Hi there.

How’s your world today?

I came across an idea about mine that sent me spiraling down a rabbit-hole of thought. Here’s what came up on the way down.

THE AESTHETICS OF SUFFERING

I read this quote the other day that talked about the voyeuristic relationship that women have to their own suffering and it blew my mind. It talked about how women, even when in pain, are constantly thinking about the appearance and the beauty of that pain. Does this make me ugly? Am I still lovable like this? Is this experience going to sever me from the things that I want most? It blew my mind because even though it sounds vain and crazy, I know exactly what it means to aestheticize pain. To decorate it with poetry and music and keep it like a secret until it feels like something that makes you cool and mysterious, not ill. Or, at least I used to.

As a teenager, I felt that my suffering was beautiful. Some of that came from being a writer, some from wanting to feel grown up and real, and some, to be honest, from feeling that that pain made me more like the characters that everyone fell in love with in all of those coming-of age-movies. I felt like Margo from Paper Towns and Nadine from The Edge of Seventeen and Lady Bird. Hollywood told me that my experiences were film-worthy, that they were, by nature of the big screen, fascinating and worthy of attention. That it was okay to be a mess at seventeen, that it was part of the charm, that it was art. As a writer and a human being, I still choose to believe in that last part. I mean, this entire blog is dedicated to the art of existence. But as for suffering being something that you must do beautifully? As for it being something that we ever learn how to do neatly? I call bull shit.

IN THE REAL WORLD

It was easy at sixteen, seventeen, because there was Hollywood to reassure me that this was surely fine. There were the stereotypes and preconceived ideas about what constituted adolescence, and pain stood right at the top. I was a cliché, if anything. That’s how it felt. But now, into my twenties, struggling with mental health feels different. It feels a lot lonelier and a lot less romanticized. There are so many moments where I experience things that don’t feel beautiful at all. They don’t feel poetic or aesthetic or like anything that anyone would want to see. I can make them so, through reflection and writing, but they never arrive that way. They arrive as things that make me feel unlovable, despite having memorized the literature that explains it all as otherwise.

I read bell hooks and Cheryl Strayed. I took an entire college course on girlhood studies and all of the ways that this world digs its claws into us from the moment that we are born. I live and breathe articles and research and poetry that explain how we are all the more worthy of love in the moments when we feel that we aren’t. If it were on a test, I could get the answer right every time. If you needed me to, I could give you a whole lecture with footnotes in psychology, biology, philosophy. Yet when I am actually inside of those moments, when they are real, those right answers and perfectly mapped out explanations don’t quite hold their weight. Not up against the things that I feel.

AUTHENTIC CONNECTION

I was in a group meeting the other day and all of these people were talking about the very real, very ugly things that they are going through. It was chilling. We’re all used to walking into situations where everyone is putting their best foot forward. We’re taught to do that, it’s how our world works. Why? Because we don’t want to be the crazy one. But the thing is, we’re all crazy. Hiding it only severs us from each other. Because if you’ve ever been in a room where people are doing the opposite, where they are showing you the worst that they’ve got, where they are laying their souls bare for you to peer inside of and see your own reflection, then you know that it is those rooms that are overflowing with love and connection and support. It is within those spaces that we feel the least alone, the least alien, and the least unlovable.

I don’t quite know where I am going with this other than to say, I am tired of feeling like I need to fit into a perfect box all of the time and I am tired of that box being one that we each stand alone in. I like to think that our world is beginning to change that. I do think that we are moving towards a more authentic society. Maybe. Yet there is still somehow so much stigma and judgment that it makes me want to scream. There is still so much pressure to be perfect, to be this, to not be that. I don’t know if that will ever go away. People three and four times my age still complain about it. But I do know that I am trying all the time to authentically connect and that writing and art are the surest methods of this that I have ever known. So thank you. For being here, for sharing your stories, and for allowing me to share mine so unabashedly.

Love always, m.