I wonder what brought you here.
What brought me here is you—the fantasy that someone will see past the aestheticized walls I've built around myself and follow their instinct to be a little more curious than usual.
Writing this is an invitation, to myself and to you, to just stew in that curiosity. I’ve noticed that I'm not always reminded to stay curious with the same keenness that I am reminded to stay hopeful. Perhaps that is because hope is presumed to strengthen resolve, while curiosity pokes it open and entertains other scenarios. In any case, I am out here riding on the sudden urge to dignify my whims in public. You're out here allowing yourself to read further than a peer-reviewed Instagram caption, further than a micro-interaction with a 24-hour expiration date. There's something hopeful in that too, I think.
Yesterday, I tried to remember the last time the Internet showed me something truly fascinating that it didn’t immediately undo within the next five seconds. Where was it that I didn’t feel the need to say or acquire something? Where can I go through a tangled web of emotions without having to scale it down into an incontrovertible signpost of my virtues?
One morning, when I sat on our front porch and watched the dogs go about their business in the yard, I found something close. Their attentiveness is inspiring-- they know to lick each other's wounds without being told, to watch the butterfly quietly and from afar. They know that when my notebook shuts close and I rise from the table, it's time to go back inside. They also tore apart some seedlings I spent three weeks delicately tending to. Every morning I spend with them, I am reminded that my heart has space for more than what my language can regulate.
There aren’t many online spaces in which I feel that inarticulation is allowed. I think you know what I mean. And I think you’re here because maybe you’re searching for something more than a catalogue of articulations and rearticulations that overvalue themselves. As Laura Kolbe would put it, we need “rooms to babble, to keen, to wail, to rib, to rankle . . . and maintain our right to be unintelligible, rude, and loud, and fully alive.”
I’m starting this blog as an exercise in carving such rooms for myself, so I may truly lean in on the things I’m curious about. There’s something I’m struggling to say here about the saving power of representation to yourself, of saying things aloud to yourself because you know they matter.
This is an exercise that needs a certain kind of openness, which you are perhaps being called to, since you’re here, reading a blog post that has absolutely nothing to do with anything else but itself.
On that note, welcome. And thank you. May this be the start of us never overlooking the smaller and quieter ways we have already asserted who we are at certain points in time.
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