#writing in my diary

[proxycrit]

Day 26- Lanayru Mountain

Perhaps dragon song sounds familiar. No matter; it’s time to get to business.

On that note, magnesis is reacquired! Purah’s still working on the other glyphs.

(“We’ll find a cure by the end of this year, I promise.”

“I hope we do, Mimi. I really, really hope we do.”)

((This is a totk au called familiar familiar! Zelda doesn’t go back in time, history is forever changed, and link is beset by ghost memories from his magic arm as per usual.))

(Want to throw a coin to an exhausted art hermit? Check out my patreon!)

[charbroiledchicken]

reblog if you're a writer but would rather drink straight cyanide than show any of your family members your work

[readmydairy]

yes I love you. yes I love you. yes I love you. yes I love you. take my soul, my heart is on a platter. serve it to you. please I love you. I love you.

[hyunpic]

hyunjin — arena homme korea (june 2025)

[just-gingerkat]

Thinking about how The Murderbot Diaries is a character that is completly and fully character driven to the point where the very writing and book format is revolved around it.

The first book is short, concise. It skips a bunch of scenes over the course of many weeks. It focuses purely on what Murderbot thinks is important and worth focusing on. Thats why the majority of the book is dedicated to its thought process, its complaints, or it's fear. It skips over "meaningful" scenes because it doesn't find them important. Like most of the conversations, like it helping Volescu. It doesn't care. It does care when it feels uncomfortable and wants to be left alone. It does care when its scared and something big might happen. It does care about Mensah which is why the few scenes that are more meaningful are with Mensah and then back to narration.

The books get longer and longer as they go on, showing how as Murderbots journey continues so does its ability to care. More intimate moments, more admitting to us that it's afraid, it doesn't want this, it does want this. It begins to describe and pay attention more and more to whats going on around it and it grows to decide what it wants and it's all so beautifully conveyed through writing.

Even The Company was such a clever and subtle way of telling us something. Because everything in the books centers on how Murderbot thinks. Murderbot would never aknowledge its feelings towards The Company and therefore we never knew of it until someone pointed it out. And that too is development because now Murderbot cares enough to let us know. To let itself know. It still shuts down, draws away in its own thoughts. But each book gets longer and longer with less time between them because Murderbot is slowly learning to pay attention, and interact, and aknowledge the present moment. Its learning to care

[malusokay]

What's the point of a diary if you're not lying in it?

On Anaïs Nin, literary self-mythologizing, and why personal writing should always be slightly dishonest. (from my substack)

If you’re not lying in your diary, you’re just journaling, and journaling is for people who don’t know how to edit.

A diary is not a record of events; it is an act of creation. The best diarists know this instinctively. Anaïs Nin knew it better than anyone. Her diaries were not mere confessions but performances, half-lit mirrors where the truth shimmered, distorted but no less real.

Nin understood that life is not lived in a single register. Her diaries are a study in contradiction—one moment, she is in love; the next, repulsed. She is independent yet wholly consumed by those around her. But contradiction isn’t falsehood; it’s literature. She rewrote and edited her diaries, sculpting herself into the character she wanted to be. And is that really so dishonest?

People love to be outraged by the idea of a diary that is not entirely factual. But fact is not the same as truth. Diaries, at their best, are emotional truths, shaped by mood, by desire, by the need to impose a narrative on the chaos of daily life. Nin was not interested in being objective—she was interested in being immortal. She once wrote, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” But why stop at tasting? Why not rewrite, reshape, embellish? If we can curate the lives we present to others, why should we not do the same for the versions of ourselves we leave behind?

Nin herself was a master of this. She edited her diaries before publication, removing, refining, turning herself into a protagonist. She blurred lines, shifted timelines, made herself more alluring. She called it shaping reality. Others call it lying. The truth, of course, is that all personal writing is selective. Even in confession, there is curation.

The danger, of course, is that history will take the performance at face value. That the diary, once private, will harden into biography. But this, too, is a kind of truth. A diary is not a static object. It lives, it breathes, it deceives, but always in service of something larger than the mundane details of existence.

[wisteriagroves]

I wish I could forget you as easily as you have forgotten me.

