isabelle-spray

[isabelle-spray]

No safety. No food. No aid. No water. No healthcare. No education. Is this what it means to live? Is this what world accept as life?

If a group of animals were trapped, starved, and cut off from the world like this, people would be outraged. But because it's us—human beings—somehow, the world looks away.

These are unbearable days. Everything feels heavy. Each hour presses on my chest like I’m being suffocated.

My family needs urgent help.

Basic survival has become nearly impossible. Bread—just bread—now costs over $25 a day to make.

We are not asking for luxury. We are begging for life.

Please, if you’re reading this: help.

Reblog this post. Talk about us. Donate if you can. Even a small act can mean everything right now.

#crisis #humanrights #emergency #donate #pleasehelp #tumblrcommunity #survivestories #reblogtohelp #signalboost

[isabelle-spray]

Euphoria S3: Maddie and Cassie

A rainy night in East Highland. Maddie waits for her ride out front of the hotel in a designer coat, smoking a cigarette and texting.

Cassie staggers out the hotel entrance to the curb, seeming drunk or shaken, and stands with her back to Maddie. Neither is aware of the other’s identity yet.

Maddie watches on indifferently until Cassie begins coughing up blood followed by two teeth which fall out onto the ground, prompting Maddie to approach.

M: shit… are you okay?!

C: Yah I’m fine I just -

M: derisively: you’re bleeding all over the ground.

C: No really it’s fine I just -

Cassie turns her head and the two recognise each other. Cassie looks scared. They have not spoken in 5 years.

M: (to no one in particular): you have got to be fucking kidding me... (To Cassie) What the FUCK…

Beat

M: bitch, what the fuck happened to you?

She notices bruises forming on Cassie’s neck. Cassie tries to cover it with her collar.

C: evasively: I fell on the stairs

Beat. They both know she is lying.

C: I’m fine. I’m just waiting for my uber. I need to get home.

M: rolling her eyes: You’re a mess. You cannot go home like that. You need to go to the emergency room.

C: No - I - I can’t. (Embarrassed) I don’t have health insurance.

Maddie looks unsure whether to hug her or hit her. Her ride pulls up. She steps on her cigarette and climbs into the backseat, leaving the door open for Cassie.

M: bitch, get in.

Cassie hesitates and then climbs into the backseat, still looking frightened.

M: to the driver, directly: take us to the hospital.

She hands Cassie a tissue from her bag.

C: taking it, meekly: thanks…

M: with disgust: whatever. Just don’t get any of your fucking blood on my coat. It’s Dolce. (to the driver) well, drive then!

[isabelle-spray]

Happy 20 years!

[isabelle-spray]

Euphoria S3 theory/fan fic

Rue - attending community college, working at the diner in the evenings, living with Mom, sponsoring a kid at NA

Gia - just graduated high school with excellent grades and has a place to study psychology at a good school in the city. She is suffering with severe anxiety and PTSD from the events of s1&2. Her relationship with Rue has become strained.

Leslie - is a couple of years into a new relationship with a guy that both girls like. She announces that once Gia heads off to college he will be moving in, and suggests that Rue may want to get her own place.

This makes Rue feel rejected and angry and pushes her towards a relapse. She starts hanging out more with the kid from NA - but eventually avoids relapse after she encounters a crack-addicted Eliot living in a trap house, and is reminded of her experiences with Laurie. She visits Fez-co and Ashtray’s graves and promises him she will not let herself or him down again.

She also visits the grave of her father and tells him that she is doing ok and how proud she is of Gia, even though Gia kind of hates her now.

Lexi - fresh out of her masters in screenwriting at NYU, Lexi is in LA working as a runner on a TV show. After the artistic triumph of her play we all expect her to be flourishing - but she is now grappling with the realities of life in the film and TV industry. Feeling frustrated creatively at having to work at a movie theatre to make ends meet - not the glamorous life she had in mind.

Cassie - the Howard’s mom has liver cancer. After dropping out of college (which she never wanted to go to anyway) she began working as a host at a gentleman’s club, but has now moved on to working as a high end escort - which pays for her mom’s treatment much better, but she is maintaining the facade of her job at the club. She has also become an alcoholic.

