zoe-wrote

[zoe-wrote]

i sometimes say that i give good advice because i’ve felt every emotion. i think it’s true.

i just put on QKThr by Aphex Twin. I remember listening to this song and thinking it sounded like falling in love before i’d ever fallen in love. now i have, and it does. pretty much exactly like it.

i supported straight friends through breakups years ago before i even knew i was queer, but i knew loss. i knew pain.

the word ‘empath’ is used in such a way which makes it twist up all foul in my mouth but i don’t know how else to describe the experience of watching an action movie, and sobbing because i can’t stop thinking of the protagonists’ tragic backstory and how traumatized she’ll be after this. i can’t watch the fight scenes without picturing the grief the families of the dead will face. i look insane, and sound pitiful when trying to explain how on earth the fast and furious has brought me to tears.

i spend hours a day thinking of my loved ones’ inner worlds. i don’t know how common that is. my world view is very much shaped by expressions of pain.

i remember during one of my last few weeks in Dublin, i was walking down Nassau street on the way to the bus stop sobbing to Síofra about the Rwanda bill. I had just seen a post of the booklet refugees currently are receiving in the UK when assigned to the program, and i broke down in grief. the feeling flooded me— to think of a world so cruel that a person who has fled everything they know and love in return for safety and has risked it all again by seeking asylum status and thus informing authorities of their presence will be put on a plane with a vague promise of a future in a country they do not know and had no plans in, to have their lives uprooted constantly and to have anti-immigration advocates dehumanize them to the point that they are no longer afforded autonomy, the one thing intrinsic to human desire which they abandoned everything to retain.

síofra wiped my tears and held me tight, squeezing me as she said she didn’t know either.

no matter how much political theory i learn it still doesn’t make sense to me how one can truly abandon humanhood to that point, no matter the reward. the concept of leading one’s life without emotion as the defining sense baffles me. i genuinely can’t grasp how people are able to become so cruel. i can’t grasp how those people sleep at night. i’m not sure they know how many souls they’ve broken, or if they would care if they did.

the playlist i’m listening to now is called ‘hiding under the willow tree’. it’s not done yet but i’ll share it. i guess i like it when i can safely let people peek into my mind. i hope someday soon to be more open in sharing myself. i know i seem exceptionally open, but there’s a lot i keep to myself. people always seem baffled when i share just a bit more; “you’ve lived so many lives, zoe.” i’ve heard that many many times.

i’m gonna do something new. i’m gonna share some poetry of mine. a few excerpts and one full one. i’d like to tell you my love story with my wonderful wonderful girlfriend through lens of what i wrote when i hurt the most. i spent what felt like eternity preparing for us to end. i wish i didn’t. i’ve given up on that.

it’s not gonna work it’s not gonna work it’s not gonna work it’s not gonna work it’s not gonna work IT’S NOT GONNA WORK IT’S NOT GONNA WORK

it won’t work. it can’t happen. we can’t happen.

it **won’t** work. it **can’t** happen. we **can’t** happen. **it** won’t work. IT can’t happen. WE…

how much pain

could i have absolved myself from

had i never vowed to prevent it?

how many nights

could i have slept through more soundly

had i never plotted the ending?

i spent hour after hour

predicting our pain

trying to peek through my eyelids

in lieu of a crystal ball

i was determined to bypass delusion

gritting my teeth and muttering until i screamed

somehow i heard ‘i’m leaving’

every time you said ‘i love you’

dear god wouldn’t it have been nice

to hear that you loved me instead.

——————————————-

——————————————-

finally, i’ll share the lines of a song which means more to me on every listen— but paraphrased. these were texts i sent today. i’m bad at lyrics, better at retelling the emotion.

i want to kisksiksiskisskisskiskisskissskissskissskisskisskisskisskisskieskisskisskisskisskissjjsjiskkisskirsskirsskirss

your eyes again

i don’t want talk about anything

i don’t want talk about anything

i wanna listen to the sound of you blinking

i want to listen to the sound of your thinking

[zoe-wrote]

it’s twelve sixteen on a tuesday night or a wednesday morning, depending on how literally you take the hours. it still feels like tuesday.

