When You Decide To Touch A Woman

I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

Sylvia Plath

Feel fear? Feel sadness? Feel lonely or wounded? If you can turn it into rage, you can use it as fuel. Get mad and you’ll get up in the morning.

But somehow I’ve become a person who speaks sharply to everyone around her. Who wants to scream at children, then break down in tears. Whose rage is always written on her face.

You’re one of the angriest people I know.

Anger is part of the engine that makes things happen, but it’s savage and dangerous. It also burns things down.

I never meant to turn that girl into a forest fire.

— Molly McCully Brown, from “What We Are,” Places I’ve Taken My Body

“Nobody knows as yet what is normal. We only know what is customary.”

- Dr. Harry Benjamin

Spoiler alert: there IS no “normal.” There is: common, typical, etc. Normal is a judgment and a social control mechanism. 

I’m Not/I Am

I’m Not…

I’m not the girl who would tie your tongue.

I’m not the girl who turns your head.

I’m not the girl you’d ask to prom

Or even on a date.

I’m not the girl who likes frills and lace.

I’m not the girl who’d be flirty or flighty.

I’m not the girl who you would daydream about.

I’m not the girl who everyone sees,

The one who beams beauty, radiance, and so carefree.

I’m not the one to be in the foreground.

I’m not visible to anyone.

I Am…

I am the girl you’d pass in the halls,

Who’d probably like you from afar, but never say a word.

I am the girl who’d sketch or write,

My words never reaching your heart or eyes.

I’m the girl who stands in the rain

That mixes with her tears and drowns out her cries.

I am the girl who is always the second choice.

Why on earth would I ever be the first?

I am the girl some would torment

Because I’m different and hide in the background.

I’m the girl that’s invisible to you.

The one you’d never remember until we meet again.

“Maybe, the only thing that has to make sense about being somebody’s friend is that you help them be their best self on any given day. That you give them a home when they don’t want to be in their own.”

— Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X (via thebookquotes)

This mere chaotic peace between wanting to be the greatest and wanting to rot in the room all alone for the rest of eternity.

Loneliness is a Dangerous Thing

‘Everyone knows there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul.’                     - Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Rootlessness and homelessness, though similar in nature, are also quite different. A person who is rootless may very well have a home, but does not have a sense of belonging, they identify themselves as ‘the other’. 

Since the end of World War II, migration has increased significantly with people opting to set up their life somewhere new, whether this be for a job, education, religion, or whatever opportunity this may provide. A person disentangles themselves from the ties and bonds that they have with one place and form this relationship somewhere new… this is now home.

But home for you may not always be home for the new family that you set up. I have mentioned this before in another post so I won’t go into it in too much detail, but when looking at those with extremist and ‘radical’ thoughts, we find that they are often children of those who have migrated. The parents have chosen to build home in a new foreign land and build a relationship with that place, but the relationship is not so straight forward. This relationship is a half way house between assimilating and holding onto one’s culture; the migrant chooses which parts of the new culture to adopt and which parts of their old culture to hold onto. This might vary from eating and drinking habits, clothing, social life, it could be anything. 

The child of the migrant however, having not chosen but instead having been brought up with this conflict between the two cultures feels lost. This is something I have thought about for a long time, but Arendt put it into the words I have been searching for for so long. 

The child feels a sense of rootlessness. 

Arendt argues that those who feel rootless or homeless will seek out a home for themselves at any cost, which can have disastrous consequences. 

She states that for an individual who feels rootless and homeless, often with this comes the feeling of having an existence that is not meaningful or fruitful. To find this sense of belonging, individuals often turn to exclusionary movements and groups, which actually only increases the feeling of alienation and rootlessness. Now they are in a group that only contains people such as themselves, perhaps from one place, class, religion, etc. all together feeling like outsiders, because of the absence of others of a different background. 

Arendt says that uprootedness has been ‘the curse of the modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution’.

Loneliness is a dangerous thing. When a person is lonely, when they feel their roots are not in any ground but sort of drifting from place to place, a person is not themselves. Who are we, after all, without a background against us? Just an entity, perhaps? 

‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.’

“Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.”

— Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)

I can't live as I once did, telling people that I was doing fine and desperately wanting them to wade through the language and see that I was in pain.

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance