Wise Words From One Of My Favs

Wise words from one of my favs 💕💕

Emotional Labor: What It Is and How To Do It

via Celine Loup

And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

me: i love you but please, please do not step on my keyboard. go a foot out of your way and go around

my lovable yet ungrateful cat, a troublegirl and a fiend: you could sooner divert a river from its course than deny my nature 

I feel like society normalizing mothers screaming and being angry at their children as long as they don’t beat them because ‘mothers love you more than anyone else’ should stop. It hurts victims of emotional and verbal abuse because they are told to keep loving their mothers since they “don’t abandon you, give you a roof, food, and clothing” and it makes them unable to identify if they’re being abused or try to fight back because “she still loves me.” Such things really have to stop.

I’ll never forget that one time I was talking to this boy and I rejected him (mind you I almost gave him my address because we were supposed to go out) and he stalked and harassed me for an entire month and put my number on Craigslist (I was getting hundreds of calls and texts every day to the point my phone stopped working).

Men are crazy.