~ Snake Bracelet.

I don’t think self-neutrality should always be treated as a stepping stone on the way to a commodified form of self-love. Sometimes, perhaps, self-neutrality is enough on its own, and might even be more helpful.

Example:

“I feel worthless” doesn’t need to become “I have value.” Instead, it would honestly be healthier to realize that “value” is a vague concept with little to no bearing on your right to exist.

“I’m useless,” doesn’t need to become “I have potential.” Who honestly gives a fuck if you have potential, except for people who want to use that potential for their own gain? We don’t exist to be a vessel for potential. We exist merely because we were born to exist.

“My life has no purpose,” doesn’t mean you need to find an all-consuming passion to give your life meaning. Life doesn’t really need to have a grand meaning, that’s just something human beings decided. You can still live a fulfilling life just by focusing on what you like now.

“I’m nobody.” Why do you need to “be someone” in the first place?? Everyone is always trying to be somebody, what’s so bad with just enjoying yourself and your friends and good food and laughs, without any expectation of being a person that others can identify and judge?

Conclusion: Self-love can have many benefits, but sometimes it has foundations in toxic productivity culture, capitalistic ideals, and an unhealthy pressure for us to be socially and financially valuable. In those situations, it’s best to just throw away the whole suitcase and realize that you don’t need to be judging your existence based on made-up ideals.

Narrow Gauge Rail in the San Juan Mountains. Photo by Noah Larimer‎.

Home!! 

MOUNT SNEFFLES WILDERNESS AREA COLORADO

Post Halloween feels

Nuns on skis, Norway, 1970s

On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic

The acclaimed novelist lost her beloved husband—the father of her children—as COVID-19 swept across the country. She writes through their story, and her grief.

My Beloved died in January. He was a foot taller than me and had large, beautiful dark eyes and dexterous, kind hands. He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning. He cried at both of our children’s births, silently, tears glazing his face. Before I drove our children to school in the pale dawn light, he would put both hands on the top of his head and dance in the driveway to make the kids laugh. He was funny, quick-witted, and could inspire the kind of laughter that cramped my whole torso. Last fall, he decided it would be best for him and our family if he went back to school. His primary job in our household was to shore us up, to take care of the children, to be a househusband. He traveled with me often on business trips, carried our children in the back of lecture halls, watchful and quietly proud as I spoke to audiences, as I met readers and shook hands and signed books. He indulged my penchant for Christmas movies, for meandering trips through museums, even though he would have much preferred to be in a stadium somewhere, watching football. One of my favorite places in the world was beside him, under his warm arm, the color of deep, dark river water.

In early January, we became ill with what we thought was flu. Five days into our illness, we went to a local urgent care center, where the doctor swabbed us and listened to our chests. The kids and I were diagnosed with flu; my Beloved’s test was inconclusive. At home, I doled out medicine to all of us: Tamiflu and Promethazine. My children and I immediately began to feel better, but my Beloved did not. He burned with fever. He slept and woke to complain that he thought the medicine wasn’t working, that he was in pain. And then he took more medicine and slept again.

it WAS for him

Where the forest follows the shoreline. #FilsonLife

When I’m told I need to find another available clinician to take over a crisis walk-in if the session is taking longer and begins to extend into the time I’m supposed to meet with my scheduled client, I’m just like…