i’m coming back to this blog a few months after returning ‘home’ to Boston. it’s starting to feel a bit more like home now, i’m cozied up in my bed in my very own apartment writing because i want to in bed because i want to be. autonomy is like… the biggest thing i’ve craved since becoming a teen. i know that’s exceptionally normal, but i had circumstances in my teens that took my autonomy away more than what is typical. i’ve continued to feel stuck there since. in moments when my mom and i disagree, suddenly i’m sixteen or six again. for the first time in my life, i’ve truly felt like i have the power to ‘choose my own adventure.’ god i used to love those books, i’d read them in the middle school library excitedly flipping section to section and getting upset when the story’s outcome didn’t line up with my genius and infallible decision making. but yea, now my life is real. i don’t have to flip through a YA paperback to make choices that impact my life, i do it every single day within the real world, a world which is messier and more complicated than those soft-to-the-touch yellowing pages which smelled like stories long loved.

i’m sleepy suddenly. i’ll be back in the morning (maybe)

[zoe-wrote]

returning “home”

moving abroad is not for the faint of heart. or rather, prepare your heart if you’re moving abroad. i suppose when thinking about studying abroad, it’s always talked about as a break in your *real* life to guide your future back *home.* i think if your exchange is only a month long or even two, it might be easier to see it that way. but for me, i lived abroad for six full months. i was aware the whole time that my life in dublin was temporary, a life which i was building up for six months with the full knowledge that the clock was ever ticking and my return to boston looming ever closer in front of me.

when i landed back in the US i started to have a bit of culture shock. it started in the airport with the flags down the hall, and continued in the immigration line where i heard the familiar buzz of a group of americans talking, a sound i had learned to discern while in dublin and encountering quite a few americans through the study abroad program. i remember being novel. i’m no longer special. i don’t get people cautiously testing the waters when assuming that im from the states just in case they could be offending a canadian by saying “you’re american, or north american right?” not that being from a truly massive nation with a very loud presence on the international scale for both cultural and empire/genocidal reasons ever made me exactly unique when in europe, but it was an easily discernible fact about me which goes unquestioned in the US. now it’s more interesting that i’ve lived in dublin, which was mostly unexciting to dubliner acquaintances. i found that dubliners tended not to love their city as much as consider it the best option they had, in the same way that irish republicans (as in pro-unification of ireland) are proud catholics despite often being completely non-observant and even quite critical of the church as an institution. the catholics colonized the irish a bit before the brits, and as culture continued to be forcibly replaced bit by bit it became a point of pride to cling on to catholicism as a belief that came before the english which they would not give up. that’s grossly oversimplified and mildly historically inaccurate, feel free to hit me up for actual reading recs but that seemed a quick way to get my point across. google irish sectarianism if you’re curious and a bit lazy.

that was a bit of a tangent, let me try to recenter. i believe i’ve mentioned this blog is stream of consciousness, tangents are a pretty major component of my conversational style and general consciousness so please bear with me as i attempt to express and idea in a length short enough that you won’t get bored reading.

i guess i wasn’t prepared to be able to close my eyes and remember the bus routes of two different cities and name the stops i would need to get off for different establishments, or describe an area on a street or a park nearby. i’m not used to being of multiple places, i’ve lived in boston mostly my whole life. i did live in germany for six months when i was six, but i was so little im not sure i had captured the nuances of home yet. i know dublin is still there, i know im not obligated to abandon it, but the reality is that my life has always been in the US and will continue to be at least for a while. i became truly aware while abroad of how much i suck at maintaining friendships virtually. i talked to my friends back home next to none and still have family members and friends that i haven’t responded to since they texted me in march. i called my parents twice (2), one time was a twenty minute zoom call to talk about my housing situation come fall and the other a forty minute phone call during my last month there where i filled them in on several things i had been keeping from them. thankfully i’ve had a very warm welcome upon coming back, and i am ever grateful for my village here in boston. i have friends i consider soulmates. it’s hard to imagine not being around them.

i move into an apartment in august, my first big girl lease. i’m living with two of my best friends. síofra is visiting me in a little under a month. she applied for a visa and everything. i do have my own life i’m building. i have time to figure out what that means for me. i suppose i might not remember the bus transfer options from dublin 2 to dublin 8 when coming from UCD in dublin 4 by this time next year. maybe i will, who knows. there’s a lot of not knowing right now. i’m trying to make peace with that. i turn 21 6/30. i have a lot of time to fuck up.

some songs i’ve been reflecting to when thinking about home

[zoe-wrote]

Germany, Amsterdam, what else?

I meant to update the next day. I didn’t. I lie here now two weeks later in my dorm bed in dublin. It’s a single bed like the one I had at Simmons, but this time I get the whole room to myself including a tiny little bathroom and a shared kitchen and living space down the hall with the five other folks in my apartment. Everyone is really nice.

