Rubberbandheart - Rubberband Heart - Tumblr Blog

I am afraid of my attraction. I keep connecting with people whose only response to me is care enough to not want to hurt me by rejecting me.

What is it called when it is not a worthiness problem but a knowing that I am not attractive to the people I am attracted to? And so I have come to understand that my attraction is problematic and it is self-preservation to withdraw from anyone I want to get closer to.

It's 6 months post break-up and while I don't intend to keep using that as a marker of time passing in my life, I want to explain how much less physical affection I have. I don't sleep next to anyone, I haven't been held.

I don't have many friends either and while I am ok, the days go by and I feel less and less like a creature meant to have been touched.

I think I might cry if someone ever holds my hand again.

I think I am always going to be confused about when I am supposed to self-soothe and when I am supposed to feel truly loved and supported in my intimate relationships, that it's ok to turn to someone else.

When instead of swallowing a fistful of white pills, you decided to shower, the palm trees nodded in agreement, a choir of crickets singing behind your swollen eyes.

— Erika L. Sánchez, from “Six Months After Contemplating Suicide,” in Lessons on Expulsion

I don't really know what I hope for, in writing about my inner world. Indeed, my worry and pain. It alienates people. It exhausts them. What makes me think I'll become real if I speak it? What makes me think the world is changed in any way because I put these thoughts into it? It is both from a place of arrogance and zero worth and that is the weirdest meeting of polarity.

I wish I could measure my experience of the world to the way other people do. Like how often do friends text them? How lucky are they? How much do they feel like they belong? How peaceful do they feel, alone with themselves? How much do they feel the urge to express and make sense of being alive in exactly the way I am trying to write about it now?

simone weil

Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

I have tried to be and achieve everything I thought anyone would want in this life and still, I have not kept love.

“You can’t remember what they did to you. Your loneliness isn’t welcome here, you know, but still you walk the dream-lit village, looking for someone gentle enough. There must be an animal trapped under your shirt, you think, because little claws scratch against your chest and you throb there, but you’re afraid to look because looking means remembering.”

— Sara Eliza Johnson, from “Parable of the Unclean Spirit”

My grandfather died last night. I think one important part of getting through the heartbreak of a break-up is learning to do the hard stuff alone.

I keep trying to write you a letter. Nothing good has ever come from me continuing to communicate with someone who has concluded that they don't love me. There are no letters for me.

Being in the world as a lonely thing Turned my sensitivities into fingers I pull the sleeves over to keep from being seen The details are frightening to anyone I show them to I stare at an ant carrying the corpse of another and know the tragedy is mine alone

Every day is a violent survival of ruin like when a tree feller cut a neighbour's perfect, infringing tree down and I couldn't defend it My anguish contained within the bounds of this body I know is too thin In the heavy silence of feeling what will not be spoken nor heard Wind, take my fingers Ravens, take my eyes Oceans, take my blood I want to give my heart back to the fabric that nobody else can wear.

I am hopelessly cynical about humanity and ever making any real change. Activists have been fighting against the same things for decades. Selfishness is an unavoidable barrier for progress.

If I didn't put myself into the world every day. Think. Write. Be real. I fear I might dissolve into the cold silence, the eternity of aloneness I know is waiting for me once I stop. And the proximity to stopping grows ever nearer.

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

— Saul Leiter

Ada Limón, “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance”

We are nothing without our mistakes, regrets and sacrifices.

That's what ignites our most important lessons. Consequence.

“I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who, somewhere along the line, misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract…in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.”

— Joan Didion

I am a big advocate for gratitude. It just feels like the bar is so low lately. It's one thing to be grateful for food and health and basic needs satisfaction. It's just so messed up that these are things that shouldn't be a struggle for so many people but are.

I suspect Dina really did smell like a hot pile of garbage after dancing and being sweaty at the church. No way they had deodorant in that world.

Ellie and Dina Spoiler warning:

I think Ellie feels guilt for spending the night with Dina, when Jesse told them that Tommy and Joel didn't show up.

I think she feels like she might have been able to find them earlier than she did and possibly even saved Joel if she weren't distracted during her time with Dina that night. It very likely contributed to her decision to go find Abby one last time, leaving her life with Dina behind - she might feel like she is partly to blame and must make it right. That she didn't really deserve what she had with Dina because it cost her Joel. That's why she left, in spite of her fear of losing Dina - her guilt was greater.