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you’re on your own, kid, you always have been

normal people, 2020/@ryebreadgf /ceilings - lizzy mcalpine/the haunting of hill house, shirley jackson/untitled, frank wright/unknown, from pinterest/nicolas martin, “dedicated to light”/you’re on your own, kid - taylor swift/edward hooper, “gayle on the f train”/@seashellronan/tolerate it - taylor swift/unknown/tv - billie eilish/unknown, from pinterest/@lustloveandliarsx/@finehoney/@farmlesbians/liability - lorde/i get so jealous of euthanized dogs - june gehringer/anne magill/you’re on your own, kid - taylor swift

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am tired of making a religion out of my suffering’.

will you be enough for her, though. little slip child. you hated every time you had to scream to be heard, so you stopped screaming. it feels so fucking demeaning, 16 and shivering, saying please! father! look at me! and having him say in a minute sweetie.

online they're back to making fun of self-harm scars. isn't that funny. we have dropped the silver pretense of empathy and are walking around without any shred of humanity.

are you still shouting? how can anybody love you, then, siren. error signal. your voice so quiet and desperate. nobody is going to help you, stop begging. how can anybody actually look down at you without squashing you flat. oh, darling. you once bit into the back of your hand to stop from crying out, and discovered that it felt too dramatic for repeating.

people like you aren't supposed to cry, because you are too much. you have never meant to, but you take the air out of a room just by walking in. other people can take up room like a sunbeam. you blurt out all your wickedness in oilslicks, everyone can feel it. you slosh yourself over their hands and demand their flinch. you are a bone stuck in the throat.

be more beautiful, more perfect. if you can earn it, they won't abhor you. they might even tolerate you, if you turn the right way and never stand up straight.

but love? her life is a silver fish, a cat paw. your life is a long, thin, impossible desire - angry like a blade. your life is a crack in the floortile. you cannot bring your rotted fruit heart into the church of her hands. you will ruin her. you will overtake everything good for her.

or worse - you will have to beg her look at me. and that moment of desperation will ruin you forever. completely.

No Longer Human // Ask Polly: Help, I'm The Loneliest Person In The World! // Franz Kafka // Sue Zhao // Fingertips - Fortesa Latifi // Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky // Juansen Dizon // The Garden of Eden - Ernest Hemingway // On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

Louise Glück, “Unpainted Door” Poems 1962-2012 / Ingmar Bergman, Bergman On Bergman interviews with Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima / Moonlight 2016 dir. Barry Jenkins / Fiona Apple, Second Bite interview by Craig McLean, The Guardian / Eighth Grade 2018 dir. Bo Burnham / Norman Rockwell, Little Girl Looking Downstairs at Christmas Party / Anne Carson, “The Anthropology of Water” in Plainwater

{Hannah Green, from "Are you still hungry, Mother?"/ Anne Carson/Sam Gordon, "A Mother's Hate"/ Ella Wilson/ Joan Tierney/ Ella Wilson/ Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous/ Unknown/ Nayyirah Waheed/ Sharon Olds, “Holding To A Wall, Treading Saltwater”/ John Green, Turtles All the Way Down/ Safia Elhillo, "an inheritance," published in Narrative Northeast/ Annie Ernaux, from I Remain in Darkness/ Poplar Street by Chen Chen/ Unknown/ Tumblr User: @inkskinned/ Elena Poniatowska, from "La Flor de Lis," published c. January 2011/ Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom}

fatima aamer bilal, from i mother it the absence of her, iii. i am not a person that can be loved for a very long time excerpt from moony moonless sky.

night terrors by hannah green // how to cure a ghost by fariha róisín //writer in the dark - lorde // my mother & i - lucy dacus // take care: mothers, daughters, and inheriting self-hatred by ella wilson // lady bird (2017) // mother wound healing: why it’s crucial for women by bethany webster //don’t know // on earth we’re briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong // mother by maia baia

like there comes a point where you think something is fundamentally wrong with you. and then it turns out it’s just Friday and you haven’t washed your hair in three days and maybe you’re also just a little lonely and the combination of all three of those things is whittling a hole into your chest every time you breathe. but also the sun’s up. and you’ve survived everything so far, so you’ll survive this too, even if it hurts, even if you have to survive it many times.

