I Think If I Were Marooned On A Desert Island I Would At Least Be Genre Aware About It

Kazu Saitou (Japanese, born 1960)

@kazu.saitou.3

Angus McEwan (b.1963) - Dawn’s Early Light. Watercolour on Fabriano.

My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

So my dad and I agreed, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn't made you stronger than you were before, you're probably not done healing. You've got to give these things time to set.

Richard Siken

Kyle Dunn (American, 1990) - Match (2022)

Arthur Claude Strachan (detail)

I actually squealed along side my inner 14 year old self at this scene out loud. Going off the DSP after this scene because I’m not mentally ill anymore. It’s fixed all my problems in life.

"Old Town Square at Night" by Józef Pankiewicz (1892) vs the same place on November 28th 2023 (Warsaw)

Ernest Martin Hennings - Thistle Blossoms (1929)

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