catchingpapermoons

[catchingpapermoons]

Hey! Just finished reading “across our great divide (a glorious sunrise)” and I left a longer comment there trying to describe how moving it was, but it also reminded me SO MUCH of one of my favorite songs and wanted to share!

Let it Matter by Johnnyswim

https://music.amazon.com/albums/B01KNL4KWO?do=play&trackAsin=B01KNL4W0O&ts=1742325790&ref=dm_sh_a93IwYRBXdhr0gAWM0Fp34taL

hi!! thank you so so much. i appreciate it!!!

this song is so perfect for this fic, omg. if it matters, let it matter!! so freaking true actually. thank you for this lovely ask <3

[catchingpapermoons]

27

just musings on aging and mental health and being alive.

content warnings for suicidal ideation, death, self-loathing.

as the days ticked down to my 20th birthday, i became acutely aware of the fact that i was still a living, breathing person.

i hadn’t thought about it much; i’d been surviving on empty for so long i hadn’t realized it was time for me to leave my teen years behind. for me, much like it was for everyone else in the world, being a teenager knocked me around like those inflatable tube guys that blow violently in the wind outside the most drab-looking car dealership.

i grew up a lot from 13 to 19. i was very different at 19 than i was when i entered high school, but an apt comparison of those girls would be that i was so deeply, achingly insecure of my personality, because i wasn’t really sure i had one at all. much of it came from other people because i wanted them to like me, because i wanted everyone to like me. i wanted to make myself fit in spaces i probably wouldn’t have fit in at all. i didn’t know how to rise above it. i wasn’t sure i wanted to rise above it. all i knew, with absolute certainty, was that everyone would find out that i was secretly a terrible, jealous, conniving, uppity cunt who no one would ever love.

i had long believed i wouldn’t make it to 20. unfailingly, i’d hoped, maybe even believed, that something would happen and i wouldn’t have to face the rest of my life. and as much as i had believed that, suddenly i had made it through two years of undergrad and i was marching headfirst toward my 20s. i even wrote something too, braving how uncomfortable i was in facing my emotions to tell my community of facebook friends, people i’d known since birth, since middle school, since high school, since i started college, that i was grateful to them for giving me a safe place to land when it felt like i’d been freefalling for years.

“as a very lonely freshman in high school, for some reason, reaching the age of 20 seemed impossible,” i said in my post. “i’m happy to be 20 today.”

and just as suddenly as i’d approached 20, i was 21 and falling in love, and i was 22 and falling out of it. 23 and finally feeling a sense of self after being (mostly) properly treated for my depression, and then the world shut down. 24, 25, and 26 came and went. and a constant in all those years was that i’d come to this realization, this understanding of myself, that there was something—something young, feral, and bright—that was hurt. not irreparably, not from one single blow, but taken altogether, there was something fragile that needed tending to, like the broken ankle i never let heal properly.

there was an instagram story prompt the other day that asked you to show yourself in the past six years. what was startling to me was, first, that i found six pictures from six different years within the 20 thousand something photos in my library. but the prevailing thought was, looking at the pictures side-by-side, that you could tell how unhappy i was at 22, 23, 24 even. how halfway through being 25 you could see how settled i had become, that at 26, about to graduate with a professional doctorate degree, despite the massive stress and anger and anxiety and imposter-syndrome-god-complex that every law student has, i looked happy.

there’s a lump in my throat just thinking about it.

because when i was 14, i couldn’t picture life past 20. i could barely see the 15th birthday light at the end of the freshman year tunnel. when i was 19, i was shocked to see 20 flying around the corner, and even more shocked that i wanted to keep aging. it’s a source of pride for me that i’d managed, despite everything trying to tear me to pieces, to make it that far, and even farther than that.

there were reasons, of course, that i would never have left. i knew even in the throes of my insurmountable incapacitation that i couldn’t ruin my family like that. maybe that’s narcissistic to say, but maybe it’s just true, that a lack of grace in the world would hurt people in a way that would never leave them. i’m still haunted by memories of people i knew—whether i knew them well or more peripherally—because they’re gone and i won’t be able to send them a follow request on instagram or run into them on the train on our morning commute  because they died too early. and some of these people weren’t even my friends, just friends of friends or boyfriends of friends or kids i passed in the hallway. i think about them still and the mark they left, and i couldn’t do that to my family or friends or people who feel like me about the people whose posts they “love” on facebook or whose tweets they like on twitter.

and now, as i’m typing this, i am two weeks away from 27. in the past 6 and a half years i’ve been so adrift. i’d been so certain of life not existing past 20 that i never thought to picture what it would look like. i graduated from university and didn’t have a plan, and i was traumatized from my last relationship and heartbreak. i had no immediate plans beyond “make enough money to pay for gas” after i’d completely bombed the GRE, and i didn’t know who i was beyond my illness. 