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s all the blood in my mouth screams devastatingly desperate, miserable girl.

fatima aamer bilal, from being unwanted is a language.

running yourself into the ground because it "feels good" but actually because it secretly feels bad like a cheese grater against all the soft bits of your mind and running yourself into the ground specifically because it feels very bad and right now the roadrash will give some kind of visual effect to the rest of the experience of your suffering and running yourself into the ground because you were raised religious and/or with strict parents and now you feel like you need an excuse any time you burn out or else it's not burnout it's laziness and running yourself into the ground so you can be really sure it's actually depression and not just because you ate something suspicious

and running yourself into the ground because the back of your throat tastes like rotted fish and yet everybody wants you to get up and make a pretty dance about it and running yourself into the ground like a matchstick because if you're going to have to be here you want to blaze about it and running yourself into the ground like a darkened landing strip so the plane wheels spark up and your hometown finally disappears in the distance good fucking riddance

and running yourself into the ground because of some fucked up great-great-grandparent's hard work aesthetic and because you somehow owe it to your parents, who owed it to their own parents, because owing things is normal in your family, like love is a cost-value analysis and running yourself into the ground and getting up and pretending that, like, this isn't burning the candle at both ends. two days is plenty to get back into it.

you're not spiraling, you're just manifesting wealth and happiness. you're not spiraling, the radio in your chest just has low batteries. what do you mean that's the sound of distress. when they went out looking, they never found your pilot. you haven't been in this body for years now. you found yourself and put her into a box and then put her up on a shelf. she's still safe up there and she's still a kid.

running yourself into the ground and the constant knowledge: you don't even know where you're going and you don't like the experience. but where ever it is: you're not there yet.

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.

I never had a Real one, I always was the real one

Sad but true.💔

it's just too fucking much! because of course there's a national shortage on your adhd meds so now you need to figure out how to resolve that except that the pharmacy never picks up their phone and their online portal is absolute dogshit and one time you drove an hour out of your way because they said they had it, but they didn't have it, and they tell you "well we can't transfer the meds, you need to call your doctor to do that" but your doctor only works very specific hours so by the time you call your doctor the meds have scampered off to a different pharmacy and the pharmacy kind of shrugs because you should just psychically know if they got a medicine shipment and all of this is the exact kind of thing that your adhd fucking hates.

so great! your quality of life has fucking dematerialized! within the span of this week, your apartment is a pigsty. you keep having racing thoughts that slam you awake at 2 in the morning, and then the next day you collapse in a brain fog by 3PM. but you need to go to your fucking job anyway so that you can have the insurance to pay for the meds that you're not even getting but you need the meds so you can do your fucking job! you need to make money to pay for the apartment you can barely afford as it is! so good luck. your negative coping mechanisms have started to creep back in. you find yourself loud, annoying, vapid. you fucking hate it.

and here's the thing - these meds are life changing, but not necessarily life saving. it's like going through life without your glasses on - you're struggling, but it probably won't kill you. it's just fucking annoying because the solution exists, and you can't obtain it. and the whole time you are begging the pharmacist to please just fucking fill the prescription all you can think is - holy shit. i'm so fucking lucky that i don't need these to actually survive.

like, are you miserable, sinking quickly into suicidal? sure. but you keep picturing the people who aren't okay-without-it, and it makes you so fucking sad and angry and disgusted with the whole thing that fire-and-static start running up and down your limbs because of course you want to help, of course you'd cut your hair off and hold out your own body, but what are you going to do about it? because fuck! remember the first time they accidentally filed your insurance wrong and said that your meds would be three hundred fucking dollars per-fucking-month? you stood there, shaking, your hand on your credit card, thinking - i have no idea how to make that work. and how you felt like the world was laughing, big and loud and long.

because it didn't matter! they can just say whatever fucking number they want! they could say any number, and you'd pay it, because you have to pay it. they figured out long ago what the landlords are just-now starting to recognize: profiteering in the age of capitalism isn't ever punished. if it's food or housing or medicine, you're going to pay for it, aren't you, darling.

god bless america! does it hurt? does it hurt, are you going to cry about it, in one massive, horrible sob?

and of course this is an incredibly busy week at your job. of course your life is currently falling apart. the life you're fighting so hard to cling to is in a world where it's an obscene luxury to own a fucking dog. you still have outstanding medical debt because you dared to experience hardship. don't mention the student debt. don't mention the price of groceries. don't mention how we have been through at least two life-changing recessions and nobody in the middle class has actually recovered from that yet.

be good, be an adult, handle your shit. call them again. feel like you want to scream, don't scream. feel your brain getting further and further from you. god, how the fuck did you ever live like this?

you tell your mom on the phone today while you drive to the fucking pharmacy again for the third time in the last 24 hours: if they don't have it i'm just hopping the counter and grabbing the first arm i see with my teeth. i'm going full alka seltzer with this one. they're going to need a rabies shot. and you realize you're not even mad you're just fucking desperate; the kind of beg that sounds like a whimper.

home of the free and the brave! it's not that you feel trapped, it's that they've taken you hostage.

it's not a healthcare system anymore. it's just a fucking mugging.