Mood This Week

What you call self-sabotage might just be your body saying: "Familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar peace"

What you call procrastination might just be your body saying: "I'm overwhelmed and everything feels too much"

What you call anxiety might just be your body saying: "I've been in danger before, and I don't know if it's over yet"

What you call neediness might just be your body saying: "I didn't get what I needed, and I'm still longing"

What you call overreacting might just be your body saying: "This feels like danger to me because it once was"

What you call emotional instability might just be your body saying: "I was never taught that feeling emotions could be safe"

What you call resistance might just be your body saying: "I don't feel safe enough to do what you want me to"

What you call laziness might just be your body saying: "I'm frozen because I had to work hard for too long"*

What you call numbness might just be your body saying: "I had to shut down to keep you safe"

What you call avoidance might just be your body saying: "Im not ready to face this yet. I need slower exposure to it"

(the.trauma.educator on ig)

*gentle reminder that body gets tired also after doing mentally draining work/job (which includes feeling stressed too, not just studying or working 9-5 in front of a computer -which holds responsabilities, anyway)

Was your star next to mine ?

They need to invent a locking in that is permanent

he is not my favourite sacrificial lamb, he has no bite

he is least my favourite sacrificial lamb because he is so sweet and innocent. i put the cold harsh blade against his throat and his eyes are so clear when they look up at me. he doesn't even think to reproach me for the horrors i put him through. he forgives and he forgives and he forgives.

my favourite sacrificial lamb fights. he bleats for all he is worth and tries to run away on his skinny coltish legs. his eyes are older than they should be and i can see the anger of every lamb before him in them. he makes me feel sorry for what i have to do.

because that is how it needs to be. i need to feel pain and regret and responsibility for the sacrifice to work. if i don't feel disgusted at my actions then there is nothing to cleanse and purify.

fight and scream little lambs, never let us take you easily. if you die quietly we will never feel the guilt, and it will be for nothing.

and then at night i kneel and i pray, not to the god for whom i commit these atrocities, but to the lambs skipping across the inky sky.

ignosce mihi little lambs, just not for this.

i bring a sort of...locked out... vibe to the study sesh that the haters (my very clever bsf who is going to study medicine and needs straight a's) hate

the killing of the weeds

we've all been told that they pick the flowers they think are the prettiest

and they do, they pluck the beautiful ones when they are young and they display them for all to see

but hidden away behind this is their treatment of the less beautiful ones

the ivy and and the dandelions - the 'weeds'

a weed is not a specific breed or family of plant, a weed is defined as 'a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants'

a weed is any plant that does not conform

a plant that is wild and unruly and a law unto itself

a plant that challenges the status quo, the norm

a plant that grows in competition, a plant thats non-conformance makes it brighter and bolder and braver

i can tell you what they do with those plants

they rip them out

they try and remove the roots as best as they can, to try and remove any chance of the resilient weed bouncing back up

they pour weed-killers, harsh chemicals designed to destruct

and they do so repeatedly

the forceful and ferocious beating down of those that dare to be different

the killing of the weeds

no one cares about that

they kill the weeds

studywithelle pinpost

I am 16 and i am in S5 in Scotland

This year I studied Highers in English, Biology, History, Latin and RMPS (religious moral and philosophical studies)

Next year I will be taking Advanced Higher English, RMPS and Modern studies, and a Higher in Classics

I hope to study English at Oxford, and then do a law conversion degree

I play cello (taking grade 5 exam in a few weeks), and piano at a grade 2/3 level. my sports are orienteering, ski-racing, tennis, and badminton. member of law, politics, debating, and newspaper societies at school.

would love moots!

also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

one of the biggest things I can advocate for (in academia, but also just in life) is to build credibility with yourself. It’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking of yourself as someone who does things last minute or who struggles to start tasks. people will tell you that you just need to build different habits, but I know for me at least the idea of ‘habit’ is sort of abstract and dehumanizing. Credibility is more like ‘I’ve done this before, so I know I can do it, and more importantly I trust myself to do it’. you set an assignment goal for the day and you meet it, and then you feel stronger setting one the next day. You establish a relationship with yourself that’s built on confidence and trust. That in turn starts to erode the barrier of insecurity and perfectionism and makes it easier to start and finish tasks. reframing the narrative as a process of building credibility makes it easier to celebrate each step and recognize how strong your relationship with yourself can become

i keep thinking about how rfk said that autistic people "will never write a poem." i keep thinking about that, about if humanity is calculated on the back of old verse. how far we measure personhood is in baseball and stanza breaks.

i keep thinking - i have over 7k poems on here alone. language can be a special interest, after all. did you know the word autism comes almost direct from the greek word autos, meaning "self"? self-ism.

maybe he is right - i haven't really played baseball. i was a ballet dancer instead. and besides - my sister once accidentally hit me in the face with an aluminum bat. i'm not sure if the injury gives me half points. am i only a person in the dugout? hand in a mitt? swinging?

does softball count? does cricket? am i a person if i throw the ball to my dog. am i a person as long as the ball is in the air, or do i stop being a person as it rolls into the bushes. i took my girlfriend to fenway recently; was i a person in the sun, with my hands up, with the game laid out at my feet in a diamond. i felt like a person, but that was back in the summer, and i often feel my most person-like then.

am i more of a person because of the sheer number of things i've written? does quality matter, or is it quantity? i used to write entire books every summer in high school - i wasn't doing well. i felt the least like-a-person back then. but then - does any person feel human in high school?

in the library, ink on my skin, i feel personhood shutter at the edges of myself. actually, writing feels blissfully like not being myself. it feels birdlike; escaping into creation so my body dissolves and i survive only by muscle memory. i am not there, i am writing.

but who can deny the falconlike focus of warsan shire, the tenderness of mary oliver, the sheer skill of amanda gorman. those are poets. they are certainly human. you could line them up with the way their words have influenced us and measure their literary shadows like wings.

perhaps it was very assumptive of me to want to be a poet rather than "a [ label ] poet." i wanted the work to fill itself in, rather than be stained by what i am. i do not write in despite of my neurodivergence, i am just neurodivergent and writing.

does the poem have to be in english or can i send it through my palms into the coat of my dog. does the poem have to make sense. does the poem have to love you back.

if i break a glass, will the poem appear naturally? or is the act of breaking the glass human-enough. the shards of my life glittering out beneath me - do i have to write the poem, or is it self-evident in the pile of glass splinters? i cannot grasp this world the way other people can. regardless, i endeavor to touch - even the mess - very gently.

i broke my toenail against my coffee table recently. i released a bug outdoors. i made coffee. i walked my dog.

i didn't write a poem about any of these things.

something else, then. existing without humanity.