shivadarwish - Tumblr blog

[shivadarwish]

What's going on in the congo rn is one of many many reasons that the right to repair is a VITAL tenant in leftism imo

[shivadarwish]

like i said, i can take ANYTHING as long as i’m loved. if i’m not loved i’m not embarrassing myself, why would i be with someone who doesn’t adore me? you can beat me cheat on me as long as you love me but if you don’t even like me, why would i

[shivadarwish]

you think you can get them to connect by pouring out your heart but you can’t. you think you can connect by sharing about your life but you can’t. you think you can even connect by abandoning yourself and wholly engaging with their own things but you can’t. you have only the option of silence. speak only when spoken to and only of the subject material. this is the code. nothing of your life is so worth sharing and the things that are will be pushed aside in such a way that you feel insignificant so that then your significance resides only in them. and then you have no life.

[shivadarwish]

it's hard to explain because inevitably you sound like an asshole, but some people are allowed to lose their temper, lose their mind - you're not, though.

when your friend never texts you first and misses your birthday and never makes an effort; you don't mind. you know she's struggling, and you want her to get the help that she deserves. you give her every excuse and every chance.

it shouldn't matter to you so much that people are always coming through for her. you want her to be happy, you love it for her. you love that her community rises up to the occasion. why does it bother you that when she snaps at someone, says horrible mean things - but two hours later, everyone is comforting her while she's crying. you know she's stressed. why do you kind of hate that she is welcomed back to her job, that her parents are endlessly wiring her money.

and you're - fuck, are you envious?

but when you don't text back, someone sits you down and says i know you're struggling, but you're being a bad friend. when you're too numb to show up for work, your boss just shakes his head. i'm sorry. i can't approve more time off. we have the company to protect. when you finally snap back at your family for making that shitty comment again, you're forced to apologize for being too sensitive.

god forbid you need something. people aren't used to you being the one asking. you're the giver like the book you hated; your pages all open and rumpled. you always have the answer, always have the solution. you are reliable, trustworthy. people like you don't struggle with things. you're supposed to be lifted by tragedy. you are given a maximum of 24 hours to grieve, and then you need to just behave at the party.

you can't read the giving tree without feeling like crying, and even that feels like it's too much emotion. like, nobody looks at you and assumes you're the tree; they'd name five other people before even considering you in the running. you're just there, never-asking.

your friend gets to say mean shit, that's just her personality. when you make a snide comment, you're just being petty. people laugh when your friend stands you up for another event; they say she's just like that. you were 5 minutes late to a meeting with friends and they were mad about it for the rest of the evening. your friend sets everything on fire; everyone applauds her through the ashes. you so much as light a candle: and suddenly now you're an arsonist.

you don't want your friend to suffer, though. the thing is that you just wish that the empathy and kindness your friend gets - you wish you had that option, that everyone offered you grace and money and a gentle reception.

the other day you were fighting down the bad urge; the void call, the end note. you tried-anyway. you went to the family event, tried laughing at the right moments. nodded and smiled and all of it. one of your siblings threw a fit, but she's allowed to, so everyone just rolled their eyes about it. you took 3 whole minutes to stand outside when you got overwhelmed. you literally set a timer about it.

in the morning you woke up to a text from your parents: you were a complete disgrace last night. idk what your attitude problem is, but you really need to fix it.

[shivadarwish]

answers to "its too much"

i know (apologetically)

i know (condescendingly)

its supposed to

you can take more

this is how you learn

good sluts take it

stop complaining

i don't care

i didn't ask

your pleasure is irrelevant

you shouldn't have done *insert mistake*

focus on pleasing me instead

you're not supposed to like it

don't talk back

you look so cute like this

you're mine and i decide what you do

its your punishment for *insert mistake*

shut up

good

you're supposed to be focused on my pleasure

get used to it

you can take it cant you?

you asked for it

beg for it to stop then

you look prettier overstimulated

you'll stop when i tell you to

*gagging them so they're quiet*

your only purpose is to be a fuck toy for me so don't complain

you know you like it

aww but you look so cute like this

stop lying

it cant be that bad if you're still talking

did i ask?

[shivadarwish]

what is funny about ad Reinhardt and yves Klein? i want to be let in on the joke

so yves klein was a color field painter, also known as those guys who just paint a canvas blue, all blue, all the same color of blue, and sell it for a shitton of money. actually when it came to blue, yves klein was kind of The Guy. 