I submitted a kind of shitty essay yesterday for my health psychology midterm. It’s nice to finally be done with midterms but holy fuck there were several criteria I know I did not hit- fine on the word count and such but I know my references were not enough and I should have expanded on the appropriate psychological models used. But it’s done. That’s nice. That’s part of why I’m letting myself lie in bed listening to eifuawn and writing my tumblr blog.

It’s been odd living independently for the first time. Odd and fucking wonderful actually- I haven’t quite learned how to adequately feed myself or stay on household tasks the way that I should, and I often find myself overtaken by the sudden urge to vacuum or deep clean a surface. I scrub the bathroom floor with a kitchen sponge almost weekly, almost always on a whim which becomes a burning drive to get the floor clean enough. But for the first time ever, if I fail it’s just my failure. There is something really wonderful about failing and not having anyone but yourself to blame. That’s not profound, it’s just true. I find the need to clarify that sometimes, because I speak in a way that I know sounds more convincing or more wise than it actually is. I was just raised by academics. My language is naturally more flowery. I’ve done a lot of therapy. I remember most all the facts i’ve learned in school and in therapy. I get lost on wikipedia all the time, and insatiable curiosity eating into me until I’ve delved so deeply into a question my wonder is temporarily appeased. Shortly satisfied until the next question starts burning up inside of me. I was sitting in a lecture on wednesday for my class on existentialism and humanism, and our professor was talking about “Le deuxième sexe” by Simon de Beauvoir as an important peace of both existentialist and philosophical work as a whole. She told us about her own colleagues and scholars she has encountered who don’t believe feminist theory or critical race theory to be true philosophy, saying with gritted teeth that she didn’t know how to respectfully say they were just wrong. Philosophy can’t just be told from the middle class white cishet man, she said. That isn’t all people. That’s one of Simone de Beauvoir’s big points in The Second Sex, the idea that she’s seen as a woman first and a philosopher second. The Second Sex is in the literature section of bookstores, not the philosophy one like the work of her partner Jean Paul Sartre. Dr. Foran said that alone says enough.

I have a lot of conversations in my relationships about boundaries, especially with my friends who have emotional communication styles very different from mine. When my wonderful friend Macy came to visit from Boston, I really wanted to make sure she had her needs met as an introverted person. I love people, I love my people, and I know the way that I love people and show it is different from others. I know that as an exceptionally extroverted person, my way of experiencing the world externally is foreign to others. The fact that I never get exhausted hanging out with my friends is also something that confuses people who rank more towards introversion on the introversion extroversion scale. I get scared that my ability to express myself externally so often, to be so affectionate and so open, will be daunting to my friends whose communication style is different from that. I don’t want people to feel like I’m dominating communication and their needs aren’t as important. They are so important. I love my people, I want their needs to be met even if it isn’t what I would initially have thought of. So I ask a lot of questions relating to boundaries, I try to give a lot of options when making plans. “Do you want to stay out or go home? Do you want to chat or sit in contemplation and be nonverbal?” The fact that I don’t get socially exhausted doesn’t mean my friends are obligated to hang out infinitely, and I think it’s especially important to establish boundaries relating to social energy when you’re going to be hanging out with someone for days on end, like I was with Macy, with my cousin Noa who just visited, and with my dear friend Jena who is my travel buddy.

I worry that when I give these kinds of options, people won’t think that they really are options I am freely giving and ok with. I fear people will say yes to things out of politeness or sense of obligation. I don’t want to jeopardize my relationships by folks appeasing my needs constantly because they think it will be easier. It won’t be easier, because it’s harder on them. lol yea this is what goes through my mind as an extremely extroverted person. i care a lot about my homies! i love spending time with them! but god it’s not fun to hang out if i think im the only one actually having fun, that’s why it’s important for all the homies to have their needs met. introverts i love you! im sorry if my externalization has made you feel silenced before. im working on it.

but that’s something i’ve thought a lot about recently- the externalization of my world experience. i have a drive to point out things i see, to start conversations about the things im wondering about- i don’t have a quiet brain, there’s always a lot of thoughts. i like sharing them; it makes me happy to interact. when im travelling, i try to experience things with as many senses as I can, whether it’s petting mossy trees when at a waterfall in the irish misty rain or letting the sea breeze whip against my face, smelling it and feeling its impact on my skin. i like to jump and skip and run, to wander and to spin and to smile and laugh, to spontaneously find the next location, to procrastinate and then urgently finish my midterm essay on contemporary dystopian fiction in a belfast hotel room.

