Hello, welcome.
This is my going to be my first entry here on substack. As I’m writing this, I feel both excited and nervous to open up this new medium and/or portal for my work. Before, I think I want to set some intentions (and also leave room for these intentions to change or transform). Firstly, I’ve realized I don’t like to put a lot of parameters on how I can create, so I hope this to be as free as possible, a space where I can collect around the shape my life is taking and, of course, musings from the end of the world. I will post when I like though tentatively, I’m feeling a once-a-week situation. Thank you so much for taking the time to click on to this it is an honour to be perceived by you. <3 Subscribe and you will receive posts in your email inbox—AND with that lets get into it.
What a Trip to be Alive (journal entries)
16.6.22 (POV witnessing miracles)
It’s just like this, it can feel like the end of the world, the depths of sorrow, and then your roommates crawl into the bathtub with you. You poor lavender oil and bubbly bath soap and it forms a perfect spiral. You get into it together and you turn the bath in to a portal to another timeline. And here you are. Not even the end of the world is really the end of the world…
My heart keeps getting blasted open with love.
Your bicycling back from a dinner party where you eat from overflowing dishes (lotus root, tender bamboo shoots, smashed cucumber salad, marinated eggs, green onion pancake) and then sip soju while you hold your belly and lounge on couch talking about the beauty of where you all are in your lives over candlelight. You ride home and the streets smell fresh from the summer rain and the lights from the store windows reflect in the puddles. You feel the immensity of life and it makes you feel so small as you glimpse people in their houses going about their lives [loving each other, watching tv, having parties]. The wind blows through your hair and simultaneously you feel so expansive as if you could encapsulate all of the curling and churning of life’s folds in this single moment. For a moment, you don’t think about all the ways things could go wrong but instead you expect them to go right. That you could, in fact, expand forever co-creating back and forth, finding new doorways to love.
There seems to be all these moments I can’t seem to get out of my head. Moments when I think to myself this feels like a movie, like how can this be my life?
Another time, after another dinner party, you all sit around and talk about what your best day would look like. The funny thing is it isn’t these grand extravagant experiences that was yearned for, it was small moments that reminded everyone how special it was to be alive, to be having this experience here on earth [at this point in time]. You and your friends discuss running errands on a nice day while listening to a podcast you’ve been looking forward to, leaving the house in a rush to meet a friend for coffee and throwing on a random outfit and somehow have the outfit just looks effortlessly cool and put together. Or, or, having a really fun night out and sleeping in the next day, ordering takeout and watching reality tv (feeling deeply at peace). It was having great sex and falling into a deep sleep. You all expressed something of the same, a deep sense of nourishment from being here on this earth [at this point in time]. Connecting with that something else, that deep sense of ~being okay~ in a million different possible configurations.
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23.6.22 (solitude)
I asked for space, and I got it.
Having the whole apartment to myself, alone but not lonely, I smoked a cigarette and I liked how it felt. I rarely smoke and if I do I don’t always get it, but today in all of this stillness, I felt the delight of the story I was creating (single young women alone on balcony, in a silk robe, smoking a cigarette). What with the rain and all, I felt all the stillness around me pooling into my lap and between my thighs. Why is there something so erotic about an empty house? So much eroticism in absence, just as much, if not more, than excess. I think we forget about the absence part though.
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25.6.22 (call and response)
Me: June, I think, was about me entering into a version of myself that I’m really excited about
Friend: and July is about seeing what that self can do?
Me: yes, yes, exactly!
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Quiz (If you answered before what is you answer now?)
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&&& A Poem
Finding Myself
I don’t think there is anything in me that feels unchanging,
(I say as the witnesser of the change),
It’s just this, I would gladly give up many things to know myself,
But I don’t think I can be known…
I meet myself again and again, often through the eyes of someone I love,
Or even someone who’s funeral I would attend but be self-conscious over the fact that I could not be moved enough to cry at, or I would cry and be self-conscious of the fact that my grief seemed overly performative.
That being said, every time I seem to acquire something of my essence it slips from my grasp.
Leaving me with just an imprint, a shadow, of who I was being yesterday, or the day before that.
Chasing shadows become futile although romantically melancholic.
I seek pleasure in lovers that paint me pink, crimson or blue with their fantasies and stories, sometimes I enjoy just being a chapter in someone’s book, or even just a page. Feeling my own transience in the way I often slip through someone’s grasp, or else, become their character and then drop it all together when I’m done with it.
Other times, I hope to find some parts of myself in the void: what I birth, what I create and how. That feels closer, closer than I could ever get, but still, still, there is something else.
Perhaps, there is something awfully self-centred on questing to know oneself, but (again, again) I remind myself that there is a reason why separation is the primordial illusion.
<a centred self is the nature of living, loving and dying on Earth>
Many times, I don’t know who I’m trying to be, what narrative I’m trying to inhabit, what plotlines I want to carry on and which ones I want to let go of.
But it is in the confusion that I seem to meet myself again, that part, the part that can never be found.
Who am I being now?
Who am I being now?
Mhhm I think I’m getting closer.
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PAINT BY NUMBERS
Finally, I made a ~multi-media~ art video (ever heard of it) on paint by numbers. Why paint by numbers you might ask? During a particularly rough and busy period of school and life in March, I felt incredibly overwhelmed by the complexity of the world pushing up against me and I really just wanted to enter the <no thoughts, head empty> void. I was really desiring a paint by numbers kit to turn off my brain to. There is something so satisfying about being told exactly what to do (when you’re utterly not sure what to do). I didn’t have any, and I didn’t want to buy one, so I made my own. I found some reference photos of water reflections and I sketched out an outline and designated colors. I painted (and watched Gilmore Girls—per my love of *white women’s media™) and sat with the emptiness of my brain. And it felt really fucking good. Anyways from that, I really dove deep in to the world of paint by numbers, its origins and also what I felt like it represented. This is also a chapter in my own timeline of giving my art the space to be taken seriously and maybe even have value (at least to me at first). Anyways here she is:
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Okay Finally, Finally,
Some affirmations and maybe prompts?
notforeverbutfornow, notforeverbutfornow, notforeverbutfornow, not foreverbutfornow…
how wrong do you feel right now?
What moments have you felt like you were doing it (art, spirituality, life, manifestation) wrong?
What moments have you felt like you were doing it right?
How much permission are you capable of granting yourself to be right? Can you increase it?
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that is all for now, till next time <3
I love the way you framed the idea of eroticism through relation and space: “So much eroticism in absence, if not more than excess. I think we forget about the excess part more though.” It’s funny because I immediately put the absence / excess binary (?) of eroticism in conversation of the sensual self as it exists alone / with other(s).