“I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say.
“Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.”
| — | Marcel Proust |
“I lose interest when I get ignored.”
–found online
“Your line of work requires support. People who care about your wellbeing, who will be there to stitch up your wounds […] There is not a man or woman, no matter how fit he or she may be, who is capable of carrying the entire world on their shoulders.”
Can we talk about how we’re living an age where we can get an action tv show with a female protagonist and her male sidekick and they’re not in love and he’s a nurturing figure for her and she means adventures for him????
BLESS
It is not only men who are in this class…some women too. Some children too…
There are very few honors greater than to be allowed to witness a woman’s full truth, full radiance, full depth. Any man who gets caught in the easy shallows and then bails not only misses a taste of the infinite … but remains incomplete – having missed out on an opportunity to reclaim a piece of his own soul.— Randall Alfred
“I want to care, but I don’t. I look at you and all I feel is tired.”
— Elizabeth Scott
I didn’t change. I just found myself…
Not a big Bukowski fan, but this quote? Omg!!
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
— Charles Bukowski
got there on the back of a woman…
“The best revenge is to move on, get over it, and continue to succeed.
Never give someone the satisfaction of watching you suffer.”
| “J’aime la nuit, j’ai les idées plus claires dans le noir.” |
| — | Serge Gainsbourg |
“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only.
I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.”
| — | Margaret Atwood, “Variation of the Word Sleep” |
You take everything away from someone,
expecting them to crumble like sand in your palm.
You forget though, when someone has nothing to lose,
they have nothing to fear. You forget, that in the right heat,
sand becomes glass and the broken glass you hold has edges
sharp enough to cut through you.
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong ~or feel abandoned;
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you~ If you can look back
with firm eyes saying “this is where I stand.”
I want to know if you know how to melt Into that fierce heat
of living falling toward the centre of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing to live day by day with the consequence of love
and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat.I have been told In that fierce embrace
even the gods speak of God.
— David Whyte
…you who wrote vociferously to deny me becoming, deny me growth…
…you who wrote to deprive me of my innate destiny to have a perspective, walk thru life and the years, and then have a new perspective from a new place…
…you who wrote to deny forgiveness by telling me that I was unforgiveable…
…you who wrote in denial of a Grandfather’s wisdom that a wise person changes their mind and a fool never…
…this post is for you.
I am free of your judgments. Take them back to the grave you choose to live in, I want nothing to do with them.
Give me a chance to be responsible and to give and take and live and learn and forgive and be forgiven…give me a chance to be the person I allus was and not this fabricated golem you have created to tell yourself what you think you need to be…give me that chance and I will take it.
But to gas-light me, castigate me and condemn me all the while denying me any means or opportunity to walk forward?
No…Charissa will not play that.
Take it all away and best of luck to you…as for me, I will live in forgiveness, give forgiveness, receive forgiveness, love, laugh, and know that I am perfectly imperfect.
I mourn that you deny me the opportunity to walk a life with you…but from the looks of things you are far more the loser.
“Suicidal behaviors in LGBT populations appear to be related to “minority stress”, which stems from the cultural and social prejudice attached to minority sexual orientation and gender identity.
“This stress includes individual experiences of prejudice or discrimination, such as family rejection, harassment, bullying, violence, and victimization. Increasingly recognized as an aspect of minority stress is “institutional discrimination” resulting from laws and public policies that create inequities or omit LGBT people from benefits and protections afforded others.
“Individual and institutional discrimination have been found to be associated with social isolation, low self-esteem, negative sexual/gender identity, and depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders.
“These negative outcomes, rather than minority sexual orientation or gender identity per se, appear to be the key risk factors for LGBT suicidal ideation and behavior.”
Source: The Truth About Transgender Suicide | Brynn Tannehill
This.
I am sharing this truly scintillating essay, and the pull quote above is the core for me.
I just wanna say that I was raised white…but I was…raised white. Fortunately for me, I was never inculcated with racist bull shit, to the point that in college in the 80s I had a dear friend literally shock me when he told me I was the least racist person he had ever met…and yes, I did hear and note his use of the word “least”…which said volumes to me but in a language that I could not decipher or understand.
Well…since coming to terms with myself and understanding my gender journey, my life has changed in shattering ways, stunning and transcendent ways…but most importantly of all I was delivered from the ocean at last…
and became aware of so much that I never knew, could never see, even as a fish in the sea has no clue that it is in the sea.