now, i’m getting ready to take this exam that will determine my future and i worry about passing because everyone worries about passing the bar, but i’ve made it 7 years past where i thought i would. and i want to make it 10, 20, 30 more years, and beyond that. i want to be 100 with a family of kids and grandkids and great-grandkids and i want to be hopeful about the world that we live in even when hope feels fruitless and when climate change feels catastrophic because even when i was my most depressed, my most helpless, the little hurt part of me still felt hope.

the thing in me that’s hurting is simultaneously more prevalent and less painful than it has been. i like to picture it like a child version of me. and some part of me is telling her, whether she’s 5 or 13 or 21, that she’s going to be okay. she might feel lonely, she might feel sad and scared and panicked, she might try—well-meaning and missing the mark often—to help those around her when they just need to be left alone, but that it’s okay to make those mistakes. it’s okay to believe the best in people until they’ve shown you otherwise. it’s okay to be kind and know that, for as many loud and awful people there are in the world, there are more people who just care about helping each other. and it’s okay to believe all those things. and it’s okay to be discouraged and disappointed.

but i’m going to turn 27 and i’m going to celebrate with friends who live near me and call my friends who live far away and i’m going to provide help when i’m asked to and support when it’s needed. and i like to believe that’s made at least one person’s life a little brighter. i’ve never liked my birthday much. i think i’m just excited to turn another year older and to just keep going.

reaching 30 doesn’t seem so impossible anymore. 

[catchingpapermoons]

friends to lovers never had a bad track. “scared i’ll ruin what we have” SLAPS. “friendship cuddles while secretly dying inside” BANGER. “teasing each other and holding eye contact for a little too long” KILLS ME. and don’t even get me STARTED on “screaming i love you in the middle of a heated argument.”

[catchingpapermoons]

I want a named, holy thing to fuck my brains out, to turn my need to be filled up and spread out and hungry into some kind of Grace.

I want to cuss my lover’s name in ecstasy and have it be the prayer I always hoped it was

— Caroline Randall Williams, "Transubstantiate, Redux or, Sublimating Lucy Whilst at Church," Lucy Negro, Redux

[catchingpapermoons]

Reminders for the Anxious/Depressed Creatives

You’re more than what you make.

Your productivity does not determine your value.

It’s okay to do nothing sometimes.

Not everything you do has to result in a product.

Not everything you make has to be important, significant, or even good.

You can make things just for yourself.

You can keep secrets for yourself, whether it’s not posting some of your projects or not sharing your techniques.

You’re allowed to say no.

You’re allowed to rest.

[catchingpapermoons]

[catchingpapermoons]

bro WHERE is the love of my life this isn’t funny anymore

[catchingpapermoons]

[catchingpapermoons]

Letters from Medea by Salma Deera

[catchingpapermoons]

friendship can be so fleeting no wonder humans are so scared to be vulnerable . what do you mean we put our hearts and souls into people only for something as simple as time to rob our bonds … what do you mean some friendships just aren't meant to last forever?? that sometimes we outgrow people we once knew better than the lines on our palms?? when the version of them we have in our heads becomes outdated, when it means nothing that we know exactly how they take their coffee and why they don't talk about their brother. that today I mean the world to somebody who might only think of me on my birthday in a years time. what an open fucking wound.

[catchingpapermoons]

you ever read a fic where you’re like – I would like to listen to a podcast episode with the author where they discuss their process. Why did they make specific choices? How did they choose this particular structure? Were there other ways this story could have gone? Also let’s just cry about how well you did these particular things.

I know there’s been a hockey thing on ao3 where writers created annotated fic, and I loved that, but I’d also love someone who knew how to ask good questions to interview writers and talk about craft specifically within this space.

[catchingpapermoons]

the ocean as a metaphor ALWAYS slaps. the ocean as a hungry force that wants to consume you? the ocean as something vast and unknowable, like a god itself? the ocean as freedom and liberation? the ocean as the mysteries of the self? the ocean as love? never fails to get me

[catchingpapermoons]

you ever know someone and you think “god i love you. i wish we could’ve known eachother when we were carefree and 11. i wish we could’ve played together as kids”

[catchingpapermoons]

Marie Howe, The Affliction

[catchingpapermoons]

that james baldwin quote where he says, “it took many years of vomiting up all the filth i’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before i was able to walk on the earth as though i had a right to be here.”

[catchingpapermoons]

by Ben Mack

[catchingpapermoons]

shut up, I—