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inkskinned · 3 hours
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you found out today that a phrase you have used before was coined by an abusive man. this felt like getting your teeth taken out. it made you sick and sad and tired, but not surprised.
bad people tell you to be careful when you talk badly of bad men, that it could "ruin" a life. you had your life ruined by a bad man, not that it ever matters to them. your real life having real consequences is not valued as highly as the potential of his future.
this has always been a frustrating little mathematics problem for you. you've missed school and had to call out sick at work and had panic attacks that lasted for weeks. it stole sleep and food and friends from you. you cried in public, fucked your relationships up. and the whole time: your present has never mattered so much as the great what if! of his future. like - one life (your life) is already ruined, should we really ruin two?
so you live with the consequences and he doesn't, and that's just like, something you need therapy for. you once discussed this with one of your friends over coffee. she chewed the wooden stirrer, looked off into the distance. "once i became a victim, everything that happens to me afterward is automatically less interesting in the eyes of the general public. it is always about him. he changed my identity. to survivor. to statistic. meanwhile this whole time - i am a person."
you learned in college that three out of five of your favorite artists and authors were actually abusive assholes. these days, you are no longer surprised. oh, is that what was happening behind closed doors? of course it was, he was a "genius," and she was just a girl. you are talking about him in art history, so obviously his career was absolutely ruined, for eternity. that's what happens, right? they strike your name from the record and refuse to remember you? nobody really knows her name, but hey. that's what you get for being close to celebrity.
you got into an argument about it, which was a bad argument, because it made you cry. he said what, you want us to just ignore all the things this man did because he made a few women uncomfortable? and you'd balled your fists up and choked on it. later, in bed, you agonized over the response you'd been trying to articulate but never found the right moment to deploy: you are ignoring what any person could do if they weren't being fucking abused. maybe her talents far exceeded his and she was just never allowed to fucking use them. maybe we only see genius in white men because they purposefully fucking squash and silence any other people with talent.
but you'd cried about it instead of saying that, because you are the cost. you are the talent and potential that he took. you used to be brave and smart and clever and unafraid. like a lich, he stole years of your life.
quiet on set made you sad and sick and tired, but not surprised. unfortunately, one of the things he said was true: an entire network of people allowed it to continue. this is not news to you, because you have seen entire networks of people make the same fucking excuses when the same thing or-worse happened to you. and your particular story isn't even in hollywood. it was just a guy. it was still difficult getting people to stand up for you.
you and your friend wait in line for your coffee. like a standup joke, one man turns to the other and says "can't wait for every bitch to come crawling out of the woodwork complaining about harassment. it's another metoo." and you think - oh, that's the network. your boss tucks her hair back and whispers that while your skirt is cute, you're giving the boys the wrong idea. that's the network. when you'd told your "friend" about what happened, she'd said oh you must have misunderstood, that would never happen. and that's the network.
you woke up this morning panting, because years later you still have panic attacks. oh, it's not a network, actually, it's a web. and you, little moth: are you still surprised you're caught in it?
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inkskinned · 21 hours
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will you be enough for her, though. little slip child. you hated every time you had to scream to be heard, so you stopped screaming. it feels so fucking demeaning, 16 and shivering, saying please! father! look at me! and having him say in a minute sweetie.
online they're back to making fun of self-harm scars. isn't that funny. we have dropped the silver pretense of empathy and are walking around without any shred of humanity.
are you still shouting? how can anybody love you, then, siren. error signal. your voice so quiet and desperate. nobody is going to help you, stop begging. how can anybody actually look down at you without squashing you flat. oh, darling. you once bit into the back of your hand to stop from crying out, and discovered that it felt too dramatic for repeating.
people like you aren't supposed to cry, because you are too much. you have never meant to, but you take the air out of a room just by walking in. other people can take up room like a sunbeam. you blurt out all your wickedness in oilslicks, everyone can feel it. you slosh yourself over their hands and demand their flinch. you are a bone stuck in the throat.
be more beautiful, more perfect. if you can earn it, they won't abhor you. they might even tolerate you, if you turn the right way and never stand up straight.
but love? her life is a silver fish, a cat paw. your life is a long, thin, impossible desire - angry like a blade. your life is a crack in the floortile. you cannot bring your rotted fruit heart into the church of her hands. you will ruin her. you will overtake everything good for her.
or worse - you will have to beg her look at me. and that moment of desperation will ruin you forever. completely.
deleted scene from body's a bad monster, 9.24.2024
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inkskinned · 10 days
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okay if you're really cool about things, i can be honest with you. before you read further, decide if you're a girl's girl. if you're cool and actually cool or like not cool.
men don't talk in my book because i was fuckken tired of the way they're the center of every fucking story. i was tired of how every story takes a moment to let them talk. men can shut up for literally one fucking book.
unfortunately not everyone is cool. professionally what i usually say is i didn't want to add violence to the world. the only men in my book are abusers, so they don't get to talk. they don't get to take up space. they ruined my life, they don't get to have their words echo anymore.
because like, yeah! you find practically any story about a person surviving trauma and... there's a man at the center. men are often rescuing us from these things. a "good man" is always standing around, being a good man, proving to the victim that good men are the real men. that her experience was unique rather than universal.
