ɴᴏᴍ ɴᴏᴍ 😋

“I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you.”

— Roy Croft

“I’ll only marry the man who can guess which is my favourite stone on the whole sea-shore.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry,”

The fact that you can feel so strongly for someone but they never have to feel the same. The fact that you can love and want only one person and they don’t have to feel the same. The fact that you can miss someone so much your heart aches for them, yet they can be fine without you

“People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad.”

— Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant

“But just because you’re strong and resilient doesn’t mean you never need someone to be there for you, to take care of you.”

— Tammara Webber

Don’t touch me if you don’t mean it.

The War Boys (2009)

“So the myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature and that they are individualistic and that they’re selfish. The real reality is quite the opposite. We have certain human needs. The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognising that there are certain human needs. We have a human need for companionship and for close contact, to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted, to be seen, to be received for who we are. If those needs are met, we develop into people who are compassionate and cooperative and who have empathy for other people. So… the opposite, that we often see in our society, is in fact, a distortion of human nature precisely because so few people have their needs met.”

— Gabor Maté

"Un solo sguardo e tutto è finito lí"

~Lacrime dal Cielo

There are two thing you can't fake or hide: the look in your eyes and your heartbeat.

May it be because they are connected to your spiritual self or because of a scientifically proven phenomenon,the true you knows that they will always be true.

They are truths that do not need to be proven.

They can't be concealed and you can't stop them from being conveyed to others.

It flows through that thin connection that surrounds us all and does not pass unobserved.

This allows you to let your trust reside in someone.

To let your emotions run freely.

To give it your all.

People are not made up of only one self,unfortunately.

As much as those things are true,they reflect the true essence and feelings of only one of their selves.

Their others selves are not obliged to uphold those truths.

Believe in them and believe in yourself as well. Good will surely come from it.

2021/08/01

I wonder what kind of girl I would be if the patriarchy didn’t exist. If gender roles and stereotypes didn’t stain my entire being. If I didn’t suffer at the hands of misogyny that molded the clay that was me. I wonder what I would do, what I would say, what I would like, what I would crave, what I would be. The likelihood of us being anything close to similar seems slim considering how many things could be different. I just wonder what type of woman I would be if I hadn’t been told from the day I was born how and who I should become. Would I still enjoy wearing makeup if I hadn’t been conditioned to feel better about myself with it on? Would my favorite color still be orange if pink hadn’t been forced on me and I didn’t care to make a point of rejecting it? Would I stand up for myself more if I hadn’t been taught to cater to the comfort of others before prioritizing my own? Would my natural instinct still be to feel wary of those around me if abuse and harassment and assault were not normalized in our society? Would I still want long hair if I hadn't been brainwashed into believing that my beauty is rooted in being feminine, and that my value is rooted in being beautiful? Would I be the same? How much, or how little, would that impossible girl resemble me as I am now? And are my interests and passions genuine—truly mine—or can they all be linked to some expectation to accommodate, some predetermined role to serve, some juxtaposing desire to please a system I don’t even like. Do I actually love video games as much as I think I do, or do I only like them because I think it makes me appear cooler to men? Do I actually want to get married as much as I think I do, or do I only want to because historically that was where the female fit in? Do I actually find solace in journaling as much as I think I do, or do I only find solace in it because it is the only time I can share my traumatic experiences without being called a crazy attention seeker? There is so much I wonder about, which parts of me are real and which have been tinkered with. Which is just pure me, and which is because of something else. A factor of the patriarch. Of course I’ll never know, but that truth does not keep me from being curious about the girl who does not suffer from the wrath of an internalized male gaze and the burden of internalized misogyny. I bet she is lovely—free of the shackles—and I hope she feels at peace.

— alhwrites

Loneliness is a Dangerous Thing

‘Everyone knows there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul.’                     - Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Rootlessness and homelessness, though similar in nature, are also quite different. A person who is rootless may very well have a home, but does not have a sense of belonging, they identify themselves as ‘the other’. 

Since the end of World War II, migration has increased significantly with people opting to set up their life somewhere new, whether this be for a job, education, religion, or whatever opportunity this may provide. A person disentangles themselves from the ties and bonds that they have with one place and form this relationship somewhere new… this is now home.

But home for you may not always be home for the new family that you set up. I have mentioned this before in another post so I won’t go into it in too much detail, but when looking at those with extremist and ‘radical’ thoughts, we find that they are often children of those who have migrated. The parents have chosen to build home in a new foreign land and build a relationship with that place, but the relationship is not so straight forward. This relationship is a half way house between assimilating and holding onto one’s culture; the migrant chooses which parts of the new culture to adopt and which parts of their old culture to hold onto. This might vary from eating and drinking habits, clothing, social life, it could be anything. 

The child of the migrant however, having not chosen but instead having been brought up with this conflict between the two cultures feels lost. This is something I have thought about for a long time, but Arendt put it into the words I have been searching for for so long. 

The child feels a sense of rootlessness. 

Arendt argues that those who feel rootless or homeless will seek out a home for themselves at any cost, which can have disastrous consequences. 

She states that for an individual who feels rootless and homeless, often with this comes the feeling of having an existence that is not meaningful or fruitful. To find this sense of belonging, individuals often turn to exclusionary movements and groups, which actually only increases the feeling of alienation and rootlessness. Now they are in a group that only contains people such as themselves, perhaps from one place, class, religion, etc. all together feeling like outsiders, because of the absence of others of a different background. 

Arendt says that uprootedness has been ‘the curse of the modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution’.

Loneliness is a dangerous thing. When a person is lonely, when they feel their roots are not in any ground but sort of drifting from place to place, a person is not themselves. Who are we, after all, without a background against us? Just an entity, perhaps? 

‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.’