“One looks for peace and turns to human beings to get it from them. But they can give nothing to begin with but madness and confusion. It must be sought elsewhere, yet the heavens are mute. And then, but only then, can one return to human beings, since, lacking peace, they give you sleep.”
—Albert Camus - Notebooks 1942-1951 (via sisyphean-revolt)
June 2013
14 posts
“
What we have here is a failure of imagination.
Some people cannot imagine themselves being happy without children, or a particular body shape, or religion, and so they cannot imagine that I am. They have put my lived experience through their validity prisms and decided that if I say I am happy in circumstances in which they could not be, I must be lying. Or in denial. Or using a bit of bravado in order to mask a secret unhappiness. Accusations of some flaw in me, to obfuscate a failure of basic empathy.
Sometimes, it’s people who are themselves childless, or fat, or have had a crisis of faith—and the unhappiness they feel because of those things is so profound that they cannot imagine anyone being happy in similar circumstances. It may be genuine disbelief, or it may be envy, that invites their suspicion and repudiation of my happiness.
And some people who have children, or are thin, or go to church every week, claim these things make them happy, when in fact they are deeply unhappy. They hate parenting; they live a life of restriction and self-denial and hunger to unnaturally maintain a thin physique; they go to church only because they feel like they should. And they resent that they sacrifice so much shit to do what society tells them is “right” yet remain miserable, while I reject the imperatives to reproduce, to hate myself, to engage in religious ritual, and feel happy and free as a result.
There’s no effective response to Happiness Policers, because there’s no way to convince someone of your happiness when they are determined to believe otherwise. If you ignore them, they will interpret that as PROOF! that you are unable to refute them and thus they are right. If you insist you are happy, they will accuse you of “protesting too much” which is PROOF! that you are secretly unhappy and thus they are right. It’s a losing game. Which is entirely the point.
It’s tiresome. But the only thing to be done is to speak your truth about being happy in who you are, knowing the Happiness Policers will do their thing, and knowing that their hostility toward your emotional integrity says something about them, not about you.
” —Shakesville: The Happiness Police (via veruca-assault)
“…I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitea and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrifed by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own I ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about…”
—Umberto Eco, From ‘6 walks in the fictional woods’ (via jakeronomicon)
April 2013
45 posts
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
—Charles Bukowski (via jeffaintshityet)
