“Yet, I keep on. I keep on. I push light out of every part of my body. I try and try and try to fix everything, and announcing when everything is ultimately fixed and solved. But it really, really doesn’t work like that.
If you’re reading this, and you believe any of these things about yourself, or you relate in anyway: I understand. I really do. And it fucking sucks. And we can deal with it.
You and I should not treat ourselves with such hostility. We are deserving of roots and forgiveness and trying again. We can not run away from ourselves. We can not scold ourselves tirelessly. We cannot keep shooting ourselves down before we even try to get up. We deserve hope and multiplicity and not being fixed all the time, but still trying for it. We deserve rest and flexibility and truth. ” (x)
This is the conclusion of inconclusively, part 2: echoes. I wrote this two– almost three– weeks ago. I gave myself the deadline to write for part 3: sunshine. It was supposed to follow a timeline, neatly wrapped up within a month: empty palaces introduced my internal conflict and the impetus to change. echoes represents the guilt and tumult and regret that came with the process. This last song is supposed to illuminate the softness and forgiveness I mentioned above.
I want to write about the patience and rest one permits oneself in the midst of “pushing light out of every part of [one’s] body.” I want to proclaim and embody the practice of treating oneself gently in the face of self-righteous character development and its ironic shadow of self-blame. I want to write about immersing one’s self in quiet moments, loved ones, small kind things, local maximums, tiny victories, simplicity.
These past two weeks were hectic and loud. Impulsive, misguided, and scared– they have not been very kind, for the most part. Certainly turbulent– with rambunctious and joyful highs, inevitably mixed in with some of the lowest lows. However, in my moments of working solitude, when I was meant to write and mobilize my emotions, I have been met with ancient silence, fantastical anxieties, and dread.
This is the trouble with writing strictly from the heart. It’s tough to be at the whim of something so volatile. I couldn’t bring myself to write about something I didn’t believe in at that moment. However, I’m clenching my fists tonight and riding the small high of this week.
I listened to sunshine again after abandoning the song and abandoning music for almost a month. I’m turbulent, I’m twenty, I’m transitioning, I’m tired, I’m trying things on. Yet, despite feeling “Enormously Pointless and Galactically Shit-Girl,” as I put to my dear friends, I’m not giving up.
This song that I wrote to myself last year– this composite of words from loved ones pulled into one place– reminded me that resting is not giving up. Pausing is not giving help. Asking for help is not giving up. Nothing is ultimately fixed, nothing is ultimately broken. Keep going. Rest. Continue on again.
This is sunshine.
This is the last song of inconclusively. I’ll write more candidly in a bit. I love you.
*izzy angus, 20
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16til26* 