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The attaining of sleep long ago left the realm of natural act and entered that of black magic.
She claims that she awaited a breakdown and that this breakdown would be welcome. She believed that if the issue, which eluded her, could come to a head, she might then be left broken, but broken free of it. At the same time she very much doubted she would have a breakdown, surmising that there wasn’t anything decisive enough in her character to bring one about, and that she was more the kind of person who would endure pain and suffering indefinitely while just about managing to cope.
Did you know, were you ever able to detect within, the passionate warfare that kept you here?
At the bottom of the webpage that’s telling me all this about your inevitable descent into black putrefaction, it says: If you are struggling, consider online therapy with BetterHelp. You are worth it!
Every word claims an authority and every word craves to be believed, and we read others’ words and we find something to relate to, solace in a shared experience. Yet there doesn’t have to be any experience behind a word. A word can be a shadow not cast by any object.
Try smiling. Smiling strongly cues to the brain that everything is OK, and brings happiness. Lie here and smile; Venus, the Milky Way, the moon, the bats, the pool, the fathomless repository of a lifetime’s memories, the warmth of the bed. Smile. Absurd little row of teeth in the darkness.
In the midst of life we are in death. In the midst of the service station we are in death. In the midst of the service station we are in life. In the midst of death we are in the service station.
I read somewhere that women are far more likely to be told by a doctor that their symptoms are stress, while men’s symptoms will be investigated and more often referred. By stress, it’s meant that women are complicating and compounding their experiences in a way that could be avoidable if only they did breathing and gratitude exercises and stopped being surprised by the inevitabilities of their lives
People are rattling with drugs, you can hear it when they walk in.
Poetry can turn phrases that rotate the world, too small a rotation to cause a public commotion but enough to knock a solitary life a fraction off its axis, such that it will never quite be the same again.
If something doesn’t exist in a language, does it also not exist in the minds of those who speak the language?
That past isn’t no-longer if it’s alive in me now, and by the same token that future isn’t not-yet. Both are now; in imagination, yes, but through imagination they arrive as physical fact, in my neural pathways, and in my emotions whose flavour and intensity affect the rapidity of my heartbeat and the rhythm of my breathing.
You will need to stand guard in case, in case. Forever in case. Standing guard will make the perceived threat seem more real, which necessitates a more vigilant standing guard. Fear ends when the threat is gone, while anxiety, operating in a hall of mirrors, self-perpetuates.
Worry and anxiety are not the same. Worry tends to be more temporary, more object-focused, more concrete, less diffuse than anxiety. Anxiety often has no object and transmutes itself into worry by finding objects to attach to, in order to justify its existence.
In the Lord’s nearness the priest finds a consolation of the highest and purest order, an opportunity to hand over his troubles without dwelling on or drowning in them, and to know that the opportunity is always there, since the Lord is always there. In this knowledge the world, he says, turns out not to be lonely and hostile as our tendencies towards fear would have us believe, but a ‘sphere ruled by love’.
He quotes Clifford: It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
sometimes i love being ignorant and silly. my kneejerk thought was: the dog said that?
And as the night struggles on one hour after another and I’m awake to see them all, awake and exhausted, I crave that feeling you get just before you go to sleep, when everything gives in. The fight ends. The fight of our thinking lives. Something bigger and stranger than yourself takes hold. Rest awaits. The relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse.
My mind is a cacophony. It thinks useful thoughts, and for every useful thought it thinks another four hundred useless, repetitive ones, and of those useless, repetitive ones a significant number are toxic. Shoulds and shoudn’ts. Eviscerations of self. Eviscerations of others. Terrors. Regrets. Reprimands. Old arguments. All of it arrives to me as an unedited babble, a firework continually exploding and dissipating, exploding and dissipating. Unedited, unreadable and impossible to assimilate.
At that a tall figure appears in black with a scythe and says, I have a game. Yeah? Yeah. I won’t tell you the rules, or what the aim of it is, but you have to play it anyway, and reside with the persistent feeling of playing it wrongly – though there are no rules and there is no aim – and when you have finished playing you will both die. OK? Not really OK. OK? Not rea— OK! Go, kids.
bafflement at being just that morning a child then passing all of a sudden into a woman. Not ready, not ready! Stampeding down the stairs unreadily, TV on, watching Dallas in a rage.
so much more you always needed than to be always needed by someone else; ‘mother’ a strange word, brings to mind a rock, don’t want to be a rock but rather to move, to ebb or flow, don’t want to burden another with life. Feel the weight of life. Too much at times, not enough at others, ups and downs, sting in the tail.
"so much more you always needed than to be always needed by someone else" is extraordinary
What is it that keeps rising up in us even when we feel crushed? What keeps putting one foot in front of the other, or looks at the vague blue smudge of a sloe bush and is reminded of a truth that doesn’t even have a name? What is that? It isn’t me. It isn’t me that gets me up this hill each morning, but rather an irrepressibility that must be called life, life itself, a force working independently of my brain, body and mind.
