henlo
this is onion’s little sister. how do you all do? have a good day uwu. okay. byebye.
Basic August - Eileen Myles / @solarflowers / Madisen Kuhn / August - Flipturn / @yesterdaysprint / August - Taylor Swift
my dear. you’ve tried hard. you’ve suffered. you thought everything was okay. i’m so sorry my dear. baby girl. you’re okay. even if this doesn’t work out, you’ll be okay. i’m sorry that this is difficult for you. i don’t know how to make it easier.
i understand that you want to succeed, you want to do well. you want to be smart and capable and strong and healthy and pretty. you want to have money, find love, make your own space, eat food you like, read books that fill you with joy, buy all the stationery you can get your hands on.
i know you want your friends around you, i know you want friends at all. you want to be able to converse easily, laugh genuinely, understand a joke that’s being told. you want to be part of the in-crowd. you want them to include you, you want them to care enough to get past your awkwardness and stilted responses. you want to be loud and funny, you want to make witty observations. you want to be held.
you’re past your prime, i know that’s how you feel. you’re approaching the wrong side of thirty. at your age your mum had just had you. she had been married seven years. she had done her masters and was working two jobs.
on the flip side you’ve been working for two years in a job with low pay and you haven’t upskilled yourself at all. you look at jobs online and you don’t meet any of the requirements. you’re not talented, you’re never going to be able to perform well enough to be hired by any jobs that are more meaningful and pay better than yours. even your current job will eventually need someone better than you.
what happened to the you from 20 years ago? what happened to that 12-year-old, fresh out of primary school with a successful standardised test in her backpack, just starting to play the flute, whose ambition in life was still, secretly, to become a singer?
do you remember life when it was simpler? do you remember when you could go to a bookshop with your family after seeing a movie and having lunch at burger king, and sit on the bookshop floor in a corner with a book your mum would never let you buy because it wasn’t ‘good literature’? you’d read and read until it was time to go, mark the page in your mind, and the next time you returned you’d pick it up from there.
when you were 12 you could cry and then feel better. now you can’t cry at all. you used to cry so easily. what happened, my dear? you tear up but never cry. you never rage. you keep all that pain stuck in your throat. you can’t breathe, you can’t swallow, you can’t speak. you’ve stopped self-harming because you 'know better’. you’re an adult, not a 15-year-old acting out cos her mother called her a failure compared to her classmates, carving out FAIL into her skin with a divider from a geometry set.
my dear.
i think you’ll be okay. it’s been a while since you’ve felt this low, this utterly and completely decimated by life and by disappointment in yourself. i think you just want a break from everything. i wish i could fix this for you. i wish i could show you how to focus and how to process information quickly. i wish i could snap my fingers and make it easier for you to write, to think, to do tasks, to get things done.
my dear girl. you’ll be okay even if you aren’t okay this time.
you worry the cardboard sleeve around the coffee and think about landfills and the future without straws. you are worried about prion disease and deer. you are worried about the rising temperature of mushrooms. you are worried about teflon and microplastics and carcinogens and whatever else you're being quietly lied to about.
your mother used to jokingly say you are "a worrier," which always kind of oddly hurt your feelings. you feel like a person. and besides, you've been told one-million-times that this is normal. examples get trotted out in a pony show each time: everyone gets nervous sometimes. they talk about public speaking and picturing people naked and how when they get nervous they just-get-over-it.
you run your hands down the grater of your life and feel the sharpness. you started holding your breath in tunnels as a kid, worried that if you relax, the ceiling would cave in. like years of architects and engineers weren't responsible - you, and your faith, you were responsible for the success of infrastructure. if you slipped for a moment, your whole family would be swept away under the ocean. and the problem is that it worked - no tunnel collapsed.
you once broke a coffee carafe and even though you didn't drink from it after, you worried that there had been some previous invisible micro-break that had made you drink glass particles. you stayed awake for 24 hours, constantly dreading each swallow, waiting to taste blood.
you hate being late, you worry about it. you go to grab literally just lunch with a friend - no pressure, no emergency - and you still park the car an hour early and just sit there scrolling on your phone aimlessly. maybe you just don't like surprises or change. you triple-check you locked the doors, and then go to bed, and then get up out of bed to check twice again.
a worrier. like a strange and dreadful bingo card, you collect weekly experiences. someone tells you that you're overthinking, that's 2 points. you have to physically turn around and go back in your house to check you unplugged everything, that's 1 point. spiraling about climate change or politics or the state of the world is a free space, that's basically every evening.
you worry you're being selfish and not a good person because how come you're worried about your dog's health and the itch in your eye when you know people who are really very ill or who have it worse or who are genuinely struggling. then you worry that you're being annoying by infantilizing them. then you worry that your priorities are wrong, that you should be infinitely more worried about the state of a dying planet.
you wanted to be a person, is all. you wanted to go through life in a softness, to hold the world gently and have it whisper past you. and instead you are a worrier. everything that touches you is hard and raw and sharp like diamonds.
if you were on tumblr pre-dashcon (2014) what fandom were u primarily in
super
who
lock
homestuck
onceler.
movies (disney, marvel, etc)
books (hp, hunger games, etc)
hetalia
mlp
bandom of some kind
more than one of these
i was not on tumblr/results
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ALTYusef Komunyakaa, from "The Cage Walker", Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems [ID in ALT]