Lexi hardly ever comes home because she does not want to face her mom’s illness. Cassie is mad at Lexi for not helping care for their mom or financially contributing, but her mom assures Lexi that she wants her to follow her dream, so she plays up her role on the TV show. Cassie and Lexi both eventually find out about each other’s lies.

Rue supports Lexi in facing the reality of her mom’s illness.

Jules - living in a loft in Chicago and working on her art and gaining a biggish following on her instagram. She caught the attention of a LGBTQ art foundation with her college artwork and is now interning with them. Jules has a new group of artsy friends but after a traumatic experience of transphobic harrassment she finds that they are more interested in coat tailing her than caring for her. This makes her reminisce about her friendship/relationship with Rue - because Rue’s love - whilst toxic in some ways - was authentic.

By the end of the series they have reconnected and will never be as close as they were but have forgiven one another.

Lexi and Jules connect over their frustrations of the creative industries, but Lexi is envious of Jules’ success.

Maddy - married to a 35 yr old realtor she met through her babysitting work, Maddy is seemingly living the dream. Stay at home mom, twins, sitting by the pool drinking rose. But she finds out that he has been cheating, and so she goes into a tailspin of affairs.

Whilst leaving a hotel where she has met a guy, she finds Cassie waiting for a cab. One of her clients has brutally beaten her and she is visibly hurt. Maddy’s memories of her assault by Nate make her soften towards Cassie. She takes her to the emergency room. The two begin spending time together and Cassie finds healing in getting to know the twins. Maddy offers her a job as a nanny.

Nate - Nate attended North Western on a football scholarship - however he is suspended as he is embroiled in a legal case of sexual assault against a female student. He visits his Dad in prison but Cal has not forgiven him for turning him in. He does however, tell him to get help and explains that he has accessed therapy and can see how his treatment of Nate has affected him. Nate does not listen and is further aggravated by this.

Nate asks to meet with Maddy on the pretence of apologising for his actions in the past. She turns him down. Instead he turns to Cassie and offers her cash to sleep with him in order to make Maddy jealous. He is the client who beat her. Maddy finds out and decides to expose Cassie’s escort work to humiliate her.

However before she can do this, Cassie’s mom passes away. The funeral sees all the characters reunite and temporarily set aside their differences to support Lexi and Cassie. Maddy and Cassie later reflect in the way that Nate manipulated them both. Maddy encourages Cassie to go to the police with the evidence of her assault and press charges against Nate, but Cassie is too afraid.

As Nate’s trial for the allegations of sexual assault at college draws near and attracts media attention, Lexi discovers what he did to her sister. She, Jules and Rue hatch a plan to stage a protest against violence against women, including an art installation made by Jules, outside the courthouse which Jules uses her instagram to promote. Cassie is too afraid to attend the protest but gives Lexi her blessing.

The final episode:

The protest is at first a roaring success but then is mobbed by TERFs claiming Jules cannot organise for women since they don’t believe she is a woman. Lexi throws a heavy book at them and is arrested. Rue and Jules later go to collect her after she is released and ask Lexi when she got so badass.

Nate is acquitted of his charges due to a technicality and due to his lawyer being expensive. This prompts Cassie to go to the police. She meets the other 3 who are on their way out. They joke that no one ever thought Lexi would be the one getting arrested and not Cassie. In the end Lexi and Cassie have not fully resolved their differences but have been brought closer by the events.

After all this is done, Rue goes back to the crack house to check on Eliott and finds the kid she is sponsoring there has overdosed. She calls the ambulance and watches her own life flash before her eyes in a coup d’etat, full circle moment as they try unsuccessfully to resuscitate him. She realises that she was lucky to get out when she did and the full extent of Gia’s trauma. She goes back to her Mom and does not tell her what happened, but they hold one another and Leslie tells her she loves her.

[isabelle-spray]

[isabelle-spray]

06/06/23

"And then, one fairy night, May became June."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Beautiful and Damned

[isabelle-spray]

[isabelle-spray]

I Turned Within

I used to pray for strength

But no one heard the call,

I turned within

Found peace instead

And have not prayed at all.

