great horse faced blue stocking

when people discuss contemporary art online

there’s always some fucker who studied 2 minutes’ worth of art history and thinks he’s robert fucking hughes or something. yawn. 

“contemporary art is just in-jokes, irony and cleverness.” dude. you may as well be looking at pollock’s blue poles and telling me “my cat could paint that” for all the insight and thoughtfulness you’ve used to form your opinion

oh my goodness. bless my former self and her naivety, for thinking that her days of gloom and crippling anxiety were long behind her. i get a few good years and think i’ve got it all figured out. haha, surprise: it doesn’t work that way.

so i read this book recently and the central theme seemed to be that women, not knowing how to handle their own creative power, invert it inwards self destructively. that’s a little on the romantic side for me, but i’ll admit i’ve been turning the idea over.

part of it is feeling very trapped. by this time and place, by the details of my life. there have been long stretches in the past when i’ve felt lost, and for the most part that’s been ok. there’s a certain freedom you feel when you don’t know where you’re going or what you’re really doing. always that insistence on the deeper truth of things, the reality. as if there is some foundation on which everything else rests, and if i could just get to it, my life would somehow be authentic. this too is romantic posturing, i think. 

so wandering lost and aimless, being a restless fickle sort of person - i’m actually fine with that, i think it’s one of the best things about me. but feeling trapped, as i do now, oh god, i have no coping strategy. just reminders of all the times in my life i’ve felt this way, and shitty patterns to fall back into because that’s what i know how to do.

part of it is just my brain chemistry too. maybe all of it is. being back on antidepressants is a concession to the idea that i will never change. maybe i need to flip it and be pleased about the fact. i perversely tell myself: no, this is actually really interesting, you’re more of a cyborg than ever. a mix of organic and constructed parts. the contraceptive stick in your arm is the phantom pregnancy that keeps you from getting up the duff: your cyborg power is a fetus that doesn’t exist. you have a molar with a filling. and a chemically altered brain. you’re more awesome than ever, 2.0, the body is obsolete, etc, etc, etc. i believe this is known as brave face.

one of my partners and i, we’ve been together 8 years in june, if you don’t count the times we haven’t been. he was with me through the last ugly round of depression. he did my shopping when i couldn’t leave the house. he’d bring cool things to show me: art books, documentaries, board games. he told me stories from his life, minutia about his cat, ideas that resonated with him: joseph campbell, james joyce, greek legends, viking history. he’d tell me about courtly love, medieval manners, and ridiculous stories about knights getting drunk and fucking up. he was trying to bring me back i think, remind me of all the good stuff i was missing out on. and even from the bottom of the very dark pit i was in, i could still smile a little at the idea that his veneration of the past was supposed to somehow snap me back into the present. 

i could hardly bear his sweetness. it was painful to be loved so unconditionally. i wished that we would fight instead. we did a bit, towards the end. it was horrible, i wanted to take back my wish immediately. eventually things got better. i still can’t believe he stuck it out.

so i marched myself down to the doctor last week, eager to circumvent another round of this. to skip the days, weeks, months lost to blankness. living at the centre of a black hole. it fucking sucks, ahaha. the fact that my sense of humor is still intact is a sign that things aren’t really really bad. and that’s good, but not good enough to displace that feeling: here we are again. again. again. another round of drugs and therapy and panicking on the tram and being locked in my apartment and missing deadlines and fucking up my obligations and becoming a pariah at work and looking like a zombie and sifting through the past and alienating my loved ones and needing favors, so many fucking favors, just to get through the day. my fabulous brain set to work at the most mundane of tasks: get out of bed, brush your hair, leave the house. christ, what a waste of time. paranoid android, haha.

so odd to share this here, but whatever, the crossover between IRL and my tumblr is very small, and those of you who know me also know about depression and anxiety. oh god do you guys know. so i can say this stuff, knowing you’ll get it and not think less of me for it. complete strangers following me, well idk, i see so much of this stuff on my dash i start to think that everyone on tumblr is depressed. it’s a strange way of being in the world, throwing this stuff out into the void. but that’s ok.

kapooyah:

bellabracha:

what even IS american culture

it’s just a big ball of different cultures with no set value 

i don’t get it

it’s like dash IRL