anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Carl Sagan, Contact (1985)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
I stopped wanting to go out. That happens very easily. It’s as if you had always done that – lived in a few rooms and gone from one to the other. The light is a different colour every hour and the shadows fall differently and make different patterns. You feel peaceful, but when you try to think it’s as if you’re face to face with a high, dark wall. Really all you want is night, and to lie in the dark and pull the sheet over your head and sleep, and before you know where you are it is night – It’s as if you were dead.
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.
Emily Brontë, from Wuthering Heights
i stuffed a towel at the foot of every door
leave i told the air
i have no use for you
i drew every curtain in the house
go i told the light
no one is coming in
and no one is going out
rupi kaur, "cemetery," the sun and her flowers
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
riverselkie-deactivated20190510
anyway so i feel like the western obsession with romantic love is symptomatic of the absence of community we experience in our socially isolating society,
ellie42161
it’s the only type of love we’re really “allowed” to have and it’s really sad. i hope everyone realizes at some point that you don’t need to be dating someone to love them, and that you don’t need any romance just to be loved.
It’s harmful in so many ways. It’s harmful and isolating to people who don’t experience romantic love. It’s harmful to people who, for any reason, can’t be in a romantic relationship. It minimizes the importance of other forms of love and trivializes non-romantic relationships. And finally it harms people who are actually in romantic relationships by sending the message that your romantic partner should be the only person to fulfill all your emotional needs and vice versa.
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
We live in a world where complete independence and self-sufficiency is seen as the ultimate success.
Not needing other’s isn’t what I’d call true success. Success to me looks like interdependency.
We are biologically a social species; we are not like bears, leopards, or foxes, we are like wolves, elephants, lions, and horses. We flourish when we come together. This has been seen throughout history.
Humans are better together than we are apart.
In the western world many of us live in single-family households with our extended families and our friends living in separate households. A lot of us don’t know how to work with each other; we don’t know how to work as a team.
The structure of western society makes it hard for us to truly, intimately connect with each other. A lot of our connections are superficial. Small talk, social avoidance, social anxiety, lack of social skills, lack of tact, lack of connections with depth is something we see and experience all the time.
This structure is the perfect breeding ground for unhealthy relationships (platonic, romantic, familial); because we are biologically programmed to NEED togetherness, we tend to settle for less than desirable connections and sometimes we don’t even realize we’re crossing our own boundaries! This also creates other forms of dependency like materialism and drug addiction (1, 2).
Our attachments become toxic and codependency is such a common theme seen in today’s western culture. It’s everywhere in music, in TV shows, in movies etc. It’s now the norm.
But so many people have already realized this and have created many things to help mend this problem! One great example is inner-city community gardens (urban agriculture).
Here are some videos to fill your heart with hope and get some motivation to go out there and create something to reconnect our world!
Check out more of TheUrbanFarmingGuys videos!
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
metaphorformetaphor
I’ve always been somewhat isolated. I’ve borne my isolation with me through the crowd as the snail bears its house. For some people isolation isn’t a circumstance in which they find themselves, it’s an innate characteristic.
Hjalmar Söderberg, from Doctor Glas
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say- yes you might say, nature without humanity.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
namrekeya-deactivated20161028
What they don’t tell you about prolonged periods of introspection and careful observation is the harm that can come from being totally alone in that process, with no one to remind you that feeling, learning, watching, and healing are communal. When lonesome thought is fetishized, you feel obligated to suffer in silence, to see all struggles as individual rather than collective. You tell yourself that maybe you’re just growing apart from things you thought you knew, that you’re not doing healing right, and this must mean you’re just inadequate. And at some point, you obsess over this cultivated lifestyle of being quiet, small, and invisible as a means of personal protection that you feel forgotten about and in the end, you have no one but yourself to blame.
Sometimes I wish I could speak and write like I used to. But the more I see and interpret, the less I speak because I become increasingly aware of my own mental boundaries as well as the structural limitations I didn’t want to know existed. And the less I speak, the more I simply think myself into non-existence – or at least, what feels the closest to thinking but not really living.