the redacted text has not been taken well by all of my early readers. there is this weird, crouching growl that keeps occurring with men-of-a-certain-age. why don't we hear his side of the story?
when i sat down to write everything that happened to me, i couldn't look at the frank brutality of my abuser's words on a page and think to myself: i actually let him speak like that. i had to redact his words from the manuscript. i then left it redacted. no victim is going to read this book and hear the person who hurt them. it is a book for the victims to speak. abusers shut up challenge, forever. for eternity.
my father once told me, chuckling, i should just have a page of redaction where i let the man just finally talk. it is funny to joke about how we should make a whole page in my book about a man that hurt me. this was not the only time someone commented - it feels like you're hiding things. how do i know you're actually a victim if he doesn't get to speak?
there are books where women aren't even present. i even genuinely like some of those books. like, who doesn't like the hobbit?
i keep running into people defending this imaginary man. the default narrative is so true to some people that they will defend any man, just by virtue of the assumption - "if he's acting like that, you had to push him." certain people need definitive proof that you didn't accidentally make your partner into an abuser. they need to decide if you deserved it, because they want to be able to judge you.
which makes sense, i guess, from a hind brain perspective. if you can figure out "why" someone was cruel, you can protect yourself against it. if you defend the bully, the bully might side with you. i don't really know their explanation for feeling this about a character in a book. trust me, i wrote the guy. he is not going to protect you.
i guess i just - there was a time in my life where i desperately wanted anyone to defend me. where i could have really used someone saying holy shit are you okay instead of what did you say to make him act like that to you.
instead, over dinner, a friend-of-a-friend i just met is pouring herself wine. i heard you wrote a book, she says. she gives me the kind of chilly smile i associate with knives. i heard it's unfair to men.
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inkskinned · 11 days
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i think probably magic is real.
the thing is that i was a teacher for a long time and sometimes i come back to this moment in the classroom where a 7 year old asked me are mermaids real? and i stared at her and had no idea how to answer.
for a really long time i just assumed that glow-in-the-dark paint/etc was a result of something made in a lab. i just recently found out that a specific mine in new jersey that just has rocks that do that naturally and it sent me for a loop about stuff.
because first of all - let's be honest, all of us: if there was going to be a naturally-occurring location for uv-activated glow-in-the-dark rocks? it would have to be in New Jersey. that's just the place that makes the most sense for that to happen. probably 10 thousand years ago cavemen were like. "oh this place is gonna be new jersey one day. this has new jersey energy."
the rocks only glow in the presence of uv light and are otherwise just normal rocks. in lord of the rings, there's a special sword that glows in the presence of orcs. it is magic, except that's a real thing that exists (and exists, as we have discussed, in new jersey, of all places). i guess maybe this implies orcs give off uv light.
yeah, okay. magic is just science. i know all the stuff about how ghosts are probably just caused by vibrating pipes. i knew about how there's a reason-for-all-of-this. but what do you mean that there's rocks that give you poison damage if you touch them. what do you mean that we live on the same planet as electric eels. what do you mean that a battery just, like - stores power?
and i don't know. in 20 years maybe they will find a mermaid but they will say something like well she's technically not a mermaid she's this other species, she has whiskers and not hair. and i will have to travel back in time and tell a 7 year old not technically, but there's something that is like a mermaid.
and she will look at me and think that what i am saying is science means magic isn't real and what i am actually saying is science is our word for why magic works. and then i will teach her about uv rocks, and new jersey. i will tell her to be a scientist, which is the same thing as being a wizard. there is probably a reason why sci-fi and fantasy are often grouped together. it is very lucky to be here, i think. if you squint, the improbability of it all - it does kind of feel like spellwork.
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inkskinned · 14 days
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we were drunk off mezcal and my dog had his paws crossed like he was fancy and we were giggling about it and i told you that with the sun coming back i can feel my fingers again and you grabbed my wrist and jokingly shook my limp hands while saying i have you i got you and i wanted to tell you i love you in that moment but it's actually just that it's spring and love actually seems like something that i can afford once in a while so long as i'm not overwhelmed by the crushing weight of having to do my laundry
i don't get so sad on sundays anymore and part of that is you but also part of it is that i've been watching a bird melodrama in the tree outside my window - first the robins had the run of it, then the doves. most recently a family of sparrows came through. the sky was pink today like a kiss, and i felt the pastel wrap in a warm piebald snake around my chest and hum herself into my bones
thank god for every person that forgives me for the depressive spirals i go on every winter without-fail like i swear there are absolutes in this world and it's stuff like. stoats go white in winter. the sun comes over the east. when it gets cold all parts of my soul go numb and the light can't pass through my iris without a tattoo gun. how many times can i tell a friend i'm sorry i wasn't talking to you, i truly wasn't talking to anyone
thank god i can feel my skin right now and you hold my weak little hand in your hand and then you flip it over so you can read my palm and you're smiling while you run fingertips over lines and read out my fate like it says here you like a good grillcheese sandwich and admit it you make salads by buying the pre-made spring mix and i have all your astrology shit memorized and i read your horoscope first when i'm checking my own even-though-i-don't-believe-in-it (but just in case) and i want to kiss you just to watch the blush spread in a tulip from under your freckles in that way it does, how you pull back and wrinkle your nose in laughter
thank god but today for the first time in a month i finally texted my friends back and actually made plans to hang out (how's that! barring disaster!) and i let my dog put his big muddy paws on my nice sweater and yeah actually when it's bad i always think i can't do that again. i can't crawl back up that mountain
but the sun touched me on the face this morning and we had a nice long talk about it and i said i gotta go the long way again huh and she nodded and shook back her solarflare hair and looked over to her moon girlfriend and she said you can do it. better things on the horizon.