I used to wait for change

Intervention from the divine,

I turned within

Stopped waiting and found

The change to make all mine.

I used to long for love

To complete my wanting soul,

I turned within

Found love abound

And myself, made newly whole.

I knew everything was gonna be alright. I took a deep breath and kept my head held high and continued forward.

[isabelle-spray]

Home Planet

(To my mother)

I once was your satellite

My entire existence

Contained within your shadow,

But I am so much bigger now -

More vast than you could ever know

A heavenly body in my own right

This light is all mine

And I cast so many shadows.

The moon and Saturn

[isabelle-spray]

You had to be there

You cannot capture sunset

There’s a certain truth evading

Two panes concave

Hold not the space

For divine - imperfect - fading -

[isabelle-spray]

Untitled

Where I am

I supposed to go?

When even I

Remind me

Of you.

[isabelle-spray]

The spell was broken. My uncle learned to laugh, and I learned to cry. The secret garden is always open now. Open, and awake, and alive. THE SECRET GARDEN (1993) dir. Agnieszka Holland

[isabelle-spray]

But for some, it was paradise

[isabelle-spray]

won’t you celebrate with me

won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

Lucille Clifton, “won't you celebrate with me” from Book of Light.

[isabelle-spray]

My sobriety & Me :)

December 31st, 2017. I sat on the Victoria line from Finsbury Park to Brixton. I was hungover from the wine and gin I had shared with a friend the night before, and like the rest of London I was readying myself for a night of drunken frivolity.

And then I noticed that the world around me had kind of numbed and dulled.

There was a void inside my chest. An all-consuming apathy.

I looked at the posters on the walls of the train carriage. The names of the stations passing by too fast to read. The blank faces of the people sitting opposite me. I looked for meaning. I looked for hope. And I found nothing.

I sat there and thought about how this train would run back and forth on the tracks between Brixton and Walthamstow Central until the following morning, and that I could just stay sitting there all night, and I wouldn’t care. It wouldn’t feel any different. I could die in this train carriage, I thought, and it would all just be the same.

Then a new feeling hit me - flooded me like an enormous tidal wave.

I was afraid.

I was frozen in deep terror.

I was staring down into the abyss, into the meaninglessness and pointlessness of everything, and I wanted to hurl myself in. Just to stop feeling.

And that was when I knew something was wrong.

My name is Isabelle Spray and I am not an alcoholic.

At least, I don’t think so anyway.

I am sober, though.

My journey with sobriety began in 2018. I’ve not had a drink since August 2021.

But if I’m not an alcoholic, then why?

I get this question a lot - from friends, family members, colleagues, loose acquaintances, total strangers… I know I don’t owe anyone a justification, but I’m always honest because I know sharing my story is a good thing.

Sometimes I have to patiently re-explain it several times before a person stops asking. And I’ve accepted that some people in my life may never stop offering me drinks at any given opportunity. Or stop saying things like “but it’s your birthday?!” (Today my own mother asked me if I had a glass of champagne at midnight to ring in the new year.)

Something about my being sober makes other people uncomfortable.

They feel the need to push against it in some small way. Perhaps they think I am judging them, although they’d be wrong there. If anything I envy people who are able to drink without it affecting them the way it does me. Perhaps it is to double back on their obvious shock since I don’t “seem” like someone who doesn’t drink. Most likely I think it is a way to reassert their sense of control after being confronted with something uncomfortable.

Being sober is actually a little like being gay in that sense. You are moving through the world in a way that is sort of accidentally resistant, simply in the act of being true to yourself. To discuss it openly takes courage and an admission of vulnerability. People are very uneasy with vulnerability.

And so I answer, calmly and truthfully: it’s for my mental health.

I’m not part of AA. I’m not doing the 12 step recovery. I just reached a point where I realised that drinking wasn’t useful to me, and so I stopped.

For some, that is enough to satiate their curiosity, and then the conversation moves on.

Others have further questions; how long have you been sober? What exactly made you stop?

I try to be honest and truthful with these answers too (although the level of detail depends on our closeness, of course.)

Every now and then I am greeted with a softened expression and a kind, knowing smile.

“That's amazing. Good for you.”

