06: feeling bad, feeling human 🌈
another month; more or less clarity? idk (september 2020)
Iteration #6 of this monthly letter full of feelings.
This issue's theme is: ♥︎ feeling bad, feeling human ♥︎
I miss new york city! I miss my apartment and the life we built and shit. I feel like I've been screaming this internally for the last few months. Screaming it before we even left, feeling like nobody could hear or see how painful it felt for me to let go of this life I'd been clinging to, feeling like I had to dig my claws and teeth into that life so no one tiny thing could fuck it up and take it away. Obviously the current circumstances are no One Small Thing: a pandemic, not having work, having a bunch of fucking debt, a sick step-parent, no idea what the future will look like, you know. AND I KNOW I know I know it's not all ~gone~ and the life I built lives inside me I know I know I know. It just hurts sometimes and I'm tender.
I was talking to my friends in an artist meetup I do online every week and we each described the feeling of going in and out and up and down through the insecurities and low points. We each had different phrases for it: running in the loop, taking laps in your head, the endless loop of inquiry. I call it riding the carousel.
Anyway, it's like... very cool to be alive. Being a human feels like constant screaming sometimes and often maybe it feels like nobody can hear you, but how cool is it when you finally express vulnerability and someone is like "holy shit, me too"?! I feel like I didn't really *get* the feeling of community growing up and now it's become some kind of life mission. I'm sinking my teeth into it and not letting go.
⧽ VULNERABILITY FOREVER ⧼
Art from the folks I referenced above: Shawna, Danielle, Nina, and Arti, who are part of my weekly artist group. (Do you want to be in this group? Tell me!) I'm really grateful that I get to know them and share feelings with them. Another week earlier in quarantine, I shared how sometimes I feel like a deeply "bad" or "rotten" person and it was maybe the first time I said it out loud with my voice and it was scary. A few of them were like "oh yeah me too same" and Arti reminded me that the binary of good/bad doesn't exist and it's kinda just a tool of capitalism/patriarchy to make us feel like we're not doing enough or we don't "deserve" our desires. Being bad is good! Being bad is fun. People are complicated and hold so many emotions at once and who the fuck actually believes people are "good" or "bad?" So maybe I am kinda rotten and that's okay. I brought this idea up again with a group of friends who've lost a parent and we all had that same feeling as well. It's wild how we hold these stories and secrets inside of us SO TIGHTLY WE COULD BREAK. And when we let them out in the right spaces, people mirror us and remind us that we're not alone. Like duh, it's kind of a cliché, isn't it?
⚘ THINGS I DID IN SEPTEMBER ⚘
Karolena's wedding! UGH it was so beautiful and I still feel so lucky that I got to be there, let alone document it. I wrote a whole mushy thing about it on instagram.
I put a lot of the photos on my website here if you wanna see more. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
hot merch for biden/harris! ☺︎ My very ambitious & stylish friends Courtney & Jenny created this very cool independent merch store with actually cute designs & 50% of proceeds going to the Biden/Harris 2020 presidential campaign & the other 50% going to the designers behind the merch! They were featured in NYMag's Strategist and Stylecaster. I took some photos of them in the park a few weeks ago wearing some of their favorite pieces. 〰️
Took some photos of the amazing food & drinks at Bar Beau, a restaurant in Brooklyn that you should definitely check out (at least get a pretty cocktail at) if you live in NYC ☀︎
THINGS I LOVED THIS MONTH:
love you, thanks for opening this and getting all the way down here. hope you're drinking lots of water, breathing biiiig breaths, and maybe finding that "lucky to be alive" feeling somewhere today. ttys, lylas ✿
⋰ If you'd like to read previous newsletters, they are archived here.
This newsletter was written from the Onundagaonoga (Onondaga) & Haudenosaunee territory. To learn more about the stolen land you're occupying, visit native-land.ca ⋰