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inkskinned · 17 days
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my father told me he read it, but he hasn't read it. that's okay. my friends keep picking the words out of my throat.
someone once told me that the more trigger warnings that go on a book, the better it is. i didn't mean to write something with so many conditional phrases - i was writing about what i felt while being a human. sometimes you are a person and sometimes you are a statistic. sometimes it is falling upwards and sometimes it's sliding back down again.
my father tells me that it will be difficult to get people to read it. i didn't like the idea of a singular genre. i'm not going to lie to you - it is actually a difficult book to get through. i change the rules in it. it's not poetry or prose explicitly. it's neither false nor reality. i give you the tools to "solve" the book, but i let you do the thinking. my father says people don't care to think. i don't know about that - i think we just, like, enjoy reading.
the thing is - i was tired of stories about survival where someone with depression goes to therapy and wakes up okay. i didn't live like that. i was tired of books about violence, where the gore of what i experience was splashed in glitter to lick off the page. like, i was a person, you know? i had a life and a job and a family. and in books, i watched my story get ripped up so people could explore the viscera of my body. so they could feel good. my brother once called it inspiration pornography. we had walked out of a suicide-prevention seminar, both of us disgusted while the increasingly-elated presenter kept listing methods-of. i remember the look on my brother's face. like i would tear that man apart given the right time and place.
my father says that kids these days. he warns me against writing about things that are too-serious. he says that they don't want it. i don't listen. he does make me take out a scene from the book where i go to church after having sex with a woman. it used to be the 7th scene in the book. i don't think he's read further than that, it rocked him too hard to continue.
it's a book about being queer. it's a book about being raised catholic. it doesn't have monsterfucking, i'm sorry. it's just about, like.
at some point you have to choose to stay here. and then you do have to stay here, which takes practice. this is about forming the habit. this is about what happens after you've already started doing the work. because, like. you keep going. you have to. and it's like. very imperfect.
i should make a post on instagram. i should make this announcement less bittersweet. but like -- i'm giving it you, specifically, because i think you know why i had to write it. you and me. this little community.
body's a bad monster. here's the link if you're interested in ordering.
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inkskinned · 18 days
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before you know about women, you hear that you do not need to love the man, just that you need to love him through his manhood. which is to say you have seen the future painted in lamb's blood over your eyes - how your mother shoots you a look about your father's inability to cook right. how your aunt holds her wineglass and says i'm gonna kill em. men, right! how your best friend bickers with her boyfriend, how she says i can't help it. i come back to him.
you learn: men are gonna cheat. men aren't going to listen when you're talking, because you're nagging. men think emotions are stupid. they think your life is vapid and your hobbies are embarrassing. men will slam things, but that's because men are allowed to be angry. if you get loud, you're hysterical. if a man gets loud - well, men are animals, men are dogs, men can't control their hands or their eyes or their bodies. they're going to make a snide comment about you in the locker room, about your body, about how you're so fucking annoying. you're going to give him kids, and he will give you the money for the kids, and you're going to be running the house 24/7 - but he gets to relax after a long day, because his job is stressful. the man is on stage, and is a comedian, and says "women!"
and you are supposed to love that. you are supposed to love men through how horrible they are to you - because that's what women do. that's what good women do. wife material. your father even told you once - it'll make sense when you're older. it was like staring down a very lonely tunnel.
it feels like something's caught in your throat, but it's all you know, so. it's okay that you see sex as a necessary tool, a sort of okay-enough ritual to keep him happy, even though he doesn't seem to care about happiness as-applied-to you. it is relationship upkeep. it is kissing him and smiling even though he didn't brush his teeth. it is getting on your knees and looking up and holding back a sigh because he barely holds you as you panic through the night. it's not like the sex is bad and you do like feeling wanted. and besides! he's a man! like... they're another species. you'll never be able to actually communicate, right. he isn't listening.
you just don't get it. you don't feel that sense of i'm gonna climb him like a tree. mostly it just feels fucking exhausting. you play the part perfectly. you smile and nod and are "effortlessly" charming. and it's fine! it's alright! you even love him, if you're looking. you could have good life, and a good family, and perfectly happy.
in the late night you google: am i broken. you google i'm not attracted to my husband. you google i get turned on by books but not by him. you google how to get better in bed.
the first time he yells at you, it almost feels like blankness. like - of course this is happening. this is always how it was going to end up. men get angry, and they yell, and you sit there in silence.
you mention it to your friend - just the once - while you're drunk. she shrugs and says it's like that with me too, i just try to forget and move on. men are always gonna hear what they want to. pick your battles and say sorry even though he's in the wrong. you play solitaire online for a month. you go to your therapist appointment and preach about how you're both so in love.