Usually these are people who have been through it, or have family members, friends or partners that struggle with alcohol. And then I wonder what pain lies behind that knowing look.

The last time I had a drink it was one gin, and it gave me a hangover.

My first two years of sobriety, I thought it might be a temporary measure.

I was working on myself in a lot of ways and I thought once I got my depression and anxiety under control, I could go back to enjoying a nice glass of red with my steak.

In summer 2021 I was feeling more relaxed and stable again, and so I tried it. Just a few glasses of prosecco on holiday with my friends. And it was fine. No crippling existential dread, no unspeakable fear at the transience of my own existence.

And so when I returned to London I had a single G&T whilst catching up with a friend.

That was all fine and dandy too until the next morning when I woke up dehydrated, irritable and generally just feeling quite shit. I sat on the tube, 45 minutes late for the lunch I was supposed to be at, and with a nagging feeling of recognition.

I know this feeling.

I’ve been this version of myself before, but when..?

Oh right, I thought as the realisation dawned. This was my early twenties.

And then I laughed at myself.

My early twenties were years behind me now. There was no need for me to retrench myself in that mess!

Back then alcohol had been a kind of social lubricant. It bolstered me in situations where my anxiety made it hard for me to socialise - which was often. But now I had grown used to sitting with my discomfort and just trying my best. And mostly it was kind of okay. And when it wasn’t I would just quietly excuse myself.

This was ridiculous and all completely unnecessary.

But there was another layer too. Beneath the drinking to ease my anxiety there was something more insidious that I had never acknowledged before.

Like everyone, I was deeply lonely and confused in my early twenties. I was making choices with no real clue what I was doing and just clinging onto the illusion of control. And my depression and anxiety were always there in the background, although back then I was never looking them in the eye.

I found that the more I drank, the worse I felt the next day. And the worse I felt the next day, the more I could tell people that I was struggling, without them (or me) really knowing why.

I could say I felt sad without admitting I was depressed.

I could spend the day in bed without anyone getting concerned.

I could tell everyone I’d been throwing up all morning and no one would wonder if I was having an eating disorder relapse.

It sickens me now to think of the way I treated myself. And that I didn’t think I deserved to feel better than that. I thought that I alone wasn’t inherently worthy of care and attention.

It took my first hangover in two years to realise the reasons why I had been drinking in that way - the cycles of shame and self-loathing I had been living in. Perhaps I wasn’t a full blown alcoholic, but my relationship with alcohol had been one of abuse.

So I decided firmly that I would never make myself feel that way again. I respect myself too much now. I actually care about myself. I know I deserve better.

Now, I am pretty much okay.

I still get tempted every now and then. A cold white wine on a Friday in summertime will never not call to me.

But that one drink would be so much more than a drink. I want to move forwards with my life, not backwards. I want to grow upwards, towards the sun.

I’ve noticed that as I speak more openly about my sobriety, the more people are beginning to ask me questions - not about why - but about how I got sober. And I’m grateful to be able to offer them some support. I think this is what people mean when they talk about leading by example.

So I’m here. Sober. Hopeful. Still a little scared. And even, sometimes, happy.

[isabelle-spray]

I think you just saved my life. 

[isabelle-spray]

What Emily Dickinson taught me in 2021

I am ashamed to say that despite having an English degree and having been born with a permanent sad girl vibe - I only came to discover the work of Emily Dickinson in 2021.

I am even more ashamed to say that I discovered it - not while thumbing the pages of my Norton Anthology, or even whilst scrolling through tumblr (do sad girls still do that?) but through that most basic of platforms - a TV show.

More shameful still than either of these truths is the fact that I didn’t sit down to watch said show because I was keen to learn more about a great female poet of the nineteenth century, but because it was advertised as an historical lesbian drama. (Although I hope for this one you will cut me some slack. It’s a limited genre and a girl has to take what she can get…)

In this most modern mode of discovery, I was delighted to find much more than just a period drama with a same-sex romantic plotline. I found a thoroughly modern poet, thinker, lover and someone who was as boldly herself as anyone I have encountered, even in 2021.

In his play The History Boys, Alan Bennett described the power of poetry thus:

‘When you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you... And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’

This is what it has felt like discovering Emily Dickinson for me. In a year when I so often felt broken and lost and alone - she reminded me that I am exactly who I am supposed to be.

