Tumgik
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
springtime :))
4 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 14 days
Text
everything I know about Dune I know against my will. -_-
also I guess I’m back here??? either intermittently or wholly headfirst — we’ll see. been seven whole months!
5 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 8 months
Text
significant shifts in how i want to go on and what i want to report to the world mean i may put this blog on ice (at least temporarily). to live! to live!
7 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
My inner crow is very happy with the shiny shiny (handmade! engraved! identical and gender-neutral!) bands we got :3
#S
12 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 9 months
Text
a vow, from early days
Wrote this about (for) S in mid-Feb and then forgot it in an Obsidian vault. Glad that this is exactly how things turned out. :)
Listen. Listen. If and when we commit to each other in a Big and Momentous and Final way — say, with a marriage — it has to be about just us. I firmly believe that every single thing we do is autobiographical and very telling of who we truly are as people, and so this is something we must be honest about as well. We must ensure that we continue to write the story of us in a way that does justice to how it began. Because what a story this has been: to have begun by chance, complete and utter chance! We met in a goddamned elevator, of all places. Then this Thing was nurtured by interest, persistence, curiosity. Then, turning inwards inwards inwards unto ourselves every second we spent with each other, right from the beginning. One evening in the early days when you stopped by my spot in the library, we ended up talking for so long that outside, night fell. I had things to attend to but I didn't want to leave. You had so much to tell me and I had so much for you! Why would we look outside; why would we consider anything else at all? When we did look outwards, it was to show each other things that interested us. A creeping plant that clambered over a rock (what made it stick? We are curious, and we eventually found out — sticky lac!), a woody fruiting fungal spore, porcupine quills on the ground, the sun setting over Hussain Sagar. And this is what I liked best when we were close enough to do this: hold hands and look at the world and each other. I've always considered myself an intensely private person, and I used to think you were more extroverted than I was — because I beheld you in the company of other people, laughing with ease, confident, firm when you had to be. But together, again, we have our own little world. This world too feels very private, our own little cocoon. In our minds, we have our little library, a workshop, the co-owned accoutrements that we will use to create (because what is there to do with this one precious life but create?). In the real world, however, we have something perhaps more important: true, unbridled affection, as much honesty and clarity as we can muster, and a wish to see this through. If we're deigning to go through the trouble of paperwork and getting the government involved in our affairs, then these processes too must mirror our values. If life admin requires the sacrifice of our time — time we could instead have spent with each other — then we will make it the most outrageously honest-to-us affair as we can. And there will be no place or time for ostentatiousness. Instead, I want to consider: what can two private people that love language and stories and each other do? How do we keep this pure and true to us? I would much rather give you a story, because that would mean more to you than any contrived, pre-arranged, edited, airbrushed performance in the world. For this, for you being the way you are, I am so grateful. But what story could do justice to our own? Nothing would ever feel adequate. So we propose instead to give each other the substance of stories: symbolism, space, and time. And the substance of us: attention, affection, allegiance. It is so easy when there's clarity in my own mind. So effortless. This is what I did not have in the years past: my own mind was never truly there. Unlike you, it took me the better part of this past decade to understand and learn to honour who I am. Several years of living alone — and by alone, I mean well and truly and abjectly alone. With nobody to distract me from my duties towards my own mind. What a privilege this has been, though — and what luck, to have met you when I did. You found me after I found myself. Earlier, I was simply lost. I think a part of me still is — or is it undiscovered and unknown to me. And there are parts of you still waiting to be found and claimed too; I see that. We can do the discovering together. All the figurative cutting through the rushes to chance upon worlds not yet known, etc. I get to do this with you. And we get to decide how we begin.
