take heart.

executive dysfunction is legitimately physically uncomfortable. i’ll be trapped between two things, weirdly caught on how-much-time-it-might-take-me. i take hours worried im going to take hours doing things. i’ll sit on the floor for the entire day, caught up in the middle of not-doing the chores i actually do want to be doing.

& the amount of mental energy that goes into it. & the legitimate amount of anger and discomfort and self-hate. is not “being lazy”.  it’d be a lot less work if i didn’t have to fight myself to just get up and do it. 

i just need you to understand it’s not effortless. it’s never effortless. it’s not “okay let me just get up and finally start doing this.” it’s more like. i am slamming my foot on the pedal but the car is in neutral and nothing is moving. it’s more like shouting instructions into a dying telephone. it’s more like being trapped in a small electric box, and someone who hates me is administering shocks. 

im trying. im trying. please help me get up.

Undersong, ‘Equinox’ (1969) by Audre Lorde

[iD: we must be very strong / and love each other / in order to go on living.]

Ijeoma Umebinyuo, your love poems need politics to survive //  June Jordan, Directed by Desire // Warsan Shire, Conversations About Home // bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love // Mahmoud Darwish // Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light // Rod Smith // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

yknow theres a lot of pressure to be successful, particularly on artsy kids whose professions are seen as useless unless theyre famous, but life is fucking hard and sometimes things dont turn out

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

there are a million ways to be happy and a million ways to be a successful artist. we create what we do to enhance the human experience and relate to each other and improve ourselves. theres something to be said for just doing that,,,for the sake of doing it, yknow

This is the most comforting, warm and important piece of text I have ever read, and it is so true. No life is wasted that is spent sharing and loving.

My mother never became a professional artist. She became a social worker, then later taught emotionally disturbed children. But our home was filled with photographs of wildflowers and wildlife. Spice racks, shelves, and other useful objects were adorned with small paintings. She taught me and my sister that we could make things beautiful, even if in small ways, and let us glue glitter and fake gems on our cheap kids furniture and make it ours. Capitalism tries to say that art isn’t successful unless it makes money. But that’s not why humans make art. We make art to convey emotion. To make an object or a moment or a story OURS. And making someone smile when they hear you sing, or look at something you made for them is as valid a reason for creating as any other.