t a sign of maturity as much as it is a sign of a person stripped of their ability to have full access to their humanity. Rage, anger, sadness, frustration, and disappointment are a part of what keeps us agile, along with rest and joy. An unwillingness to engage with those emotions only leads to a reality where one day you realize the only thing you’ve let them do is turn you into a feeble, rigid thing.

No Actually, We Shouldn't Let Them, Hanna Phifer

My boots&me<3

embarrassment has good bones

When everything is embarrassing, that’s a sign that your passion is waking up, and it wants more. Your desire is a tender sprout that wants more water, more sunshine. It wants you to give up on SEEMING happy and in control and to start FEELING joy instead, even when it feels a little too big, even when it makes you cry, even when it forces you to question where you are and why.

Passion and desire and shame and sadness don’t signal that you have to change everything immediately, though. These are sensations that don’t require solutions. Your primary job, in the face of renewed lust for life, is to tolerate the shame of joy.

Because embarrassment is sometimes just a sign that you’ve never lived out in the open before, you’ve never cared more about a feeling than you care about how you’re coming across, you’ve never prioritized happiness over control.

This is why it’s good to take risks that might embarrass you regularly. Because every time you dare to embarrass yourself for the sake of who you are, you’re teaching your body to prioritize joy. You’re teaching yourself to let go of seeming better than the things you love. You’re showing yourself how to feel where you are — to soak in the cool fall air, to breathe in the moon, to love every lopsided moment of your glorious, flawed life.

Shame is a Side Effect of Desire, Heather Havrilesky

"To whom should we pray?

It is for the one who is praying to know, but a true prayer always originates from the deep feeling that there is some reality that encompasses all things, a feeling that there is a hidden harmony behind and within everything. Any prayer that originates from this deep feeling, no matter how misguided it may be, will always receive a response that will enable us to grow spiritually, in understanding, love, truth, and beauty. So when we pray, we pray to that which is. Ultimately, we pray to that which we are."

The Perfume of Silence by Francis Lucille

Le beau mariage (Éric Rohmer, 1982)

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (9.32)

Text ID: I observe how much I have matured since last year despite my belief that I was losing myself, how something strong was born from the painful experiences survived and from the numerous minutes that I believed were wasted.

Take responsibility for your emotions by understanding that your emotions come from your thoughts. Recognize that your interpretations and beliefs about situations, not the situations themselves, create your emotional responses. Acknowledge this connection between thoughts and feelings, so you can gain more control, so you can find peace.

Once you break through your reactive emotionality, you can learn that emotions also come from the body and perhaps even the soul. There are other types of knowing beyond thoughts. If you learn to connect to the world through those deeper emotional responses you may become a genuinely emotional person without needing to hold so tightly onto control

this is probably the former closing dishwasher in me but few things are as personally satisfying as washing the dishes at the end of the night . something something michael chabon “either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of beautiful of routine” quote

the full quote from the mysteries of pittsburgh which has nothing to do with washing dishes but nevertheless has stuck with me

What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.

— Kaveh Akbar, from Martyr!