BLUE

but back before all the fame and the blue, he made “yves peintures,” which was a catalog of his monochromes, pictured here:

the joke is that it’s bullshit! it’s just squares of construction paper glued on the page with little titles written below them. even the preface isn’t a preface – it’s just horizontal lines that he had a buddy of his sign with his name. one time yves klein and his art pals all hyped up a big big gallery show that he was opening. a solo exhibition! very exciting! all the critics and fancy motherfuckers showed up – three thousand people came. with great drama, they were led into a completely empty gallery. “welcome,” yves klein said. “I call it THE SPECIALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY IN THE RAW MATERIAL STAT INTO STABILIZED PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY, LE VIDE (THE VOID).” he was, in every way, a total fucker who loved bright colors and pranking the art world.

meanwhile, ad reinhardt – what’s ad reinhardt’s gig?

ad reinhardt’s gig is BLACK

more specifically, black-on-black grids of very slightly varying shades of black, applied in a very matte, powdery way that left the paintings with almost no sheen. it’s a pretty cool effect in person (if vantablack 2.0 had been a thing in the 50s, ad reinhardt would have busted a nut)

unfortunately, the way he did the paint makes the paintings incredibly difficult to maintain. if you touch one, the oils on your hands will immediately stain the painting, and it can’t be cleaned or repaired.

“no prob, bob,” ad reinhardt said to the flustered museum curators and collectors. “if you mess it up i’ll just replace it.”

“but what about our original ad reinhardt!” said the curators and collectors

“yeah i’ll replace it,” ad reinhardt said, “with the same original painting but not fucked up.” this caused some consternation

incidentally, he also made this small comic, which never fails to tickle me:

YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE TOO!

one of my real favorite artworks in this vein is by robert rauschenberg, and i’m going to include the story of it because it makes me very happy. rauschenberg was an insane post-modernist – one of his most famous pieces includes a taxidermy goat with paint thrown all over it and a car tire around its neck, that kind of thing – and i love his piece titled “erased de kooning drawing”

so willem de kooning was the husband of elaine de kooning, who painted sick abstract expressionist portraits and was slamming hot

wow

willem was also an artist, and kind of a big deal in his own right, and friends with rauschenberg

one day rauschenberg calls him up like “hey i have an idea for a collaboration between us two art bastards. i need you to do me a drawing, in pencil”

and willem said “why”

and rauschenberg said “wouldn’t you like to know”

and willem said “why”

and rauschenberg said “because i’m gay, give it”

and willem said “that’s not a reason”

and rauschenberg said “fine, i wanna make a commentary on the value of art even after it’s destroyed and palimpsests and ephemerality and shit i guess, so i need a drawing by a famous dude to erase, and you’re famous”

willem de kooning said “okay” and proceeded to find the wettest, most difficult to erase grease pencil in his studio, which he then used to make several drawings until he came up with one he liked and sent it to rauschenberg

and to his credit, rauschenberg erased that motherfucker. he put in the effort. in a spectacular show of spite countering spite, he very nearly got rid of it all. look at this shit:

if that almost-blank piece of paper isn’t a work of art, i don’t know what is

[shivadarwish]

Obsessed by this statue I saw today in Le Havre (France) from the Italian sculptor Fabio Viale. The design isn't painted on... The ink is injected inside the marble like a real tattoo. And if I remember correctly what the guide said, it took the artist three weeks to do just that.

How stunning is this

[shivadarwish]

one critical piece of advice is that opportunities are fractal doorways

you can take an opportunity that seems small, a group meeting for an hour once a week let's say, and if you really commit and put a lot of effort into even a small opportunity, if you work to prop open that passageway, then you will find that it can surprisingly quickly multiply into many future possibilities, many future paths.

one of the members of your small book club desperately needs a babysitter for the weekend. that's a gig. another one hits it off with you on some obscure topic. the bulletin board at the place you meet has a flyer for a class on writing. you go, and now you're in an environment full of other people who are there for the same reasons. talk to them. over drinks one night an older member encourages you to apply for uni with one of your short stories you wrote for the class. et cetera.