12 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 9 months
Text
“To be with G-d is really to be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward, makes me better. I conceive of G-d, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
— James Baldwin, In Search of a Majority (1960)
2K notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media
21K notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
9 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 9 months
Text
still utterly burned out — the vacation didn't help a whole lot, though it did make me feel more clear about quitting my current job — and a more recent symptom of this is completely lacking the will to respond to texts. i want to set an auto-responder that says, "sorry, i do not currently possess the neurotransmitter levels that would allow me to get back to you. please give me one to six business months and things should get better. maybe. i don't know."
speaking about the vacation though, one word: lovely. S: lovely. everything in my life right now (except for crippling, debilitating anxiety and exhaustion): lovely. it turns out that it's very possible to live both of these dichotomous realities at the same time.
the anxiety and ennui and depression is mostly centred around what the rest of this year (and by extension, the next) will look like. the burnout is just from work, especially G20 shenanigans. i'm still drained and depleted from it and i have no idea how to go about filling myself back up again. very few work events have gotten to me like this. but i'm glad that realising how extensively this fucked me over has pushed to me quit. i've been talking to S (and also to myself) about what this will mean. and what all of this will result in. i wish to keep my promises about shifting my approach radically and to prioritise joy and meaning above all things. i wish to draw meaning from the values i hold dear, not from externally focused outcomes. this has been incredible hard to do these past few months, where i was consumed by the anxiety of securing funding for studying further. said funding was not secured. and where does that leave me? i have been quite shaken by this whole thing, not least because the past cycle was so exhausting (especially, particularly, because i only applied to UK schools where a single programme requires up to three different, complete applications). i'm beginning to think i don't have it in me (as things stand right now) to apply again this cycle. and a while ago, this would have freaked me out. i'm beginning to allow this freedom to grow on me though. i must, must prioritise my health and wellbeing, which have been severely compromised this year. i want to spend time on cultivating joy, feeling love. I want to read — and write more if i can. i want to feel curiosity about the questions that propelled me to consider undertaking doctoral studies in the first place. there's a lot of healing that needs to take place, and i don't want to repeat the mistakes of my 20s: ignoring my body in the pursuit of some arbitrary goal, only to meet it and discover the hollowness of it because i, myself, had been hollowed out in making the effort.
if you don't change anything, nothing changes.
i am here. i have everything i need to be content. to feel joy. what a rare and lovely thing. what a shame to while away this time, fretting about non-essentials. no more, no more.
4 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 9 months
Photo
Tumblr media
June 11, 1930 Journals of Anais Nin 1927-1931  [volume 4]
3K notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 9 months
Text
some iridiscent fuckery from like, last month that i didn't get around to posting earlier...
Tumblr media
feathers, close up
8 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 10 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
some more pix of the babies at home from the past few months because they’re ridiculously adorable and my heart hurts but it’s okay (it has to be I guess) and I cannot wait to live with them again
8 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 10 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
the babies, at B’s. yesterday.
6 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 10 months
Text
BIG SAD. Sad about having moved cats to B’s and being cat-less. Hung out with B over the past two days and also sad about no longer being around him. I miss so much. So abjectly. I will note that this isn’t the ideal state of mind to be in a day before S lands in India, and literally two days before we sign marriage papers. But it is what it is and what is to be done with life but be honest about shit like this? At any rate, glum today. Going to try and distract myself from mind stuff by drowning it in shows and podcasts and stuff. Nothing like online content to absolutely turn the brain off. 
4 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 10 months
Text
person w adhd experiencing symptoms of adhd: why the fuck can’t I do this thing . I wish there was some explanation for this
58K notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 10 months
Text
life and walks (and too many metaphors...)
i just want to dwell for a second on how i’ve been feeling about life right now. last week, PMSing and migraining and then bleeding, i wasn’t very happy. it wasn’t just the physical discomfort, of course — it is the existential stuff that tends to actually get to me. the year’s not shaping the way i had thought it would. is this good? is this bad? or is this merely the way life tends to be: one thing after another? why do i attach value judgements to outcomes? why must i always be so full of wantwantwant? 
