‘Do you want to be an adult or a child? Children require comfort even in a crisis, because they can’t understand how urgent things are. In a child’s world, it’s all about them: how this affects me, how this makes me feel, why is life so unfair? An adult sees a problem and tries to fix it. They think of other people and they plan their actions aware of the consequences. …’
(c) Ilona Andrews, Sapphire Flames
quotes
Neanderthal Seeks Human
onI, on the other hand, always hovered in the space between self-consciousness and sterile detachment; my gracefulness was akin to that of an ostrich. When my head wasn’t in the sand, people were looking at me and probably thinking what a strange bird!
Neanderthal Seeks Human by Penny Reid
my therapist called it an already natural propensity to observe life rather than live it.
Neanderthal Seeks Human by Penny Reid
Since I spent much of my childhood being left behind and ignored, one might think that, as an adult, moments of perceived abandonment would feel old hat. The truth is, as an adult, I’m always waiting to be left behind. I’m always ready to be discarded and, therefore, I spend significant amount of time preparing for this eventuality.
Neanderthal Seeks Human by Penny Reid
Rudy Simone, Aspergirls :
To find out you're autistic is quite a realization to have in your teens, but in your 40s or 50s it means you have to look back at your whole life and re-frame everything; every incident, every moment, with this new lens to look through. It's like getting glasses after spending your whole life near-sighted. Obviously, the longer you've gone without the diagnosis the more work you have to do in looking back. And in some cases, the more damage to your spirit, psyche, and relationships you have to undo. There are stages we have to get through once we, as adults of any age, find out we have Asperger's:* Awareness - We find out about Asperger's and the information speaks to us but it just hasn't hit home yet. We may experience some resistance or denial.* Knowing - The irreversible understanding that you have Asperger's. The realization clicks.* Validation - Asperger's explains so much in a life that often seems to have had no rhyme nor reason. This is not one moments that will continue for years if not forever.* Relief - I can finally as the song says "Lay my Burden down". We don't know what our burden is until we're diagnosed but we can tell that other people don't seem to be carrying it.* Worry - What does this mean for my future and my potential?* Anger - For all the blame and misdiagnoses that may have been laid upon us by others or by ourselves. Hopefully we will then get to the next phase of our lives.* Acceptance/thriving - We become keenly aware of our gifts and deficits and use what we have wisely.
I don’t know if I’m doing this in order, but I’m pretty sure I’m hovering somewhere around anger mostly.
Liane Holliday Willey Pretending to be Normal
on
Linguistics and the act of speaking itself, have always been among my keenest interests, but I did not become immersed in the treasures they awarded until I studied them in high school. Words, and everything about them, hold my concentration like nothing else. On my over-stuffed bookshelf sit several thesauruses, a half dozen dictionaries, famous quotations books, and a handful of personal reflection journals. Language appeals to me because it lends itself to rules and precision even more often than it does to subjectivity. Put together in the right sequence, taking into account things like tone, perspective, implications and intent, a writer can tweak and bend words until they say precisely what they should. I am fascinated with the opportunities words provide. I love everything about them, especially the power they yield. Some words can please my eyes, given that they have the symmetry of line and shape I favor. Other words can fascinate me by the melodies they sing when they are spoken. Properly handled – with care most of the time – words can work miracles on my sensibilities and my understanding of the world, because each one has its own personality and nuance and its own lesson to teach.
Not everything about this resonates with me. But what it does is remind me of that feeling of absolutely needing words to be right. Feeling them as images and physical shapes, and getting very frustrated when I can’t manage to find the right words to form the right pictures, and when people ask ‘but what is “right”?’ like I’m preoccupied with something that shouldn’t matter… Or why languages fascinate me and I feel like I need to learn more and more of them all the time.
Sometimes, the care I give to words can throw me into an obsessive compulsive ritual. I typically end up spending far too much time selecting which word to use and too much time reworking a sentence so that it looks and feels and sound right. This all translates into fixation that can grind my thought process to halt. When I get like this, I cannot concentrate on anything else, not a thing, until I have found the perfect term or phrase I need. This tendency can make my experiences with the written word tedious, at least in terms, at least in terms of time and other missed opportunities, but never meaningless or futile.
Unfortunately, in my case, I am not in the place yet where I would be able to say that last bit, about it not being futile. Also because sometimes, when I try to think about it too much, I lose track of all words, their meanings lose all colours and get all mixed up in my head. To the point where something completely different from what I intended comes out, and I can’t even tell anymore. I’m chasing myself between these two extremes all the time.
The point is, that even on those shittier of days of mine, the image that still carries me through those shittier days is the one of me finally holding at least one of my finished books in my hands. And it’s not about whether people are actually going to read it, or whether I’m going to try to get it published in the traditional way or put some money away and work out how self-publishing works. It’s about making it solid, and putting it in right words that will paint the right images and connect into that story that I’m trying to tell. And that voice in my head that keeps telling me that I will never able to do it because I’m broken in the head and can’t even connect words in sentences properly (unless it’s an angsty blog post) can just go and… suck on something nasty.
When I finally find the right words and manage connect them in the right way for the story, reading them back, feeling the tiny parts of it really come alive, makes me feel like home.
Which always reminds me of the Alfred Kazin quote.
“One writes to make home for oneself, on paper.”
For someone who doesn’t really have anything else that feels like home, this is sort of important.
One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
…
Тот, кого считают сильным,
Знает: сильных не жалеют.
Дескать, жалость унижает,
Дескать, жалость ни к чему.
Сильному наградой – сила,
И осенние аллеи,
И еще… А в прочем, хватит.
Слишком много одному.
Те, кому наградой – сила,
По привычке зубы сжали,
По привычке смотрят прямо
На любой пристрастный суд.
Слабым – вдвое тяжелее –
Им нести чужую жалость,
И еще… А впрочем, хватит.
Слабые не донесут.
(с) Г.Л.Олди
On flirting:
“It brings out in me the most profound feelings of anxiety and exasperation. I was not raised to subtlety.
Why do people have to make such fuss about something so simple?
I say, “Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you’ve never had, the story you’ve always been afraid to tell.””
“Two or Three Things I Know for Sure” by Dorothy Allison
“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that no one is as hard as my uncles had to pretend to be.”
” …compulsive mobility of 20th century life as a measure of social and moral instability. Freedom of movement is interpreted as the curse of movement — an inability to remain still, to come to rest, to be anchored.”
“… For this is the great secret, which was known to all educated men in our day: that by what men think, we create the world around us, daily new.
And now the priests, thinking that this infringed upon the power of their God, who created the world once and for all to be unchanging, have closed those doors (which were never doors, except in the minds of men),…”
Marion Zimmer Bradley “The Mists Of Avalon”
Every writer has a myth-country. This does not have to be childhood … Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth.
Doris Lessing, African Laughter
heads
on
Kawabata Yasunari takes words out of my mouth:
“My head hasn’t been very clear these last few days. I suppose that’s why sunflowers made me think of heads. I wish mine was as clear as they are. I was thinking on the train – if only only there were some way to get your head cleaned and refinished. Just chop it off – well, maybe that would be a little violent. Just detach it and hand it over to some university hospital as if you were handing over a bundle of laundry. ‘Do this up for me, please’ you’d say. And the rest of you would be quietly asleep for three or four days or week while the hospital was busy cleaning your head and getting rid of the garbage. No tossing and no dreaming.”
The Sound of the Mountain
Keina Daria 