“All Of Us Fight Hidden, Silent Battles Against Not Being Good Enough, Not Having Enough And Not Belonging

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.”]

You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (2005) dir. Joe Wright, adapted from the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

“They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.”

— Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

yes girl you are so [if i loved you less i might be able to talk about it more] [hands are unbearably beautiful] [i'll take care of you it's rotten work not to me not if it's you] [if you are intolerable let me be the one to tolerate you] [i could recognise him by touch alone] [i love you i want us both to eat well] [on purpose i love you on purpose] [whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same] [i am half agony half hope] [you have bewitched me body and soul and i love love love you] [he is half of my soul as the poets say] [i'm sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for but i'm so lonely] [i love you most ardently] [let me stay tender hearted despite despite despite] [someone has to leave first this is a very old story there is no other version of this story] [mostly i want to be kind] [tell me how all this and love too will ruin us] [you said i killed you haunt me then] [someone somewhere can you understand me a little love me a little] [i will love you as misfortune loves orphans as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong] [sorry about the blood in your mouth i wish it was mine] [who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me] can we kiss now

Life is going to be tough but you can make it.

“She is so stubborn, her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

I would not be the person I am without the authors who made me what I am - the special ones, the wise ones, sometimes just the ones who got there first.

Neil Gaiman (via resqectable)

“My creative writing professor told me to stop writing about love. I asked him why and he said, “Because you have turned it over and over in your hands, felt every angle, every fault, every inch, every bruise. You have ruined it for yourself.” I spent the next 3 weeks writing about science and space. Stars exploding. Getting sucked into a black hole. How much I wished I could sleep inside of that nothingness without being annihilated. What an exploding star would taste like. If it would make our stomachs glow like fireflies, or tingle and shake like pop rocks under our tongue. My creative writing professor told me that those poems weren’t what he was looking for. He tells me to stop writing about outer space. Stop writing about science. Again, I ask him why. Again, he says, “You have ruined it for yourself.” I spend the next three weeks writing about my mother, how we are told we can’t make homes inside of other human beings, but the foreclosure sign on my mother’s empty womb tells me that women who give birth know a different, more painful truth. My creative writing professor tells me I am both talented and hopeless, that everything I write is both visceral and empty, a walking circus with no animals inside but a beautiful trapeze artist with a broken hip selling popcorn in the entrance-way. He tells me to stop writing about my mother. I don’t ask why. I pick up my books and my notepad and I leave his office with my war stories tucked under my tongue like an exploding star, like the taste of the last person I ever loved, like my mother’s baby thermometer, and I do not look back. We are all writing about our mothers, our lovers, the empty space that we will never be able to breathe in. We are all carrying stones in our pockets and tossing them back and forth in our hands, trying to explain the heaviness and we will never stop writing about love, about black holes, about how quiet it must have been inside the chaos of my mother’s belly, inside the chaos of his arms, inside the chaos of the spaces in every poem I have ever written. None of this is ruined. Do not listen to them when they tell you that it is.”

— Caitlyn Siehl, “My Creative Writing Professor Told Me to Stop Writing About Love” (via alonesomes)

we are the daughters of parents who should not have had kids

~ Emily Dickson