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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) dir. Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

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By @deannazandt / Posted with permission via Medium

Full text and image descriptions:

Self-care is thrown around a lot as a magic bullet to solve all of your problems. If you’d only take a second to treat yourself, you’d be fine!

But what does self-care really mean?

First, I think there’s a difference between self-care and self-soothing. Self-soothing might look something like this, for example:

Self-soothing: Activities that provide distraction and/or comfort in difficult times

Examples illustrated include: TV bingeing, bubble bath, fancy beverages, singing loudly, getting out into nature, time off from home responsibilities & childcare, fresh flowers, cuddling, exercise

Such delightful things!

Self-soothing is INCREDIBLY important to our well-being. Sometimes, though, these activities may not actually get at stabilizing you, or creating opportunities for you to move forward.

That’s where self-care can come in:

Self-care: Activities that help you find meaning, and that support your growth & groundedness

Examples illustrated include: Going to therapy, meditating, exercise, taking ownership of your finances, napping, saying “yes” and “no” when you really mean it, massage, getting medical care, eating well for your body, yoga, setting — and keeping! — boundaries

Do you feel the difference between soothing & care?

(That “finances” one may or may not be borne out of my own traumatic experiences with money, btw. Also: certain things may be self-soothing for some, and self-care for others. You get to decide!)

Still, it takes a LOT to be able to even do self-care, since the systems and cultural norms in which we currently live can feel impossible to navigate on our own.

That’s why it’s important to have workarounds:

Community care: Workarounds for systems that don’t inherently support care (ie, capitalism!)

Examples illustrated include: Childcare & education collectives, freecycle and buy nothing groups, dignified, supportive healthcare orgs, intimate relationships outside of traditional romantic couplehood norms, worker-owned coops, credit unions, co-housing, skill sharing and mutual aid

Taking one step further back, it’s also important to recognize that workarounds and harm-reduction are also only one part of the solution.

We also need to fundamentally overhaul (or tear down and rebuild entirely) the systems in which we live, so that we can be further enabled to work on the other kinds of care that we need.

Structural care: Systems that support community care, self-care AND self-soothing

Examples illustrated include: comprehensive universal healthcare, environmental defense and renewal, child- and eldercare, living wage, efficient public transportation, gender & sexuality liberation, racial equity & justice, paid family leave (and an illustration of the word “capitalism” on fire and melting)

No single person can do all the kinds of care that are needed all the time; we each can play a role in supporting each other in different ways, though. Now, go forth and care for each other — and yourself.

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Chasing waterfalls, Hiroyuki Yamada

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Corner of Archer Street

My man sings Sunday hymns In a wooden chapel on top of a hill Dolours it is called - The Lady of Sorrow Who at age 79 was packed away in wooden box But not before I had my first kiss Walking home in a daze I laid my head on her lap thinking: I could never be this happy ever again. A man once touched my back and planted landmines down my spine. On each meeting he pulls the pin Collapsing a vertebra at a time Until all that is left is the critical mass out of its depth. I am told I have to start again. In the suburbs Dolores calls out to me She says, In sorrow, you remember my lullabies. The shadow of the streetlight on our bedroom floor, the scratches the branches used to make. In the wilderness, I made you a home. Make yourself at home now: In this quiet corner he sings his Sunday hymns. You are happy again.

-- Written on January 15, 2020, five years after meeting Ryan.

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Naruto, a one-sided love story

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Let it go, let it leave, let it happen. Nothing in this world was promised or belonged to you anyway.

Rupi Kaur, All You Own Is Yourself (via thegoodvybe)

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Three + years later 

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when I was me I could not put it in words though I could hear words waiting for me to recognise them ghosts of the unborn

W.S. Merwin, from Natural History Of Forgetting in “The Moon Before Morning” (via existential-celestial)

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Portrait of a young wife, sitting on the couch [pissed ever so slightly at her husband who keeps forgetting to take the trash out like geez louise the fucking shithole smells like a tramp house, Donnie] , 1881, Ilya Repin

Portrait of a young wife, sitting on the couch, 1881, Ilya Repin

Size: 33x43.5 cm Medium: pencil, paper

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I hope some way we can again strike up our own private dialogues—hysterically funny to us only—maybe as very old men on a bus stop or a park bench in some place like Lincoln, Nebraska where we’re equally lost.

Rest in peace, Sam Shepard

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One Last Death in Sydney

 There is a man in Sydney who sleeps with monsters

Who nestles his face against its last head

Believing himself immune to its poison

Believing he has cleansed her breath of dead gods

  He snores contently in the arms of his quiet wife

Unaware of the serpents between the sheets

The tongues he cut off in holy matrimony

The shadows of his lover unvanquished

Unburied in her memory

  She remembers Lerna and her mother

The sacred purpose for which she was raised

She remembers the vibrations of immortality

Cut one head off and two will take its place

The traitor who sealed her mouths with her own blood

By Heracles’ sword the deaths she suffered

Until all that was left was one

  In Sydney husband and wife lay in bed

He dreams of firebrand and constellations

She feels the beasts stirring inside her

She clicks her tongue in anticipation

Cut one head off and two will take its place

                                                                                                                             -GT

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By Amrit Brar (Musterni), 2015. [x]

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Lilian Stannard (British, 1877 - 1944): The old garden seat (via Woolley and Wallis)

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An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me.

Michel Houellebecq (via macrolit)