There are about as many interpretations of each of Emily’s poems as there are readers. Here - if it means anything to you - are some of mine.

I felt a funeral in my brain

Most of Emily’s poems were left untitled (a defiance of convention that I adore) but for practical purposes many of them are referred to by their opening lines. In my opinion the most powerful of all these is the one in which Emily tells us that she ‘felt a funeral in her brain’.

Not a funeral in her heart - the usual centre of feeling in literature, but her brain - the centre of thought, logic, rationality, cognition.

This image has rattled itself around my own brain for many months since I first read it, the way a gong sound reverberates against your eardrums long after it is struck, because it was a feeling that I recognised.

I don’t know if you’ve ever pictured your own funeral. I hope for your sake that you have not. You have to get a good way down the rabbit hole of melancholy before the thoughts of your own death start marching into your brain uninvited. Until they ‘creak across my Soul / With those same Boots of Lead.’

This year I have felt that leaden creak more times than I care to remember. This year, I have had moments when my own rationality and will to keep going through all this strangeness and grief were threatened by an overwhelming hopelessness.

...a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge.

I don’t know if this was the meaning Emily intended, but I think it must be something like it. It brings me comfort to know that somebody, somewhere felt this way once too. Somebody else was once ‘Wrecked, solitary, here’ - but she kept going. She kept doing. And how grateful I am that she did.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant -

The notion of truth is an odd thing in 2021.

So much so that we’ve started referring to this time in history as the ‘Post Truth Era’.

Truth once meant something absolute and solid to us. Now, in a world where facebook has more influence over election results and vaccine uptake than verified data and scientific research, it seems that ‘truth’ has become something elastic. Something you can bend or stretch to your own convenience. Something liquid that can run away from you if you’re not careful.

So what did I learn about the truth from Emily Dickinson in 2021?

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The truth’s superb surprise

When I read this it occurred to me that I had been naive in my assumption that this era was the only one in which truth was a relative concept. People have always been afraid of truth, Emily tells us, until somebody explains it to them in a way that they can understand.

As Lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind

The notion of some unseen scientists developing a vaccine in a lab and then pumping it into our blood streams does on the face of it sound threatening. Most of us don’t have enough scientific knowledge to be able to really say for sure how it actually works on a molecular level - I know I don’t. So we have to be able to trust one another. And pulling up graphs and statistics from google is often not enough to inspire trust because we aren’t used to learning through data. We’re used to learning through stories. We’ve passed down knowledge through stories for many thousands of years before science was ever conceived of. It’s still how we explain the world to our children, and how we like to express and process our emotions. And most of the time, it’s what we need to wrap our minds around the abstract.

Reading them now, at the end of 2021 as Omicron fills the hospitals with droves of the unvaccinated, the closing lines of the poem seem almost prophetic. Long before the phrase ‘fake news’ was ever coined, Emily warned us:

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind -

All the letters I can write

I came to Emily Dickinson looking for an historical lesbian plotline, and while I found much more besides, I was not disappointed on that front. Despite the censorship of her editors, Emily’s love for Susan shines through in her poetry.

I’ve read enough erotic verses written by men about women. The winking coyness of John Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed.’ Shakespeare’s back-handed Sonnet 130. Even ee cumming’s ‘lady I will touch you with my mind.’

There is something so uniquely feminine, not only in the ‘fair’ subject of this poem, but moreover in its telling, that makes it an unmistakable work of sapphic eroticism.

All the letters I can write -

Are not as fair as this -

Emily, despite holding herself in great esteem as a writer, concedes from the very beginning that even her powerful imagination and command of the English language are humbled by her subject.

Syllables of Velvet

Sentences of Plush -

Even if she wanted to, she could not conjure anything so sumptuous with her words.

She also plays a clever game with the conventions of gender in love poetry. Ordinarily the subject - the woman in the poem - is compared to a flower for her beauty and fertility. Here Emily - being herself a woman - imagines herself as the flower, and her lover as something else entirely:

Play it were a Humming Bird

And just sipped - me -

ee cummings could never.