after all, you have a future to want. nobody lied about it - how many instagram posts say marriage is hard. say real love takes work. say we fight like cats and dogs but the best part is that we always make up. how many of your friends say happy anniversary to the best and worst thing to ever happen to me. if you really loved him - loved yourself too - you'd accept that men are just different from you.
the first time she kisses you, it's on a dare at a party. something large and terrifying whips through your body. you wake up sweating from dreams where her mouth is encrusted with pearls and you pick them off one by one with your teeth. fuck. you sit at the computer and your almost-finished game of sim city. you think about your potential perfect life and your potential future family. you google am i gay quiz with your little hands shaking.
you delete each letter slowly. you don't need to love him. you just need to keep going.
#warm up#writeblr#this is also about being ace btw#my identity has slowly shifted over time and maybe if everyone is REAL cool i'll talk bout it#bc it's complicated and nuanced. but this is like#trying to warn u that if you find it “relationship upkeep” to have sex with ur partner#and don't actually enjoy it or seek it for urself. u might just not be attracted to them.#which is fine ! ace ppl can be perfectly happy in any relationship they feel good in!#but also i wasn't as straight as i had expected!#> the first time i saw dick i was like. huh. oh okay that's fine i guess#> the first time i saw pussy i was like. WAIT ACTUALLY HANG ON I GET IT#i just assumed sex wasn't all it was cracked up to be ya know#but also like. btw? this IS NOT saying ''u might be gay not ace''#bc tbh i'm grey ace/demisexual#it's saying u might not be into ur partner. explore urself & ur feelings. turn inward.#TAKE THIS IN THE MANNER IT WAS MEANT> GENTLE AND KIND#AND NOT IN A WEIRD INTERNET WAY PLEASE#bc the truth is that there ARE ppl who are gay who assume that they just ''don't like'' sex#and ace ppl who might need a different partner w/different needs#and i would have REALLY needed to hear ''check in w/urself about if u actually like sex''#WAY EARILIER in my life. but nobody said anything bc they assume if ur having sex. u like it.#not just the actual act of sex. not once ur turned on. do you ACTUALLY like it. or is it a burden?#even if ur gay. check w/urself. maybe ur more ace than u realized. in which case. ADDITIONAL FLAG BB#i love collecting my flags. i'm at like 354 at this point#but also btw this is about how toxic relationships are SO normalized that u can be in one#and have everyone around u being like ''THATS JUST MEN LOL''
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inkskinned · 21 days
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it's yours in september, by the way.
i owe you all the moon. i owe every person who read my work and supported me and asked where they could buy the book i-hadn't-written-yet. thank you for being here while i put my life & words in order. thank you for being mine, in the way we are each other's. i'm yours too. i have been on this site since i was 19. i am now 30 (yikes). we have spent over a decade together. you have all watched me process each part of my life.
and yes, it's stupid, because it's just a broken little website. but. and not in despite - but because of how silly it is, that we are here and it is community, and we have somehow all survived -
it's our little home. and i fucking love you guys.
i got my isbn today for the book. 8 months to go. my mom and i were talking about what the next steps are. i was eating trail mix, standing on one foot, phone tucked into my ear.
"yeah," i said. "the problem is that tumblr as a market is like, not something that can be studied." there's this weird wave of nostalgia and affection for this place that came up over me: how lovely we avoid consumerism. okay, it sucks as a creator. but also? keep stickin' it to 'em.
my mother made the sound at the back of her throat that i also make, the one that means i've got an idea. "you should figure out some kind of reward for presale amounts. maybe you give out poems or a mug or a signed book or something. would your followers like that?" my mother is sweet, and kind, and i have no idea how to explain on this website you can buy someone crabs.
i put more m&ms down the hatch. i had to speak through peanuts and almonds. "if it passes 25 thousand i will print the book out in its entirety and eat it live on camera."
"oh god. no, you don't have to do that." she was anguished. "just tell them that you'd love them to read it, and that they've inspired you to write. you got started on that site, and they helped you keep going. raquel, you love these people. the community? you talk all the time about the other writers and artists and whatever else. tell them that you're hoping for their support, they'll come through."
"no," i assured her. i discovered i had dropped an m&m, but an ant had already found it, so it belonged to him now. i will let his little life have a surprise blue treasure in it, too. "i'm gonna fuckin' eat the book."
