bitterhearts

[bitterhearts]

'How many of your favorite shows got canceled? How many of the best albums barely sold when they came out? . . . Just because something doesn't make money or win awards doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Or doesn't deserve to exist.'

Emily Henry, from Great Big Beautiful Life

[bitterhearts]

[bitterhearts]

Rabbits in the foliage on a gothic-style page header, Germany. Les maîtres ornemanistes. 1880.

Internet Archive

[bitterhearts]

[bitterhearts]

[bitterhearts]

embarrassment has good bones

[bitterhearts]

Gilbert Oakley - Old Moore's Dream Book - Foulsham - 1985

[bitterhearts]

— Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done

[bitterhearts]

So much of what society treats as a joke is just mocking disability. Their idea of lazy is a disabled person trying to survive, whether that be living with their parents as an adult or using pre prepared food. Cringe culture is based entirely around mocking neurodivergent people and their interests. Symptoms and characteristics of disability such as urgency issues, drooling, tremors, tics, strabismus and speech impediments are used as cheap punchlines.

In children’s tv shows disabled characters such as those with speech impediments are treated as a joke, with symptoms of disability being portrayed as synonymous to stupid.

This idea is being taught from a young age in the media and it’s engrained into our language and culture. This goes beyond jokes, it contributes to the alienation of people with disabilities.

Once you start noticing these things you realise how constant and normalised it is.

Reducing an entire person to a punchline is wrong. Using a disability symptom as an insult is wrong. It’s disturbing how normalised it is to not treat people with basic decency and respect.

[bitterhearts]

Mist on a lake, fog in a wood, streetlights shining on wet pavement—such sights make it all very easy. Something lives in the lake and hides in the woods, stalks upon the pavement or dwells under it. Whatever it may be, this something lies just out of sight . . . but not out of vision. In certain surroundings our entire being is made of eyes, every atom dilates to witness the haunting of the universe.

Thomas Ligotti, “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures On Supernatural Horror (1985)”, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

[bitterhearts]

We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old mystics described as karma, repeated until the spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved.

Seduction of the Minotaur

Anaïs Nin

[bitterhearts]

“Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.”

— Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

[bitterhearts]

“Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.”

— Mark Epstein

[bitterhearts]

Sophocles, Antigone

[bitterhearts]

Thank goodness people couldn't see the lurid visions in one's head.

Susan Minot, from Why I Don't Write and Other Stories

[bitterhearts]

Sylvia Plath