I Learned Recently That Humans Glow Faintly, Even During The Day. All Living Creatures Do, Apparently.

« I learned recently that humans glow faintly, even during the day. All living creatures do, apparently. In recent years, scientists have been trying to discern if and, if so, why our bodies emit a varying visible light. In a study published in 2009, five healthy, bare-chested young Japanese men were placed in dark rooms sealed to keep light out, for twenty-minute intervals every three hours for three days. They were only allowed to sleep from midnight to 7am. A highly sensitive imaging system found that all of the men glowed, most strongly from the face, at levels that dropped and climbed during the day. Yes, it’s a small sample size, and the study does not seem to have been repeated, but it’s a delicious thought. The authors of the study, Masaki Kobayashi, Daisuke Kikuchi and Hitoshi Okamura, concluded that we all ‘directly and rhythmically’ emit light: ‘The human body literally glimmers. The intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes.’ »

— Julia Baird, Phosphorescence

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

When you’re growing up in abusive family, you don’t feel like “oh, I’m being abused, this is wrong.” You don’t even think about that. Instead, you feel guilty all the time. You feel like a horrible person. You feel useless and wrong, like something is fundamentally wrong with you, and you deserve every bit of harm coming your way.

For every time your parents hurt you, you feel it was justified and you deserved and provoked it. You keep feeling horrible and guilty about everything you’ve done to cause it. Even when something extreme happens, you dismiss it with “they didn’t mean that” or “it was just once, in anger, so it doesn’t count.”

You feel like a burden, because you know these people don’t want you in their house, and you don’t feel capable of being independent, and it’s on you that you keep bothering them with your existence, and don’t seem to be capable of getting out of there. You don’t feel like you deserve food, shelter, clothes, or anything. You feel like a burden no matter what you do. You don’t feel welcome anywhere, you don’t feel like you have a home, like there’s a place on this planet where you could be loved and cared for. You doubt yourself so badly, you struggle to see any value in your existence and it becomes hard. You break down and feel weak and lost and like everyone else is leaving you behind. You don’t feel like a part of anything. You feel guilty for existing the way you are.

If you felt this, you’ve been thru abuse. There is no one on this world who is useless, unworthy of love, or deserves to feel so guilty and to be hurt all the time. These ideas didn’t come from you, but from how horribly you were treated. Feeling this way is not normal. You did not deserve to feel this way.

“This work is not for nothing. The nights you keep pushing forward, even when you feel exhausted and overworked. The days you continue to show up and try, even when it’s uncomfortable and would be easy to quit. All the opportunities you have to postpone and all things you have to sacrifice in order to move toward what’s important to you. It has a purpose. Some things take time to build. And you’re building. You’re building and planting the seeds, and you’re growing. Even when you feel stuck. Even when the progression feels drawn out. You’re getting there, slowly, each and every day. It’s heavy, and the work is hard, but it’s not for nothing. You’ll get to where you want to be and you’ll become the person you want to become. Or maybe, you’ll blossom into a version of yourself you didn’t even know you wanted or didn’t know was possible. You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to think about everything you need to do to get to the finish line. You just have to focus on the most immediate thing in front of you and do what you need to survive today. This work will pay off. And if it doesn’t - if you end up somewhere else entirely — know that the growth it took to get to wherever you land is valuable in it’s own right. So keep building. Keep taking it one day at a time. Breathe. Things won’t be this hard forever. There’s a point beyond this pain, and you’ll get there.”

— Daniell Koepke

I will literally never believe your 20s are meant to be the prime of your life. The years immediately following your adolescence? When you’re entrenched in the battlefields of un/learning, healing, and growing? Yeah right