I understand the comment of my friend now…”least racist”.
I wish I had the words and ways to let my friends, acquaintances and loved ones who are subject to that which they are subject to for the absolute worst and most insignificant of reasons KNOW that I get it now…
Oh, I will NEVER get it for the reason that they are made subject, anymore than any cis-gender person will ever “get it” in any way other than developing a deep and sincere sympathy and resolute commitment to love and live that love…
But I do get it now, the persecution, the othering, the abuse, the hatred and the fucking demonic unreasoning irrational stupidity of those besotted and drunk on the luck of the draw and the fate of biology.
My friends, and you know who you are…this post is for you…may I always find the joy I have found in solidarity with you and the love of your deep suns of being that shine undefeated and undefeatable! May I always have the heart, the eyes to see and to be inspired time and again with your indomitable spirit, will, but most of all your LOVE which just fucking never quits, CAN never quit.
You have no idea, the moments you have dragged me thru…you bearing the hate directed at you due to skin and me bearing the hate directed at me due to a variation on skin but essentially a common thing we walk in…times I was on the way out, and I would read sumfin, hear sumfin, think of sumfin…and be inspired and lifted up in your heart of hearts.
Now? I can at least have the means to find the remaining privilege I have and divest myself of it intentionally…it doesn’t always go, it is stuck to my skin color…but at last it is not stuck to me.
I regret only that it took as long as it did for my understanding and seeing eyes to catch up to what my heart must have known for my friend to tell me what he told me. We intersect…and for the rest of my days on earth I am expanding that intersection with every ounce of love, faith, hope, grace and mercy that is mine.
To the rest of my friends: please take it in faith that your privilege is there, is stuck to you, and is a legacy that you can use if you will but set your heart in a frame of humility and ask that your eyes be opened…hopefully you will gain insight without experiencing it being ripped away…but if that is what it takes, it is better that this occur rather than go thru your life blind while thinking you see.
This line has inspired me for 40 plus years…literally.
Watch to the end…For I am committed to living to that…the end.
PS: the irony of the fact that this movie is called “Papillon” is not lost on me!!
Some days, survival is going to be hard and people are still going to look at you
in the way you hate, with eyes narrowed in judgement, words like quicksand
drawing you deeper and deeper into self doubt, self hatred when they tell you
in how many ways you are not beautiful.
On those days, look people in the eye and say
“I do not know how to be your version of beautiful, but I do know
how to be every version of strong, I am a survivor
and no one can ever take that away from me.”
— I Learned This Today | Nikita Gill (via meanwhilepoetry)
| — | Lao Tzu |
“Good people are like candles;
they burn themselves up
to give others light.”
— Turkish Proverb
“Absence.
Absence, hear thou my protestation against thy strength, distance, and length.
Do what thou canst for alteration… For hearts for truest mettle.
Absence doth still and time doth settle.”
| — | Sylvia Plath |
“Wisdom cannot be imparted.
Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart
always sounds like foolishness to someone else.Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.
One can find it, live it, do wonders through it,
but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
| — | Hermann Hesse |
“We fool ourselves
into thinking
we’re strong,
then complain
the rest of our lives,
crippled by
the consequences”
…You move on
when your heart
finally understands
that there is
no turning back.
— J.R.R. Tolkien 
…I have lived into this…thank you dearest one.
“I want to fall to sleep with you,
and I could care less
whether it is in
layers upon layers
of clothing
or only our skin –
all I really want is to wake up
not knowing
where I end and you begin.”
– Beau Taplin
“I realized that I walk briskly because I feel that if I look very busy and send the message
that I have a very important reason for being in this space, perhaps men around me will think
I have a right to go on my way un-harassed, untouched, un-bothered.“To be a woman in public is to be on your guard, all the time.”
— Yusra Amjad, Why do women walk so briskly in public?
This quote…
“Your worth
is determined by you,
and with no need for
an explanation to anyone.”
— Wayne W. Dyer
Here is the problem for the person who struggles with self-worth issues:
If you see yourself as unworthy and worthless, then you are doomed. And I have heard it more times than you can imagine…”well just see yourself as worthy and you will be”!
