Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
the word just came to mind while meandering about my laptop. the french word ramasser. i love the way it sounds. perfect for constant repetition. rammaser! rammaser! a strong “ra”, followed by a hammering “ma”, and a swishing end with “sseh.” i forget what it means, as it often happens when a foreign word comes to mind. the sound. le son. i just like the sound.
ramasser means to pick up, or to gather. a small reminder that maybe it’s time to pick myself up. gather my bearings. stop being a mess.
***
am i a mess, or am i just alive?
philosopher byung chul han writes:
“The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.” (burnout society)
***
it’s one of those days when i feel like i am wading through molasses while my brain is following the muffled beat of the macarena up top.
the day before, my french teacher inquires about my mental situation. “you said last week that you were in a depressive episode, is it better at least?” he asked. “oh. yeah. you’re right.” i almost forgot. i had such a busy week from then until now, i stopped missing the signs. the inability to do anything apart from get out of bed, work, scroll. can’t surmise enough attention to properly watch a movie. missing things. being unable to think ahead, to make plans. but i promise, the thing is. i make plans and never follow through.
***
follow through is one smooth motion. “don’t drop balls,” they warn me. but to pick something up you have to allow them to drop.
i want to write about shows, exhibits, etc. and i want people to be able to find them. being google-able increases that (vs Substack). this matters more to me than reach, i think; this is the one metric I care about.
my boyfriend arby once quoted someone else: “you should write about the exhibits you go to, because that’s usually the only memory of that exhibit that will exist.”
i’ve been to many life-changing exhibits that i haven’t written about. (big bang data, ai weiwei at the royal academy of arts in london, joan miro at tate modern, art as therapy in the rijks… dami pala!!!)
hey now i have this blog so maybe i can now!
it’s empowering to have a platform-agnostic space where i can write and do whatever the fuck I want with no pressure. mostly to write. i also don’t want to clog people’s inboxes with whatever experiments i’ll come up with. substack feels like a party. this blog is a receiving room, and you see the library of my mind.
i can choose to have an analytics-less experience if i want to. might be counter-intuitive against #1 because SEO, but let’s see. substack emails you 24H after you post about your analytics. i’m too sensitive for that if it happens too frequently.
i write a lot and share on instagram stories, though my account is private. i thought that if i had a blog it would be a more reliable archive.
a lot of people ask me: “do you remember what you said before about X and Y?” and it then becomes an extensive triangulation of different archives and sources.
a colleague once told me that she likes reading my stories when she unwinds after work. i like the idea of bringing comfort, having a steady place where everyone can find me and expect me.
when i was a kid, this was my favorite thing to do online: read and reread blogs.
maybe my colleague (in her early twenties) yearn for blogs, which she may not have experienced as my generation did.
it’s been my dream to have my own domain, to figure out a wordpress.org hosted blog. my love for graphic design and affinity for coding began with wanting to have my own blog.
what will happen to my substack
i mean it will still be there, there’s no reason for it to not exist. i just don’t think my intentions here are compatible with the channel. i don’t want to bombard people’s inboxes. emails like that gives a sense of purpose and urgency. what if i want to do a 30-day posting everyday challenge? etc.
probably longer essays on substack? as long as it has a strong sense of purpose and urgency, then i suppose it will land there.
a lot of pensées (thoughts) on the quotidien. i write a lot about music, fashion, art, pop culture, politics on my instagram stories, so i expect whatever i write there will eventually land here. i could conceivably have a separate section for *special stuff*, but frankly when i daydreamed about this, the first thing you on the landing page see has to be the blog.
anyway, welcome! let’s have a good time.
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