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inkskinned · 25 days
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crying because i call myself my dog's mom but i'm probably more like a sister to him and the way i love people is always spilling out over my hands in milk so yes i got told a lot you try too hard as a kid and i didn't know what that meant i just try to shove everything i care about under my wing and hold it there so every feather acts as an umbrella and if you're normal that's okay they'll say you're kind but if you're not normal it is a problem and someone who says they're an empath watched me fall down on the train and refused to give me the hand up
and yeah maybe i'm kind of bitter because every time i try to open up i only get to the bones of the thing before someone else takes up the whole room with meat and gristle and sparknotes of their own life painted in a pelt across my palms and just as i'm tryna clean up one mess another seems to pop up and it's really difficult to explain to your therapist that the problem is that you are too aware of the problem and that you keep fucking up and it's really difficult to explain to your partner i have no faith in the concept of love and life is a lot of sliding down these days, turn my body ice and moth, and that's okay! i am broken upside down like an egg and i am going to love you like an explosion and a star and a fucking galaxy! i'm gonna be too much
because god forbid you feel like me! god forbid you know what it's like! holy shit, god forbid. i'm gonna love you because i didn't get love. i'm gonna love you because otherwise the world is too cruel. i only live in the dark. maybe i'm a martyr. i think it's more like - i need to be right about this, about hope and trying and community. i'm going to be right about this, even if i need to set myself on fire to procure the warmth. come take it then, come latch on. i need you to be okay so someone is okay. so there's a reason i was born. i need it to work. i need to be shelter. a lighthouse. endlessly giving more.
i need to be. holy shit, god forbid. i can't live in a world that's only storm.
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inkskinned · 28 days
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i don't mean to sound ungrateful, but as a content creator on this site, there's a part of me that's like. they absolutely just stole my work.
i'm not, like, unaware that tumblr has been shuffling downhill for years now. sometimes i play with the idea of switching platforms, turning myself into the shark. i often get tens of thousands of notes - i could be "doing numbers" on a platform that actually pays me to do so. i could have statistics that i could use to sell myself, i could rebrand and make content pay-to-play and make brand deals. i could have the other life, i mean.
but i don't want to. i like the quiet nature of tumblr. i like that it still feels like i'm writing poetry, not like i'm fulfilling ad spots. i like the community, and that i can sometimes still take someone by surprise and write something that really speaks to them. i like the tags and reading things like oh of course it's fucking inkskinned i love you inkskinned you gay mess. my girlfriend recently told me that people tag things "inkskinned" because they assume it is similar to tagging "creative writing". that's wild. i made this word up when i was 19, and have always assumed people tag me in things so i read it (and i often do). i have nothing but love and gratitude for you all, for this tiny scoop of family.
and i haven't made any money off it. i had opportunities, and i turned them down. i could have sold this thing like a thousand times. i thought about moving my work elsewhere - over and over and over i thought about it. i weighed each option specifically. but my tumblr felt like ... it's for you guys, only. if you're still here and reading this, you deserve to do it for free.
tumblr has now, most likely, skimmed my work (and yours) in order to make money. i will never see a single cent for that violation. something about landlords, i guess - my work pays their rent.
i just lost my job on valentine's day, and am working on scrambling for solutions. i am writing this to a blog that they will probably scrape with AI. and like, what number to do you think it was? do you think it was only a couple hundred thousand? no way it was close to a million, right? my time, effort, energy - it belongs to someone else now. how many silver pieces for them to completely sell out their user base.
and it's kind of like - funny? when it isn't very-sad. because i personally don't know what to do, ya know? i might as well move to a different platform, where my efforts are ai-scraped but could eventually pay me. where i know my privacy is the cost - but it could result in actual money. anyway. i need to figure out how i'm paying for meds. i need to email like six people about COBRA benefits.
my work is powering someone else's AI. it will be a beautiful fabricated poem, made from words i've already said.
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inkskinned · 1 month
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most writing advice is good as long as you know why it is good, at which point it is also bad. the hardest thing (and most precious thing) about being an artist is that you gotta learn how to take critique. i don't mean "just shut up and accept that people hate your work," i mean you need to learn what the critique is saying and then figure out if it actually helps.
i usually tell people reading my work: "i'm collecting data, so everything is useful." i ask them where they put the book down, even though it's too long for most people to read in 1 sitting. i ask them what they thought of certain characters. i let them tell me it was really good but i like it more when they look a little stunned and say i forgot i was reading your book, which means they forgot i exist, which is very good news.
sometimes people i didn't ask will read my work and tell me i don't like it. and that is okay, you don't have to like it. but i look at the thing that they don't like and try to figure out if i care. i don't like that you don't capitalize. this one is common, and i have already thought about it. i do not care, it's because of chronic pain and frankly i like the little shape of small letters. you use teeth and ribs in all your work. actually that is very true. i don't know what's up with that. next time i will work to figure out a different word, thank you. you're whiny, go outside. someone said that to me recently and it made me laugh. i am on the whine-about-it website as an internet poet. you are in my native habitat, watching me perform a natural enrichment behavior. but i like the dip of whiny, how the word itself does "whine" (up/down, the sound out your nose on the y), but i don't know if i want to feel whiny. maybe next time i will work on it being melancholy, like what you would call a male writer's poetry.
repeated "good" advice clangs in a bell and doesn't hold a real shape, dilutes in the water. like sometimes you will hear "don't use said." you turn that around in your head and it bounces off the edges of your brain like it is a dvd screensaver. it isn't bad advice, but it feels wrong somehow, like saying easy choices are illegal! sometimes i will only use "said." sometimes i will just kick dialogue tags out to the trash. sometimes i make little love poems where the fact that i do not say "said" is very bad, and makes you feel bad in your body, because someone didn't say something. i am a contrary little shitbird, i guess.