That works as well as the last time I saw myself as a billionaire
| — | S.Plath |
| — | Sei Shōnagon, “The Pillow Book” |
| — | Anita Krizzan |
But the issue of abuse is more subtle — more invisible — and more than all the above.
Abuse does not arise in a vacuum. A healthy mind does not (need to) abuse. Abuse is created of trauma, and it is the traumatized mind which abuses. Whether to externalize, bury, escape its anger and frustration — the abused mind must purge it’s hurt in some manner, or risk being broken, split apart by it entirely.
But the troubling fact is this.
We have created an abusive society. We have normalized, regularized, and routinized abuse. We are abused at work, by the very rules, norms, and expectations of our jobs, at which we are merely “human resources”, to be utilized, allocated, depleted. We are abused at play, by industries that seek to prey on our innocence and literally “target” our human weaknesses.
And now we are abused at arm’s length, through the lightwaves, by people we will never meet, for things we have barely even said. We live in a society where school shootings are the rule, not the exception, where more people will have taken antidepressants than not…and now one where nearly everyone will have been abused on the web…for a random, off-hand, throwaway comment, an idle thought, something trivial, unremarkable, meaningless.
Source: Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words — Medium
I wanted to press that quote, pulled from a longer article that is fantastic in describing what happens on social media…
…and online in general.
The web is one gigantic megaphone, and one person with a point of view and a platform can do incredible damage to any number of other people with what they write and how they write it.
I myself have experienced this…where an article was written about me, about the most private and personal and painful things in my life and placed on display in the service of a personal point of view.
I didn’t recognize the person that appeared in the article, even while I remembered the things alluded to…and remembered the rich tapestry that surrounded them all…a tapestry comprised of the things that happened and the things I remember and the interpretation that is placed on them by so many players in the tableau…
I was horrified as I read the comments on the article by complete and utter strangers who had now decided that I was a certain way or a certain thing, simply based on these words made public, and while those words are utterly authentic as a representation of the thoughts and judgements of the writer they were abysmally inadequate in giving any genuine insight into the gestalt of the history that had been lived.
I was despairing…thinking of how the place of publication did Zero due diligence in fact checking or vetting or even giving me the common courtesy of a warning that they were going to take a small facet, one side of a terribly complicated issue and wave it in the air like a besotted banner of click-bait and titillation.
I couldn’t help but imagine the consequences should this have happened to any other number of people I know in my situation, and the yawn and blind eye turned to just another transgender suicide…
And more than anything else? I knew that deep down inside I would have done nothing to stop the writing from happening because of the writer’s need to tell the story and tell it the way those eyes, that heart and brain lived it.
The issue is not the telling of the story…the issue is the megaphone and how it is choking itself on its own abusive streams.
Contemplate the things this author points out, and consider your own interactions with social media…and know that there is a better way.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
– T. S. Eliot
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy,
which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
The whole future lies in uncertainty.
Live immediately.”
— Seneca
Dearest Darling…
I would choose you…anytime, everytime.
Again and again.
You are the best forever.
“Her mindset will raise your children.
Not her body and good looks.
Choose wisely.”
I saw this quote…and I thought about the things that have been hurled at you this last year. I want you to know that the only choice that really matters is the one I made, and that I would make it again, as many times as I had it to make.
You are the person that I loved, and love. It was your SELF…your way, your mind, your heart that I wanted wrapped around any children I had…and I still think that you are the cream of the crop and a fabulous mother.
And you’re hot too!! Lol!!!
Love, me
| — | Charlotte Brontë writing to a friend who had been kind to a man she thought was married, only to have him fall in love with her because he thought she was flirting (letter dated April 2, 1845)
“…some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed to dedicate your life to his inanity.” –19th century sassiness is delicious |
| — | Sylvia Plath, from Three Women |
| — | Emily Dickinson, from a letter, November 1854 |
so beautiful
“she was the rain
and I didn’t even bother
to bring an umbrella
because I wanted all of her
every drop in the wind
soaking me through
her kisses were wild flowers
sweet, colorful and divine
lips a mixture of
honey and wine”
— nightlyquote // b.r.j
| — | Italo Calvino |
| — | Dorothy Koomson |
| — | nayyirah waheed |
“Feelings are just visitors, let them come and go.”
Hmmm…this may be true…
…if the visitors are Jehovah’s Witnesses on your doorstep!!
giggles
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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