Guattari’s idea is both refreshing and profound. He suggests that when a person experiences psychosis, her psychosis changes according to her surroundings, and, therefore, treating her with fear by locking her up, keeping her in restraints, overmedicating her, and exposing her to other methods of suppression only serves to change her psychosis to a psychosis of fear and paranoia. Who, psychotic or not, in the same situation wouldn’t also feel terror and paranoia? Indeed, there is a legitimate reason to be paranoid and afraid. Further, the shock of being treated inhumanly, the sense of alienation and of betrayal, and, perhaps paramountly, the realization that humans can and do treat other humans in this way, is itself shocking and traumatizing. It is a shock and trauma that alters the psyche, changing the personality of the person who undergoes it.
Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence
If they miss you, they’ll call. If they want you, they’ll say it. If they care, they’ll show it. And if not, they aren’t worth your time.
Lessons Learned in Life (via thoughtkick)
Let me find out what the star burst is made of;
what sings shadows in the shade, love,
let me find out what color love is, dove.
Find the shape of god in your silhouette;
let me tender the torment of threat,
strangle sleep supine a striking sunset.
Let me hold my hunger for your halo;
grace my grave and gentle my glow,
let me bridge my bliss and bellow it below.
Ache in me my ashes asleep at the altar;
let me honor haste and humor holy halter,
frozen fallout to let the faith falter.
Erika L. Sánchez, from Lessons on Expulsion: Poems; “Amá”
[Text ID: “In One Hundred Years of Solitude, / Márquez wrote that we are birthed / by our mothers only once, but life obligates / us to give birth / to ourselves over and over.”]
i have been meaning to reach out to you but the window was open and everything seemed so lovely outside so i forgot.. but i still love you give me just a minute
Maya C. Popa, from “Dear Life”, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder
What if we learned about nature in relation to our body instead of as something that is subject to us, that surrounds us? I repotted an anthurium today and its roots were all bunched up together because it was originally in a too small pot. I decided to loosen the roots so they could take up more space in the dirt and I was reminded of how roots are essentially veins/veins are roots! Carrying life-giving nutrients and just their shape! And how the branches of a tree are fractals, like the pathways in our brains, like lightning in the sky! Point is, we would probably feel more connected and invested in the natural world if we learned about it as similar to ourselves, as ourselves being a part of it down to the design elements being similar.
Do Angels Exist? A Google Search a Week off Antipsychotics, Dante Émile
Her fluttered spirit, delicate and soft, bumping against the lamp of life, too hard, too glassy,
Vita Sackville-West, from her poem "In Memoriam: Virginia Woolf" published in The Observer on 6 April 1941