two and a half too many
approaching two and a half years of rapid-paced altered state of living, there are too many things to manage. shifts in feeling, emotions, relationships, and ways of relating. extremes of how we see the world, how we internalize this and view ourselves.
there has been too much heartache to handle most days so i notice too many people numbing. shifting, shaping, shading. to pretend they’re okay. because this is what we have to do to survive. this is what we have to do in order to keep navigating this limbo of uncertainty that has become a mainstream way of life.
the ways in which we show up online isn’t just something that happened upon us. it is something that was planted in holes to be buried deep within us. so that it could no longer be a check in and out. but a commitment to chaos that we curate for the sake of standing still in a world that seems to be moving too fast for no reason at all.
we create for square spaces on the internet when all we ache for to be spirals of magic that flows with the wind. to find the safety to be our whole selves without filtering away the imperfections of our hearts, our minds, our bodies, or our skins.
but we return over and over again to the places that make us feel. that make us feel more empty than they do full. that make us long for a life we don’t desire to live. and to sacrifice our actual lives for said life, for the sakes to fit in.
two and a half years later, i straddle staying alive. because too many days i wonder what the fuck even is this life. i wonder, do we even know what it is to be connected. to be in community. or are we so far gone that all we can do is pretend that we are okay so that we don’t have to surrender our truths and be fully seen?
i wonder, does anyone know how to tell the truth any more? or has the stories we’ve been telling become the scripts that will curate our lives until the days that we die? we will ever be able to breathe our own breaths again, or will we always default to mimicking instagram-curated-lives.
i wonder, how much of the problem i contribute to. how much of the problem i am. not that i wonder too often am i problematic, but i do wonder too often, how often i am lying to myself about who-what-how-where i truly am.
i stopped writing last year when i left my body in a state of feeling deeply attacked. by the state of the world. by the systems that run it. by the ways others embody and release their own pains and traumas on the ones who they see as weak. by the ways in which my heart loves and longs to be met in this love unconditionally. by the ways in which money runs and divides our entire society. by the ways in which false-truths have been marketed to us as reality. and the ways in which we have learned to transform these into infographics to participate in the dividing of our society.
i stopped writing because i started speaking to the ones existing in the world right around me. to the ones who showed up in spaces i held seeking reprieve from the toxic-dying-of-our-ancestry. i stopped writing because i started feeling too many things and my nervous system became too stimulated to collect all that activated it daily.
i stopped writing because in some ways, i needed to cling to what it was to feel so that i could remember to stay inside my body. to not leave, or escape. to not numb or sink away. to not deflect by detaching. to submit to rewriting the ways in which i live, to live without creating new ways to articulate regrets.
the last two and a half years have uncovered that i will never be one who seeks to be understood. i will always seek to be a wolf in a sea of sheep - taking only what i need and moving at the rhythm of the ones who keep the balance of the ecosystem of our woods.
i do not wish to conform to a society that is sinking. to shrink in order to pretend to be seen. to puppet my way through the days, replicating, reposting, or retweeting 30-seconds-of-advertisings-called-entertainment to hold myself to a standard of mainstream normative-okay.
we’ve let systems create labels that call us mentally ill when our body-mind-heart-soul deeply express and release the pains that we feel. we take pills to regulate the ways in which our minds ask us to escape from digital and social overstimulation in order to stay well. we shame ourselves and others into silence when we hear expressions of feelings that are too real. and we preserver not for the sake of existing wildly, but in order to hide from the ways that we honestly feel.
the last two and a half years i have observed more than i have done. and through my witnessing, i have returned to the wholeness of my human that can no longer bypass the injustices of the world. who can not feel pleasure in spaces that does not hold the intersectional truths of the majority of the human-experiences within this world. who cannot be simply a spirit because i am living a human experience, and experiencing and perhaps shifting the depths of the humanness is my spiritual journey while i occupy this world.
words + self portraits by euni
more at selfstudylab.com/art
sensory play:
smell - lavender, sweetgrass, cedar + sage
touch - 100% cotton tanks, linen sheets
taste - rose + tusli tea
sound - depth over distance
sight - face-to-face with reflections of self, self portraits from 2020
work: website | instagram | healing support | communal gatherings