but it is also good advice, actually. it is trying to say that "said" sometimes is clutter. it makes new writers think about the very-small words and very-small choices, because actually your work matters and wordchoice matters. "i know," you said. "i know," you sighed. "i know." we both know but neither of us use a dialogue tag, because we are in a contemporary lit piece.
it is too-small to say don't use said. but it is a big command, so it gets your attention. what are you relying on? what easy choices do you make? when you edit, do you choose the same thing? can you make a different choice? sometimes we need the blankness of said, how it slides into the background. sometimes we don't.
i usually say best advice is to read, but i also mean read books you don't like, because that will make you angry enough to write your own book. i also mean read good books, which will break your heart and remind you that you are a very small person and your voice is a seashell. i also mean you need to eat books because reading a book is a writer's version of studying.
my creative writing teacher in the 7th grade had a big red list of no! words and on it was SUNSET. RAZORS. LOVE. GALAXY. DEATH. BLOOD. PAIN. I liked that razor and love were tucked next to each other like birds, and found it funny that he believed we were too young to know the weight of razor in the context of pain. i hated him and his Grateful Dead belt, where the colored teddy bears held up his appraisal of us. i hated his no list. it is very good/bad advice. i wasn't old enough yet to know that when you are writing about death you are also writing about sunsets and when you write about love you are tucking yourself into a napkin that never stops folding.
back then my poetry was all bloody, dripped with agony when you picked it up. i didn't know there is nothing beautiful about a razor, nothing exciting about pain. i just understood sharpness, which he took to mean i understood nothing. i wrote the razor down and it wasn't easy, but it was necessary. that's what i'm saying - sometimes it's good advice, because it's not always necessary. and sometimes it is very bad advice, because writing about it is lifesaving.
hang on my dog was just having a nightmare. i heard that it is a rule not to write about dogs - in my creative writing mfa, my teacher rolled her eyes and said everyone writes a dead dog. the literature streets are littered in canine bodies. i watched the rise and fall of his ribs (there is that word again) and had to reach out and stop the bad dream. when he woke up he didn't recognize me, and he was afraid.
it is good/bad advice to say that poems and writing have to mean something. it is bad/good advice to say they're big feelings in small packages. it is better advice to say that when my dog saw where he was, he relaxed immediately, rubbed his face against me. someone on instagram would make fun of that moment by writing their "internet poetry" as a sentence that tumbles across a white page: outside it is sunset and my dog is still in a gutter, bleeding a galaxy out of his left paw. or maybe it would be: i woke the dog up/the dog forgot i loved him/and i saw the shape of a senseless/and impossible pain.
the dog is alive in this one, and he is happy. when i tell you i love you, i know what i said. write what you need to write, be gentle to yourself about it. the advice is only as good as far as it helps. the rest is just fencing. take stock of the boundaries, and then break them. there's always somewhere else you could be growing.
i love you, keep going.
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inkskinned · 2 months
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the car broke down by the denny's where you used to work and therefore could never return to. i am trying to pick out the satisfying parts of my life, one-by-one, like i am 12 and in a frog dissection. everything in my life all viscera and formaldehyde. if i can sort the good things from the bad things, i will have a nice clean pile.
i call you and make it sound like i am happy and hangin' in there! when really i am kicking a rock and i am outside without a jacket and i am so in love with you it makes the little bones in my ear shake. someone called my tinnitus an angel choir. i like that it means i carry the echo of every concert.
this isn't the right setting for love. this is a roadside, and a denny's, and i am nauseous and ashamed i never escaped the town where i grew up. the clouds here are this strange yellow, like spilled sour milk. "someone once told me that the orange coating on the teeth of a beaver is due to the particularly high rate of iron in their enamel," i tell you. "the beaver is the largest rodent native to north america."
your voice is crackly on the other end. i'm going into a garage soon, i might lose you.
what i should be doing is calling the tow truck and explaining that my brother's car (that i'm borrowing) (that i broke now, i guess) needs to be lifted by another, bigger, stronger car (which is love too, i guess).
i shouldn't say so much. i should wait, and let you ask about my mom, and ask if i ever got over that cold, or how it's going at work. i should let you lead the conversation, for once, so the love doesn't leak out of me into the gravel. i open my mouth anyway. "if you had to choose between being a beaver with very few trees or being a tree around a bunch of beavers, which would it be?"
i don't know. your voice always has this warm cast to it when you talk to me, but maybe i am just imagining that - i am a poet, though, so i imagine things sort of chronically. through the static, you sound like you're laughing. are you the beaver?
i know, like, logically, not to fall in love with a girl-that-is-your-best-friend. like, who would i even call if we broke up? you're my best friend, you're the person i'd want to speak to. so what if these last few months we keep sleeping over at each other's houses, calling each other for hours, sending each other poems. so what if you keep wrapping your fingers into mine. no best friends. that is the first rule. what you are supposed to do in that situation is leave the situation.
but my car broke down, so. where exactly am i going to go? the car is a very-old chevvy and also where i almost-but-not-quite kissed you after you'd raised one shoulder and looked up at me and said i don't know, i think i'm straight, but for the right person - i'd try anything. the music had been good and it had been raining and your thick eyelashes had made me feel god crawling up my throat like a spider. and i didn't kiss you, because i am a coward.
