Whoever First Said That Poetry Is Dead Failed To Provide The Autopsy. If Poetry Is Dead, What A Rowdy

— I'm glad your sickness, Marina Tsvetaeva (translated from the Russian by Elaine Feinstein)

Rough Scribbles for a painting. Hopefully I can start this weekend. #graffiti #painting #canvas #bird #kingfisher #wings #flying #feathers

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.’

Franz Wright, from God's Silence; "Why Is the Winter Light"

[Text ID: Empty me of the bitterness and disappointment of being nothing but myself]

Journal Prompts

All the following questions were found from PsychCentral in the article 64 Journaling Prompts for Self-Discovery. I’m going to be using them in my next following posts

Who do you trust most? Why?

What are your strengths in relationships?

How do you draw strength from loved ones?

What do you value most in relationships?

What three important things have you learned from previous relationships?

What five traits do you value most in partners?

How do you show compassion to others? How can you extend that same compassion to yourself?

What are three things that work well in your current relationship? What are three things that could be better?

What boundaries could you set in your relationships to safeguard your own well-being? (*****This is particularly going to be a challenging one for me. I’ll get into that later.)

What do you most want your children to learn from you?

How can you better support and appreciate your loved ones?

What does love mean to you? How do you recognize it in a relationship?

List three things you’d like to tell a friend, family member, or partner?

What values do you consider most important in life? How to do your actions align with those values?

What three changes can you make to live according to your personal values?

Describe yourself using the first 10 words that come to mind. Then list 10 words that you’d like to use to describe yourself. List a few ways to transform those descriptions into reality.

What do you appreciate most about your personality? What aspects do you find harder to accept?

Explore an opinion or two that you held in the past but have since questioned or changed. What led you to change that opinion? 

List three personal beliefs that you’re willing to reconsider or further explore.

Finish this sentence: “my life would be incomplete without….”

Describe one or two significant life events that helped shape you into who you are today.

When do you trust yourself most? When do you find it hard to have faith in your instincts? (***Interesting. See to post 1).

What three things would you most like others to know about you?

What difficult thoughts or emotions come up most frequently for you?

Which emotions do you find hardest to accept? How do you handle these emotions?

Describe a choice you regret. What did you learn from it? (***)

What parts of daily life cause stress, frustration, or sadness? What can you do to change those experiences?

What are three things that can instantly disrupt a good mood and bring you down? What strategies do you use to counter these effects?

What are three self-defeating thoughts that show up in your self-talk? How can you reframe them to encourage yourself instead?

What go-to coping strategies help you get through moments of emotional or physical pain?

Who do you trust with your most painful and upsetting feelings? How can you connect with them when feelings low?

What do you fear most? Have your fears changed throughout life?

Describe your favorite thing to do when feeling low.

What three ordinary things bring you the most joy?

List three strategies that help you stay present in your daily routines. Then, list three strategies to help boost mindfulness in your life.

How do you prioritize self-care?

Describe two or three things you do to relax.

What aspects of your life are you most grateful for?

How do you show yourself kindness and compassion each day?

Write a short love letter to some object or place that makes you happy.

What place makes you feel most peaceful? Describe that place using all five senses.

List 10 things that inspire or motivate you.

What are your favorite hobbies? Why?

What parts of life surprised you most? What turned out the way you expected it would?

What three things would you share with your teenage self? What three questions would you want to ask an older version of yourself?

List three important goals. How do they match up to your goals from 5 years ago?

Do your goals truly reflect your desires? Or do they reflect what someone else (a parent, partner, friend, etc.) wants for you?

What helps you stay focused and motivated when you feel discouraged?

What do you look forward to most in the future?

Identify one area where you’d like to improve. Then, list three specific actions you can take to create that change.

How do you make time for yourself each day?

What do you most want to accomplish in life?

List three obstacles lying in the way of your contentment or happiness. Then, list two potential solutions to begin overcoming each obstacle.

Obviously there are not 64 questions listed here. I’ve eliminated any regarding work. Just not the topic of conversation that I’m wanting to have right now.

Call this whatever you like, I can’t come up with anything I would be satisfied with

Love is actually truly beautiful…weird, painful, but beautiful. And I think that’s nice. You know, we INTPs aren’t unfeeling robots, we truly feel emotions extremely intensely. It is just more rare for us to feel something than it might be for others. But that’s exactly what makes our emotions maybe a little more special, at least for us. They are the proof of our life, of the fact that we’re breathing and living, the proof that we actually don’t just fake all of what we are. My true emotions, the way they overwhelm me, the way I can’t understand them, they bring me comfort. They are something I cannot understand or grasp, and I absolutely love it. Finally something else takes control over me, and somehow it brings me rest. At those moments I stop thinking. I just stop. And I had no idea I needed it as much as I do. But it’s so peaceful. And so complex. And so depressing, yet uplifting, living in a blue euphoria. Sometimes, emotions become a drug for me. They throw you into a dream, that will never become true, and yet, I think sometimes it is good and important to live in that dream. And it’s okay to feed that dream, to add more moments that meant nothing in reality, but meant the world for you.  Emotions are beautiful. Emotions are something that should be loved, and something that should be feared. They are extremely powerful, and I believe in the strength of emotions more than I believe in the strength of intellect. Emotions are able to show you the truth through the lies they say. And I’m amazed by that.

“It’s always dark. The sky if not grey, is black. The snow thigh high slowly grows waist deep. But the tall woman, her dark shawl pulled taut, walks on anyway. The tall woman walks alone, deeper into the woods among a crowd of trees she finds her place”

— Sujata Bhatt, from “She Finds Her Place”, Collected Poems

I wonder what kind of girl I would be if the patriarchy didn’t exist. If gender roles and stereotypes didn’t stain my entire being. If I didn’t suffer at the hands of misogyny that molded the clay that was me. I wonder what I would do, what I would say, what I would like, what I would crave, what I would be. The likelihood of us being anything close to similar seems slim considering how many things could be different. I just wonder what type of woman I would be if I hadn’t been told from the day I was born how and who I should become. Would I still enjoy wearing makeup if I hadn’t been conditioned to feel better about myself with it on? Would my favorite color still be orange if pink hadn’t been forced on me and I didn’t care to make a point of rejecting it? Would I stand up for myself more if I hadn’t been taught to cater to the comfort of others before prioritizing my own? Would my natural instinct still be to feel wary of those around me if abuse and harassment and assault were not normalized in our society? Would I still want long hair if I hadn't been brainwashed into believing that my beauty is rooted in being feminine, and that my value is rooted in being beautiful? Would I be the same? How much, or how little, would that impossible girl resemble me as I am now? And are my interests and passions genuine—truly mine—or can they all be linked to some expectation to accommodate, some predetermined role to serve, some juxtaposing desire to please a system I don’t even like. Do I actually love video games as much as I think I do, or do I only like them because I think it makes me appear cooler to men? Do I actually want to get married as much as I think I do, or do I only want to because historically that was where the female fit in? Do I actually find solace in journaling as much as I think I do, or do I only find solace in it because it is the only time I can share my traumatic experiences without being called a crazy attention seeker? There is so much I wonder about, which parts of me are real and which have been tinkered with. Which is just pure me, and which is because of something else. A factor of the patriarch. Of course I’ll never know, but that truth does not keep me from being curious about the girl who does not suffer from the wrath of an internalized male gaze and the burden of internalized misogyny. I bet she is lovely—free of the shackles—and I hope she feels at peace.

— alhwrites

“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. 

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

— Winston Churchill