[inkskinned]

i'm still trying to piece together the truth of it. when you left, you said: feel free to spin this narrative however you want. i have no idea if you were being cruel or if you just genuinely don't remember what you've done to me.

it's hard because i'd done so much of the work for you. i had seen the parts that flaked off, the rust underneath. i started separating you into two people - the one i loved, and the one who hurt me. i had this fantasy version of you - my partner - and then i had this stranger, a third person who would show up randomly to shatter me. i am deliriously glad i'm no longer with "the stranger". i miss the gentle (unreal?) "other" you terribly.

at first, i was so strict about my boundaries. i remember telling you to get the fuck out of my house if you were going to talk to me like that. by the end: i would justify your behavior for you, accepting even your mistreatment as "my fault" in the grand scheme. i look back on the person i was before you - smart, independent, confident - and i feel a strange sense of detachment. i don't even recognize me.

even in one of our last conversations, you said: if you want a partner that always talks warmly to you, find someone else. there was a time that a comment like that would have made me leave. and instead, somehow, i just placidly accepted that kind of thing. you were literally telling me that i wasn't allowed to have a reaction to your cruelty - and i just took it, because you'd so fully turned things around on me.

when people are faced with irrationality, a rational brain tries to make sense of it. this is the trap. they're lovely in the morning, gentle and blue-eyed and sweet. like nothing even happened, they breeze around the house and kiss you on the mouth. but at night; who is that? they snap almost randomly; flying into an impotent rage about just-about-anything. it just doesn't make sense. so the problem must be me, and my brain, and how i think.

the traumatized brain just wants peace. so maybe i'm misremembering. maybe you were just having a bad day. maybe it's actually me.

you eventually would fully turn on me and start implying that i am the bad actor in our relationship. that's what happens, right? that's literally in the playbook. you went to therapy for all of a month, told her a half-truth, co-opted therapyspeak. you figured out how to reframe your actions as "seeking peace." any time i stood my ground, i was "gaslighting." when i asked you to be more gentle, you said i was "tone policing." you said, randomly, i had emotionally manipulated you - i still have no idea what that's even specifically referring to. maybe my consistent requests for calmness and empathy?

and while i literally know better, and i'm sitting here, trained by you, thinking: wait, fuck. was i actually the person you made me out to be?

and the thing that scares me is that i literally do not know if you ever actually saw what you were doing to me. when you'd tell me how you remember arguments, you'd always summarize them in a way where you come off as gentle and easy: "i was trying to set an important boundary." what had actually happened was 15 minutes of you shouting at me i know you did something shady, just admit it already. eventually you'd say my reaction to your shouting (when i finally reacted, which usually happened around hour three) was inevitably "disappointing" and "another way i'm silencing your feelings."

how many times did i ask you - beg you - to just take accountability? looking back, i don't think i ever heard you say: you're right. the way i talked to you was wrong of me.

i am trying to tie together the two people into a full version of you in my head. yes, you made my coffee and made me laugh and spent hours on the phone with me. and yes - you would scream at me until i had to run away and hide behind something.

i wish i did have a narrative i could pull out and shape to my whim. i wish i did have some semblance of reality. instead i just stand here, strange and vibrating, wondering: what the fuck just happened?

[squidflavoredsoup]

redraw

they’re so cute i love them😿😿

[fairydrowning]

"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."

– Franz Kafka

[ahsokalegend]

Love in The Apothecary Diaries isn’t loud.

Our society tells us love is in the grand gestures, in perfection, in physical attraction and loss of self in the pursuit of lust. In a way, not too different from Li’s society built on sex as commerce where people are used and thrown away. The desire of a grand romance played before a crowd on jealous onlookers.

But love, true love is understated.

Jinshi doesn’t come to Maomao’s aid with blazing guns but a song titled “Echo II”. He walks to Maomao. She steps towards him.

It’s in the way Jinshi immediately falls back into his true self around Maomao

How Maomao starts cracking the driest jokes with a tender smile

How she misses Jinshi’s confused concern over her antics

Jinshi reaching for her bruised cheek. Maomao not shying away.

It’s the quiet. The calm of two people existing in their own world like the echo of a forgotten memory. These little peeks into a beautiful relationship built on mutual respect and care for one another. A performance for no one.

The Apothecary Diaries is not a romance, yet it is rooted in love. Love of friends, love of strangers, love of family, and at the heart of it all, the quiet love of Jinshi and Maomao.

[iliothermia]

[readmydairy]

838PM

We can't be mad sometimes. I just don't see the point in asking me what I wanna do? and when I say we go to dinner to eat at 7 but you wanna sleep. This is my fault, I should have said something but being petty and dramatic and staying mad and even finding a reason to be mad is easier than waking him up and going. I like to be upset and I enjoy being petty but I only wanted to go to dinner, I hate when pans are made and hate when they aren't followed through. It is probably my least favorite thing. My mom used to do that shit and I would get my hopes up and just give me a half asses apology which is probably gonna happen.

[cicada-heart]

bonaventure cemetery 🤍

august 2024

[mournfulroses]

Franz Kafka, from a diary entry featured in "Kafka: The Tremendous World I Have Inside my Head,"