anyway on the chevy the whole exhaust pipe fell out, and is now scraping on the ground like one silver finger stroking the back of the highway. recently we were watching netflix in my bed and you pushed my hair back from my face like you were making the slowest, most desperate prayer, and then your boyfriend called. i remember us both jumping. i couldn't look at you in the eyes for like a week after. i kept feeling the heat of your fingerprint; computer science, you'd unlocked something dark in me.
google says the closest tow (joe's pick up) is 50 minutes away and also closed permanently. so that's not great. you live in another state and i should be calling my insurance company. i should be calling anybody else. this is not helping. i need an uber. i need to get moving. instead i say: "i need three words for a poem."
yesterday i said love you, goodnight after our 2 hour call like always and then you just, like. paused. all i could hear was your breathing. and then you'd said what a pretty three-word poem. i love you too, sweet thing. the words made my tinnitus act up again, and i must have some kind of synesthesia, because the sound travelled into my mind until it became the shape wedding rings.
orange, you say. the static is now chewing through most of your words and i only catch - borrowing the chevy -
the call dies. i have 12% battery. i never get the 3rd word, but i know you're still going to get a poem from me. actually this rest stop is kind of pretty, and so is the exhaust pipe, and so is joe's pick up, and so are the clouds. the light here is the color of a glue trap. before you worked at the denny's, we used to get milkshakes every wednesday and called it a friend date. you said you'd wanted to work there because it reminded you of me.
the sign's gone dim. the letters now spell out deny. and isn't that something.
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inkskinned · 2 months
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an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing
woobifytonysoprano-deactivated2 | "Toe Dip" by Giordanne Salley | "Landscape" by David Hettinger | "Sunrise" by Louise Glück | @b0nkcreat (x) | "Through the Walls" by Anastasia Trusova | "Little prayer" by @leonardospoetry | @girlweepinginstairwell (x) | @rainie-is-seasonchange (x) | "Blumenwiese bei Weßling" by Alexander Koester | @pigswithwings (x) | "The Sun" by Edvard Munch | @inkskinned (x)
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inkskinned · 2 months
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oh i don't know what young adult needs to hear this but you should google what day your 10,000th day will be & set a reminder in your calendar. it happens somewhere in your 27th year. i was really bummed when i googled my own and found out i had missed it by like 2 months.
(if you missed yours too, no worries, we both get another chance to celebrate 15,000 at 41. Unfortunately you will be 54 years old before you are 20,000 days old, at which point we will have overthrown the concept of linear time anyway)
life is very cute, and you have struggled a very long time to be here, and i love you. sometimes i think we need to invent our reasons for celebration. maybe today you are 10,345 days old. or 12,345. or 8,435. maybe u should just celebrate because it is a weekday, and those are hard days. i love u , light a candle and blow it out. i'm proud of you for staying.
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inkskinned · 2 months
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crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.
i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.
in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.
i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.
i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.
plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.
the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.
we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.
i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.
a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.
today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.
loved beyond thinking.
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inkskinned · 2 months
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you have to go to work so you can pay for your doctor, who is not taking your insurance right now, and if you say i can't afford the doctor's you are told - get a better job. it is very sad that you are unwell, yes, but maybe you should have thought about that before not having a better job.
(where is the better job? who is giving out these better jobs? you are sick, you are hurting - how the hell are you supposed to be well enough for this better job?)
but you go to the doctor because you had the nerve to be hurt or sick or whatever else. and they tell you that it is because you have anxiety. you try your best. you are a self-advocate. you've done the reading (which sometimes pisses them off worse, honestly). you say it is actually adding to my anxiety, it is effecting my quality of life. so they say that you are fat. they say that all young people have this happen to them, isn't it a medical marvel! they say that you should eat more vegetables. they say that you probably just need to lose a little more weight, and that you are faking it for attention.
(what attention could this doctor possibly give? what validation? that's their fucking job, isn't it?)
there is always a hypochondriac, right. someone always tells you about a hypochondriac. or someone who is unnecessarily aggressive during the worst days of their life. or someone looking "for a quick fix". or some idiot who wasn't educated about how to properly care for themselves who just abandons their treatment. and again, the hypochondriac, the overly-cautious hysteric. these people don't deserve to be treated like humans (right), and since you might be one of these people, you also don't get treated like a human. because those people can really fuck with the system, you now have to pay for it. and besides. you're actually probably faking it.
(more often than not, you find a 2:1 ratio of these stories. for every "hypochondriac", there are 2 people who knew something was wrong, and yet nobody could fucking find it. the story often ends with pointless suffering. the story often ends with and now it's too late, and it's going to kill me.)
you are actually just making excuses. someone else got that procedure or that diagnosis and he's fine, you should be fine too. someone else said they watched a documentary about other inspirational people with your exact same condition, maybe you should be inspirational, too. you're just too morbid. your pain and your experience is probably just not statistically concerning. it is all self-reported anyway, and you're just being a baby.