I spent a lot of time paralyzed with indecision, trying to find just the right opportunity to get me where i wanted to go. that's the entirely wrong way to go about it. practice pursuing possibilities is more important than optimizing your choice of path, waiting for just the perfect opportunity to magically drop into your lap. It likely won't happen like that, it's not necessary, and you don't need to live your whole life at once. Frodo didn't arrive at Mt Doom by making the optimal choice on the first crossroads out of the shire.

Instead cultivate an attitude of engagement with whatever imperfect seemingly insignificant opportunities that are already in front of you, and keep an open mind & eyes, and trust in the fractal nature of reality. look for threads to pull, opportunities to pursue, and engage with people as if every one of them has something new to teach you, and somewhere new to take you that you've never been. they probably do. the more you engage the more you'll find out that this is true; trust that paths will lead to more paths even if you can't see them yet. trust that the big scary void question mark of a future contains not only unseen dangers but also an unseen unfurling infinity of options and paths, friends and lovers, work and play. i love u

[shivadarwish]

Hey guys.

It does get better.

I know what it's like to be drowning in a sea of trauma and pain. The ocean is so vast and deep and you feel like you'll never get out. You feel yourself sinking more and more into despair, with no end in sight.

I didn't think I would ever make it out. And yeah, I'm still not out of it. I keep getting dragged back under when another wave of depression hits me or I get too close to a traumatic memory that I trigger myself.

But... things have finally become easier.

I've learned how to swim, just a little. I learned some new coping mechanisms, to help me get through the worst of it. Coping mechanisms that aren't going to hurt me in the way my old ones have. I've learned how to recognize and process through my emotions. I've noticed some of my negative cognitions and am actively working on undoing them.

And in the process, I've noticed a lot of things starting to change for me. My window of tolerance for distress has gone up. I can actually notice when I'm in a rough spot, and instead of beating myself up for not being good enough I forgive myself and let myself rest. I have learned how to manage my emotions in a way that they no longer control me. My personal relationships have gone better, as my ability to communicate with others have gone up. I can set proper boundaries and not feel like I'm a terrible person for doing so. And I can enforce those boundaries if I need to.

I rely less on dissociation now, to manage my life. And the things that are still causing me problems, I am working on improving. I have tools to handle my memory issues and resources to help with my time management.

I still have a lot of work to do, of course. I still get triggered, but I know better how to manage myself when I'm in that state. I still have bad times, but they are far fewer than they used to be, and they don't last as long as they used to. And they don't feel as all-encompassing as before. And now... I actually feel like there's an end in sight. It's far out on the horizon and barely visible through all the fog, but I know it's there. And that gives me hope to keep on going.

To everyone else out there struggling: I know how hard it is. And I know how frustrating and futile it might feel, to try so hard and to make what looks like so little progress. But it is so, so worth it. To be able to live life, to enjoy your life and feel like you're thriving and not surviving... I can't really describe it. But it feels wonderful.

I hope that my words can help provide you all with some hope as well. I don't know your specific struggles, but I know you're doing the best with what you've got. Keep at it. And someday, I hope that you, too, can see the horizon.

[shivadarwish]

Baby picked his own basil leaf

[shivadarwish]

im a lil high and i have cilantro soap questions

if cilantro tastes like soap to some people why is it such an uncommon soap scent? I feel like things that taste like soap should be soap

before soap existed what did the soap gene cavemen say cilantrussy. hang on i have to stop this mid sentence because my phone autocorrected cilantro to cilantrussy which means i have previously typed that word out enough for my phone to think it’s a word and more of a word than cilantro. i have some inward reflection to do.

[shivadarwish]

recovery horror: where the process of healing from something reveals previously unknown levels of damage

[shivadarwish]

the archer — taylor swift

[shivadarwish]

[shivadarwish]

im fucking fuming over this i cant even lie like what the actual fuck is this. straight up evil behavior. also good job literally flat out admitting amber was indeed abused by depp since u fully acknowledged that she suffers from ptsd and that the ptsd is directly related/linked to him. literally just proudly telling us that ”yeah i knew he had abused amber and that amber has ptsd from it so i decided that we should try to give her panic attacks and just totally torment her like wouldnt it be so funny to give her flashbacks so she feels like shes being raped again lol she will look so craaazyyy” like honestly kill urself

[shivadarwish]

people when trauma victims act traumatized especially in a way that is unpalatable to them because it involves lashing out and unpredictable moods and having boundary issues rather than just being demure, sad, and consumable

[shivadarwish]

I wish we'd talk like we used to