I ended up talking about none of the locations in the title, no locations at all really. I’m not gonna change the title. I write these stream-of-consciousness so I’ll keep it as is. You’re really just getting a brief snippet into my mind. I do love it here. I’m in love. My life has been filled with a lot of beauty recently. im really grateful for that.

[zoe-wrote]

Großauheim

As draft this post on Sunday March 24th at 1:04am (german time), i can hear my dear friend jena sleeping in the wooden bed i once slept in when i was five. we are staying with my grandparents in Hanau, or more specifically the village on the outskirts of the city called Großauheim. Hanau neighbors Frankfurt in the state of Hessen. it's quiet here.

My dad grew up in Nürnberg, which is a city about 2 hours away from here in the neighboring state of Bayern (Bavaria, in english). I feel very connected to that city and my heritage in that region in part because I actually started first grade there when we lived there for six months while my grandmother Hedda was dying of cancer.

I talk about death quite casually, I hope that isn't bothering anyone too much. I think it's quite relevant quite often, and as someone whose grief has played a pivotal role in my childhood I refuse to shy away from reality, though I do apologize if your own grief makes this hard to read. I know there were times in my life when mine would have.

Anyway back to Bayern; I often tell people Bavaria is the region of Germany where all the german stereotypes come from. Oktoberfest, lederhosen, overflowing beers brought to you in a biergarten by a busty woman in a Dirndl (yea that laced up German dress, see me in one below), bratwurst and big soft pretzels and yodeling and shit are really more closely tied to the Alpine region than Germany itself, and Bavaria includes much of the German Alps. God I love those mountains, and the little huts where you can get a full restaurant meal on the mountaintop after a morning of hiking. Some of my extended family members always wear traditional dress to family events, and I've joined in on that because it's a) so practical to always know what to wear b) so fun! and c) it's the one part of my heritage that I feel like I have any tangible connection to.

I guess I should give a super quick recap of my family lore for those who haven't known me as long or even really at all. My dad is german, whole family still there. He went to college in Glasgow, Scotland where he got married to an American studying there too, had a kid (shoutout Craig), and got divorced. Craig's mama decided to move back to the states for support from her family back home, so my papa decided to move to be nearer to their kid. My parents met on Yahoo Personals when they were both single parents in Cincinnati Ohio. My mama got a tenure-track offer at UMASS Boston, I'm born in my childhood home in Arlington, MA yada yada.

My grandpa moved to Hessen a bit into his relationship with Sabine after Hedda died in 2009. Sabine's family has lived in Großauheim for several generations. She's a doctor and used to hand-make puppets to tell her children stories. My grandparents are exceptionally cute together. They randomly breakout into song and loveeee to infodump about really anything historical whenever possible. jena thinks they're really funny. speaking of jena she has rustled awake a few times and heard my keys clacking. I'll show her this post in the morning. Speaking of morning, I should sleep now. I'll post more about Germany tomorrow.

[zoe-wrote]

One month abroad

Hello. I thought I would write more often, but I felt I didn't have enough to report on. In reality, studying abroad can be quite mundane.

In these past few weeks, I've spent my time learning the bus system and how to feed myself. I've never been responsible for all three meals before. Everytime I actually cook, I start by chopping up onions and garlic and caramelize them on the stove. I think of my papa every time I do that-- he never shies away from bold flavors, and back home some well browned onions and garlic are often the base that allows the meal to be built so flavorfully. I like to listen to whatever novel is assigned for my contemporary dystopian literature course via audible while completing tasks like cooking and cleaning. Having a manual task to keep my body occupied helps my mind stay focused and I get my chores done, so it's a win-win really. I've listened to Herland and 1984 thus far, Fahrenheit451 is up next.

I like to open my window in the morning to get some fresh air in the room and hope enough sunlight comes in to dissuade any seasonal affective symptoms that could occur in my silly little brain due to the change in climate. I like to put on my big headphones blasting music as I power-walk to class (I'm often supposed to have left three minutes prior). Recently I've been listening to a lot of The Smile because I am insufferable and seeing them in concert next month with jena (THOM YORKE IN THE FLESH!) as well as the usual shoegaze indie pop burlington vermont listening location shit. There is something so wonderful about the sensation of the wind on my skin as I speed through campus to my Existentialism and Humanism lecture blasting Mac Demarco.

