rosejellybean

[rosejellybean]

the feeling of despair

i did not buy it

i took it,

as someone takes a rock from the ground and keeps it in their pocket

a meticulous collector

a heart full of hope

and a pocket full of rocks.

[rosejellybean]

“I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn’t even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn’t talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.”

— Yiwei Chai, The Jacaranda Years (via crowsummer)

[rosejellybean]

Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems

[rosejellybean]

I almost say something then. I almost say something.

But i don't.

And then he says, "I wish I were more like you."

And the snow falls and i close my eyes and we fall asleep together.

@chronicintrovert

[rosejellybean]

meet my original character: Caden Hastings

he's all about wandering into the woods at midnight, getting A+ in every test, coffee and anxiety, avoiding social interaction, being moody but soft on the inside, and the most important part, being super oblivious about the fact that he's a raging homosexual.

#original character #storytelling #books and libraries #dark aesthetic #books #writing #characters #dark academia

[rosejellybean]

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits (translated by Magda Bogin)

[rosejellybean]

[rosejellybean]

yeah i have impostor syndrome *kills you in electrical*

[rosejellybean]

My relationship with content creation and hobbies, in general, got a lot better when I started learning to reframe it as a simple act of human creation, and not a metric of my own self worth.

We’re taught competition, and perfectionism, and shame. If I say “I cook” I must add “(but not well)”. If I say “I run” I must say “(but I am not good at it).” I say “I code (but I mostly know frontend).” I create and express and my first impulse is to guard against embarrassment. Lest I fall so short of marketable competence. Lest I subject myself to the mockery of being caught creating poorly. I wound myself first so others may not.

Even the advice that fights against this says “your only goal should be to be better than yourself yesterday.” But why must I be in competition with her? What happens, after the initial rapid climb in skill, when I plateau? What of injury, and atrophy, and depression, that flake these skills away? Must I return feeling compelled to over-achieve? To wallow in embarrassment until I can surpass my own previous record? To hate my work until the reception, the notes, the engagement outperform an ever rising bar? I do not want to be paralyzed by the mountains I built behind me. Why should I look behind myself when there’s a wide swath of untilled Earth that stretches far out of sight ahead of me? I want to enjoy my work, and my mediocrity, moving forward with all its ebbs and flows.

At my worst, I was nothing. I was not a writer. Because I had forgone writing for all the fear and stress and damage to my self-worth that it wrought. I was not a coder. Because I was only useful for the niches of my job, and didn’t have the heart to create something badly, on my own, for fun, lest it confirm my suspicions of mediocrity. I was not even a runner - despite the extreme and exhaustive amount of time I sunk into it - because I fell short of my previous self, and I could not hold a candle to the actually-skilled runners, and I was forced to speak of this hobby in all those guarded terms - “but i am not good” - because of how much that ate at me. 

I was no cook, and no homemaker, and no creator, because when I did those things, (I did them poorly.) 

And when all these came together, I wallowed in emptinesses. (I still do, sometimes. It’s hard and complicated). Because emptiness is what was left when I stripped myself of the things and the pursuits whose lack of value could be used to hurt me.

The change for me - the change, I think - came at the time I started to recognize that I do not deserve self-punishment for my mediocrities, for the failings of my current state of being. It was not a revelation all at once. It was a slow and progressive flirting with the idea, found almost by accident on self-help youtube channels of a very particular ilk. It came with the recognition that I had trapped myself, wiling away my time and my energy, in a state of constant apology, and shame, and self-correction for the mediocrities I dare not unleash onto the world. I boxed myself up with the promise “once I am good enough, I will be allowed to come back out”, and that was a lie. I would never have come back out. I was chasing punishing metrics of self-improvement that I did not need, and would never actually catch and maintain, and which would never love me back.

It took a long time to internalize this. It took a long time to get angry on my own behalf. It took a long time to act on it, and write again because fuck you. To run on my own terms, at my own pace, for my own enjoyment because fuck you. To create with my hands again because fuck you. To lean into the happiness of creation that I had not “earned”, because fuck you.

I like creating because it fills an emptiness that used to be there. It’s so simple, and so lovely, that humans are like this. That we want to build with our hands. That we want to assemble and construct. That we derive joy from stacking pieces together, and stringing words together, and assembling colors on a page, and moving, and singing, and baking, and knitting. Humans love to build little worlds around them. 

So why must we so actively try to cut people off from it off from it? Why do we condition ourselves to fear its mediocrity? Why does this still our hands? Why do we suffocate it for ourselves, before others can? I don’t have an answer. I can only recognize the monster. 

I want to make bad art today. I want to make bad art tomorrow. If I am a worse writer tomorrow, I want that to be fine. If I am never more than a mediocre runner, I want to be at complete peace with that. Because if not, then I might box away my hobbies again, and my loves, and my pursuits. I might go back to empty. I might go back to nothing.

I hate that emptiness I lived through. I hate that nothing. I want to make bad art for the rest of my life. 

[rosejellybean]

"anywhere else you'd like to go?", I asked.

"somewhere far", she said. "somewhere real."

[rosejellybean]

i love him so much I could cry

Aled Last, Radio Silence 

 ••• 

 "Hello. I hope somebody is listening.“

[rosejellybean]

sure, i COULD sit down and write. but i could also, and hear me out here, lie in bed thinking about writing for five hours and wishing that i had written it already so i would not have to go through the intense torture that is opening microsoft word and converting thoughts to prose

[rosejellybean]

Nikki Giovanni, from “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day”

[rosejellybean]

“Can we stay out late tonight? I fear you won’t like me this much tomorrow.”

— s.s. (stephenstilwell)

[rosejellybean]

why you should keep writing your story

because it’s a puzzle no one else will ever arrange the same way as you.

because there are ideas that simply won’t come to you until you write down the wrong words.

because all the bad scenes are the bones of the wonderful scenes.

because someone will love it: someone will read it once, and twice, and thrice; someone will ramble to you about the complexity of it; someone will doodle your characters out of love; someone will find it in exactly what they were looking for with or without knowing it.

because they have things to say, your characters. they’ve told you all those secrets and they have more to tell you, if you will listen.

because you love it even when you don’t; even when it drives you mad or when it accidentally turns into apathy; even when you think you’re doing it all wrong; you love it, and it loves you back.

because you can get a treasure even from things that go wrong; because if a story crumbles down you can build a shinier one on the same spot; because you won’t know where it will take you until it takes you there.

[rosejellybean]

i go to bed. i am consumed by overwhelming loneliness. i stare at the ceiling. i long for something i can’t name. i question if i’m real. i see a funny little meme on my phone and laugh hysterically for several minutes. i get too invested in an unrealistic fantasy. i pass out around three.

[rosejellybean]

a little disorganized thing on neopronouns in other languages, apologies for not covering a lot of languages! here’s a post about neopronouns in other languages :)

NOTE: IF YOURE GONNA SAY U SUPPORT NEOPRONOUNS IN THIS CONTEXT BUT NOT IN ENGLISH? DIE BY MY BLADE.

ALSO PRONOUNS DO NOT EQUAL GENDER HESBIANS AND SHE/HER GAYS ILY

transcript under the cut

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