dancingfairytothesunset

[dancingfairytothesunset]

Day 1/100

PhD writing is back after a health break. Currently working on chapter 3 which needs to be written by the end of the month. I went to a co-working café to help with the motivation.

Lemonade for comfort and a friend for company.

[dancingfairytothesunset]

Sunlight and Shadow, 1862 by Albert Bierstadt (German-born American, 1830–1902)

[dancingfairytothesunset]

𖥔 ݁ ˖ 🫐 *ੈ.

[dancingfairytothesunset]

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.

[dancingfairytothesunset]

"Requiem", Hovhannes Grigoryan (translated by Tathev Simonyan)

[dancingfairytothesunset]

Feeling lost

Struggling to be the protagonist of my own story

[dancingfairytothesunset]

Sweet nothing/ Bejeweled/ Mirrorball/ Maroon/ Paris/ How did it end?/... Ready for it?/ Fresh out the slammer

[dancingfairytothesunset]

wild geese - mary oliver / @canis-infernalis-art / crime and punishment - fyodor dostoevsky / can't help myself - sun yuan and peng yu / drunk drivers/killer whales - car seat headrest

[dancingfairytothesunset]

Don't I know that I wasted my life?

Don't you ever think that perhaps its not my choice?

Perhaps I've tried to hold onto it,

Perhaps I tried my best,

And that it was never enough.

X X X

[dancingfairytothesunset]

by far the best part of grocery shopping is the little babies. i was carefully selecting mushrooms when i felt upon me a piercing gaze and looked up to see a very chubby and very red-cheeked baby staring intently at me from a grocery cart with a slightly furrowed brow, hand clutching an apple for dear life. i wiggled a mushroom at her and she gasped and kept staring. i turned back to the mushrooms and heard a shriek. i turned around and the baby stared in anticipation. i wiggled another mushroom and she shrieked again in delight. she looked down at the apple in her hand, considering it for a moment. fair-minded as she was, she decided it would only be right to wiggle produce at me in return, and she held up the apple and shook it with all her might. i think i could live forever now

[dancingfairytothesunset]

— dreamily desi ˚˖𓍢ִ໋☁️˚

[dancingfairytothesunset]

Solitude is my home. –Simran.

[dancingfairytothesunset]

What if I said all these things to myself?

Would I start feeling okay then?

[dancingfairytothesunset]

thursday, 2nd may

sleep: 10:15-6:15 (8h)

screen time: 2h 54m

wins:

- cleared my room in the morning📂

- wrote more bad poetry🫀

- lots of reading and research✏️

- nighttime revision✏️

- reunion and lovely dinner with my mom🫀

losses:

- Relapsed after being clean for more than a month🥲

- PACKED CARELESSLY and forgot something important…. this was the worst for me, i really tried to be thorough this time😭

☆彡

went into the city today.. how beautiful!

[dancingfairytothesunset]

• like or reblog if you save 💕

[dancingfairytothesunset]

A quiet life like this~

[dancingfairytothesunset]

I could spend my whole life in a happiness life this~

Pictures from pinterest. Credit to the owners.