I do really love learning, and my classes this term are pretty fun. I think my favorite emotion ever is curiosity, I love the feeling of wanting to know more and giving myself unbridled permission to explore whatever I've stumbled upon. Me and Jena love just trying random doors and seeing if they will open, walking down corridors and pathways in directions we are uncertain of, exploring new random hobbies and chasing new experiences. The two of us are destined to either live long fulfilling lives filled with whimsy and joy or to get kidnapped quite young due to our foolishness and trust.

We joined several clubs at UCD including; film, horticulture, taekwondo, juggling and circus, i joined the lgbtq one as well but jena did not because she is busy being such a good ally to the community. i wanna join orienteering soooo bad they give you a compass and you have to run to spots on a map it sounds so beautiful. We tried to find the gardens for a hort soc meeting but failed miserably, got some fantastic pics from that hero's journey though. Every now and then I get so lost I think I know what Odysseus felt like.

We did attend a two hour Taekwondo training and will continue that I suppose, we had no prior ambition of doing Taekwondo but the girls running the recruitment table were so cool and made a great pitch. I really enjoy getting sold to. It's mostly queer women on the Taekwondo team, but we are instructed by black belt men who I think perhaps attended UCD like a decade ago??? Idk really but it's kind of fun and I've been saying I need a hobby. I love to kick.

We went to our first Juggling and Circus event yesterday, and we didn't vibe with the people as much. Did get to make some balloon flowers though so that's pretty cool. Probs gonna garden this week as well. The campus is kind of inconveniently located (realistically about 1 hour away from the city centre if you want to go anywhere other than Grafton st), so we're trying to find a good amount of things to do on campus.

I've definitely learned a lot about Ireland, credit is certainly due to my personal irish cultural guide Síofra who I've become close with this last month. It's been great getting to know people and to build a new life. I suppose it's reassuring that I've been able to get by these past few weeks without being miserable.

It's a bigger deal to study abroad than I give myself credit for, especially given that three years ago I wasn't sure I would graduate high school. I think often of how my younger self might react to my current life; my teen self would be astonished and disbelieving, but my child self would be reassured and excited. I am quite proud of myself. I feel an obligation to be appear particularly wise when I write or speak about emotions and past life experiences which often manifests in me writing blog posts and such with some kind of message in them once I start wrapping up my thoughts.

I don't have anything specific to offer. What I can say is that I'm excited, and looking forward to exploring this city, country, and continent more. I'm excited to keep getting to know the cool folks I've met here and to see where life takes us these next few months. The world is weird. I'm tired.

[zoe-wrote]

Last night in boston

I know logically that I am leaving for Dublin tomorrow, but emotionally I do not feel how I would expect to under 16 hours before my flight takes off. I grew up in a suburb of boston and live in the city now-- I chose a college about 10 miles from the home I was literally born in.

I would expect to feel... more, essentially?

I keep on deleting descriptions I write because they feel wrong, which is kind of funny. I'm really not that nervous and I feel like I should be.

Tomorrow I am going to rearrange my suitcases a bit bc I have a couple of items I need to cram in, buy new eyeliner, should probably run some analysis (I have abandoned lab tasks oops), and then like leave.

I'll land around 5am friday irish time. The only concrete goal I've set for myself is to talk to lots of people and have at least one slightly in-depth conversation with a stranger daily. I'm going to try to befriend a group of folks staying at the hostel so I can grab dinner with them or something. Then I have errands.

This is a boring fucking post wow. In the past two hours I've had the tab open I have been scrolling through the UCD orientation packet and clicked through the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy pages on nihilism, meta-ethics error theory and camu. I was choosing music to listen to and decided I wanted to play "Everything means nothing to me" by elliot smith. I find acknowledging lack of meaning incredibly comforting actually, it allows me a kind of positivity tied to leading my life in any way I choose to because I don't desire or need divine meaning to do so. Space Cowboy by flipturn also talks meaning, and I wanted to share the lyrics because the stanza about being a bird feels really relevant right now:

I never know what I'm looking for Just something more Sometimes I wonder If I were bird Would I be so serious If my feet could leave the dirt Cuz down here I fear I've become far too concerned With everything I'm given And nothing that I've earned In the art of war Is there something more Or am I alone?

I'm still not feeling emotional about leaving yet, maybe it will hit me in waves or maybe like... never. But I am excited to fly, for my feet to leave the ground and look at how small everyone is.