i’ve been trying to shake off these traits for a while now but this sort of thing takes a while because it involves shedding off decades' worth of learned response patterns, of behaviours and motivations and beliefs that took seed when i was very little when i was taught that i only Mattered if i was Good and being Good meant i had to Succeed and Get The Best Grades and generally Exhibit Proficiency in all things. i was told this Goodness (and relatedly, Mattering where it really Mattered) was always relative; therefore, claiming it meant and necessitated that someone else would need to give it up.
what now? what is good now? what matters? very radically different things, i think.
interestingly, in my first letter to S (right before he was leaving the country, and before we begun “dating”), i dwelled on a variation on this theme (in the context of our personal dynamic) and wrote, “Maybe nothing matters at all. Conversely: maybe everything does. More importantly, though, what has mattered in the brief period I’ve known you? Your goodness has… your self-awareness has. Your joy has mattered [too] (a good amount!)… [your] kindness [has] mattered. Your wit and curiosity and intensity have mattered. I know this because come Sunday, there will be a void in the shape of all these things. Would anything have such an effect if it didn’t matter?”
these things are all true, and i wrote them because i held (and still hold) them very close to my heart. indeed, they get dearer with each passing year. what is good now is the true and the clear. what matters now is living with the singular purpose of just… living. we take a walk through life — through all of it: the wooded, shaded bits and the parts by the water and the places that are rocky and the places where we rest our feet (i’m overusing metaphors again) — and how easy and happy would it feel if we realised early and often that a walk was just a walk? that there was nothing to “win” or gain or earn here but the experience of having experienced it at all? and that if we were lucky, we could hope to see some birds and bugs and marvel at the light glimmering on the water and perhaps strengthen our core a little? (i do apologise for the metaphors but they’re so fun!)
///
for all my brief, silly life, i’d been too caught up looking at my own damn feet to realise where i was and what it meant to Be Here. now, i’m trying to do just that: Be Here. pay attention. look around. i still forget this frequently — last week was an example of this — and get quite unhappy and flustered about not getting to places i want to be as quickly as i want. but repeatedly, i (thankfully) return to my present understanding of and commitment to the life i hope to live. 
///
i also like thinking about how S brings these qualities to my life in a way that i couldn’t have even conceived of before. it is not just that their goodness and kindness and loveliness makes me a better person. it is not only that with them, i feel safe and seen and taken care of. the remarkable thing is that i feel clarified and more myself because of us. and i marvel sometimes at the timing of it all, because i spent the past two years trying to unearth (and mould) some sense of self that felt true. i chose isolation so i could knit MySelf into a workable, honest, functional form. and truthfully, this helped the time effectively be the healthiest part of my life so far because i finally had the space and time to examine and shape my motivations and responses. so for S to burst into my life at the end(?) of this period, for them to come bearing their (gorgeous, gorgeous) attention and affections at this time is… interesting. if i were prone to that sort of thing, i’d claim i’d manifested this or something similar, but short of saying that, i’ll just note here for the record that i’m quite, quite moved by these events — and am, of course, grateful and happy about them.   
i wanted to dwell on this for a little while because i know how minds work — specifically mine, but i suspect this is a wider phenomenon — and i know one day, all of this may blend into the background, become my new normal, turn abjectly routine and regular. one day, i will take their presence and all this love as a given. one day, it will all have sunken in fully and settled into the earth and when was the last time any of us thanked the ground we walk on? so there’s an agenda to recording this, even though i do wish with all my heart to retain my present sense of wonderment and joy about what's happening with us. 
+ it fits right in with my broader goal to make my whole life about noting and celebrating joy! so anyway, right now is good. the imminent soon is looking very good also. i’m very very content right now, with where the path is taking me. it is a good walk, this life. the sun is out and i'm trying to not fret about inclement weather. because regardless of climate, terrain, or whatever else i may choose to euphmise this journey, the simple and beautiful thing is that i choose my responses. what a priviledge! every day, i wake up and get to make the glorious choice to pay attention to the world. :)
6 notes · View notes
relentlesserudition · 10 months
Text
ah yes, it is my worst enemy again: unstructured time
6 notes · View notes