What does it mean to be seen without desiring all of the accompanying narcissism that attaches itself to forms of recognition? I’ve been thinking and re-thinking the politics of recognition for almost exactly half of a year. Recognition is something so paradoxical to me, and thinking about it is bound to drive you to a point in your mental health where any mention of soap-bathing, bubble-blowing “self-care” rituals make you want to disappear a little more with each passing day. I wonder what it does to a person to ponder alienation in alienation for this long, in addition to all of the recognition rituals that compensate for it. My heart hurts just trying to wrap my mind around that.
I grabbed coffee with a friend I admire so much yesterday, and I asked her if she was feeling this way, too. She said something I knew to be true, but so desperately needed to hear and be reassured by: “Everyone is feeling this way. This feeling is political, not just personal. It permeates daily life and it’s only getting worse and worse.” And I can feel it all the way from Egypt to the United States, the two places I keep escaping for each other only to find myself retreating again for the other. The current global crisis in capital that is building up is wreaking havoc on so many of us in the most insidious ways imaginable. But even attempting to communicate this is difficult and frightening because alienation is so often strategically pathologized, misdiagnosed as “depression”, and written off as individual suffering. And so, we all suffer in silence.
I wonder what it does to a person to ponder alienation in alienation for this long...
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
For years, mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that “unless you love yourself, no one else will love you.”… The truth is you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.
Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., “The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog”
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
“I stopped wanting to go out. That happens very easily. It’s as if you had always done that – lived in a few rooms and gone from one to the other. The light is a different colour every hour and the shadows fall differently and make different patterns. You feel peaceful, but when you try to think it’s as if you’re face to face with a high, dark wall. Really all you want is night, and to lie in the dark and pull the sheet over your head and sleep, and before you know where you are it is night – It’s as if you were dead.”
— Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
thesis: the “song playing from another room” phenomenon appeals threefold to the millenial experience of nostalgia, isolation, and the sensation of eavesdropping on the lives of others via social media and hyper-consumption of culture actively building upon itself at a rapid pace
^^^ THIS IS SPOT ON!
I definitely agree with the isolation aspect. There’s this comfortable disconnect that allows a lack of responsibility but ON THE FLIP SIDE also reminds you that other people have lives that bleed into yours and can be admired from a safe distance. there’s definitely a voyeuristic quality that at the same time connects and disconnects since it stimulates sharing something (music) while not actually being there to partake in whatever reason it’s playing.
The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there can bring back the things we need.
Literature is a common ground.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
namrekeya-deactivated20161028
What they don’t tell you about prolonged periods of introspection and careful observation is the harm that can come from being totally alone in that process, with no one to remind you that feeling, learning, watching, and healing are communal. When lonesome thought is fetishized, you feel obligated to suffer in silence, to see all struggles as individual rather than collective. You tell yourself that maybe you’re just growing apart from things you thought you knew, that you’re not doing healing right, and this must mean you’re just inadequate. And at some point, you obsess over this cultivated lifestyle of being quiet, small, and invisible as a means of personal protection that you feel forgotten about and in the end, you have no one but yourself to blame.
Sometimes I wish I could speak and write like I used to. But the more I see and interpret, the less I speak because I become increasingly aware of my own mental boundaries as well as the structural limitations I didn’t want to know existed. And the less I speak, the more I simply think myself into non-existence – or at least, what feels the closest to thinking but not really living.
What does it mean to be seen without desiring all of the accompanying narcissism that attaches itself to forms of recognition? I’ve been thinking and re-thinking the politics of recognition for almost exactly half of a year. Recognition is something so paradoxical to me, and thinking about it is bound to drive you to a point in your mental health where any mention of soap-bathing, bubble-blowing “self-care” rituals make you want to disappear a little more with each passing day. I wonder what it does to a person to ponder alienation in alienation for this long, in addition to all of the recognition rituals that compensate for it. My heart hurts just trying to wrap my mind around that.
I grabbed coffee with a friend I admire so much yesterday, and I asked her if she was feeling this way, too. She said something I knew to be true, but so desperately needed to hear and be reassured by: “Everyone is feeling this way. This feeling is political, not just personal. It permeates daily life and it’s only getting worse and worse.” And I can feel it all the way from Egypt to the United States, the two places I keep escaping for each other only to find myself retreating again for the other. The current global crisis in capital that is building up is wreaking havoc on so many of us in the most insidious ways imaginable. But even attempting to communicate this is difficult and frightening because alienation is so often strategically pathologized, misdiagnosed as “depression”, and written off as individual suffering. And so, we all suffer in silence.