(once, while sitting down in the middle of making coffee, you had the sudden, horrible thought - i could kill myself to make the pain stop. you had to call your best friend after that. had to pet your dog. had to cry about it in the shower. you won't, but that moment - god, fuck. the pain just goes on and on.)
you know someone who went in for routine surgery and said i still feel everything. they told her to just relax. it took her kicking and screaming before they figured out she wasn't lying - the anesthetic drip hadn't been working. you know someone who went in for severe migraines who was told drink water and lose weight. you know someone who was actively bleeding out and throwing up in the ER and was told you're just having a bad period.
in the ER there are always these little posters saying things like "don't wait! get checked today!" and you think about how often you do wait. how often the days spool out. you once waited a full week before seeing the doctor for what you thought was a sprained wrist. it had actually been broken - they had to rebreak it to set it.
but you go into the doctor. the problem you're having is immediate. the person behind the counter frowns and says we're not taking your insurance. you will be paying for this out-of-pocket.
they send you home with tylenol and a little health packet about weight loss or anxiety or attention deficit. on the front it has your birthday and diagnosis. you think about crying, and the words swim. it might as well say go fuck yourself. it might as well say you're a fucking idiot. it might as well say light your money on fire and lie down in it. and the entire fucking time - the problem persists.
it's okay. it's okay, it's just another thing, you think. it's just another thing i have to learn to live with.
#spilled ink#warm up#can you tell what i'm mad about today specifically#i will say that there are a LOT of things that go into this. like a lot. this is ungendered and unspecific for a reason#it isn't just sexism. it's also racism. and ableism. and honestly classism.#and before a healthcare professional reads this as a personal attack: i understand ur burnt out#we are ALSO burnt out. your situation is also dire. this is not an attack on you.#this is a commentary on the incredible amounts of bigotry that lie at the heart of capitalism#where people have to pay money out of pocket to be told to fuck off.#your job is important. so is our humanity. and if you cannot accept that people are fucking mad as hell#at the industry - you are probably not listening .#anyway at some point im gonna write a piece about sexism specifically in medical shit#but i don't want terfs clowning in it bc they can't understand nuance#> it is true that ppl w/a uterus are more likely to experience medical malpractice & dismissal globally#> it is also true that trans people experience an equally fucked up and bad time in the medical field#> great news! the medical industrial complex is an equal opportunity life ruiner :)#(if you find it necessary to go into a debate about biology while discussing medical malpractice#i want to warn you that you're misunderstanding the issue. because guess what.#cis MEN might experience this. particularly black men. particularly disabled men.#so YES having a uterus can lead to more trouble for you. but this happens a LOT.#instead of fighting those ALSO experiencing your pain.... try working WITH them.#which btw. is like. actual feminism.)
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inkskinned · 2 months
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there's a video on instagram of a man kicking his partner's door in. the top comment is (with over 4 thousand likes): "how about you tell us what you did to make him that angry?"
barring emergency, nobody should be kicking anybody's door in. many of us lived in houses where it was always, somehow, an emergency. there is a strange, almost hysterical calm that comes over you in that moment - everything feels muted, and you almost feel, however incongruently, like you should be laughing. you are living inside of "the emergency." oh my god, you think. i am now a fucking statistic.
there is another comment with 2.8 thousand likes: "if this was a woman doing it to a man, nobody would give a shit."
do people give a shit now, though?
barring emergency, the door should remain standing. the emergency should be panicked, desperate - "i'm coming in there to protect you." many of us know what it feels like when the emergency is instead "i'm coming in there to get you."
1.5k likes: "and yet you post this for notes. glad to see being the victim has become your whole personality."
hysteria is a word connected to womb, from greek. what you're experiencing is so senseless and inhumane that you (a rational creature) try to find any ground within what is irrational and cannot be explained. one of the most frustrating things about staying in bad situations is that we also lie to ourselves. we also ask ourselves - wow. what did i do?
women can be, and often are, also abusers. abuse is not gendered. abuse is not just a "straight person" problem. abuse does not have a face or figure or sexuality. you cannot pick an abuser out of a crowd. an abuser could be actually anybody.
and then so many people rally behind the man kicking the door in. here is something nobody should be doing, right? you want to ask every person that liked that first comment: do you ask this because you side with him? do you ask this because it helps you feel safe from this ever happening?
in some ways, you're weirdly sympathetic to the top comment, because it is the same logic you see frequently. the idea is that the average, normal, sane person doesn't just break down a door. doesn't just shoot up a school. doesn't stalk and kill women. doesn't threaten sexual assault. doesn't run over protesters. doesn't shoot an unarmed black person. doesn't scream at underpaid walmart employees. doesn't just "lose it". something had to have happened, right? because the default (white. straight. cis.) - that is someone who is always, you know. "sane."
(right?)
on a podcast, you hear a sane, normal, rational person. "if you piss me off, i'm going to need to hit something. sorry but i'm not apologizing. that's just who i am that's how it is." his voice almost sounds like he's laughing.
you think of the door, and how you were almost laughing behind it, too. ironically, every real emergency in your life has almost felt peaceful in comparison. fire, car accident, flash flooding - these felt quiet, covenant to you. you'd stood in all of them, feeling them pass over and up to your chin, never actually overwhelming.
but when the door was coming down, you had felt - is there a word for that? there has to be, a word, right.
surely one of us has figured out the word for that, i mean. it's such a large fucking statistic.
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