These are words I needed sooner that I don’t want to forget now. I wrote them thinking of myself and my work (and my attitude towards both) at around age seventeen. I struggle at times to see the point of writing anything down since I feel my perceptions are constantly changing but there are patterns that emerge and become strong convictions. I do try to hold them loosely.
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I'm grateful for you and your gifts. Even if they haven't formed in the ways you would like. Especially if they haven't. The tension you feel from those things that just want to take form through you - even if the awareness of that tension is the only evidence you have of your creative life - if you can find it in yourself, acknowledge it. The harder this is to do, the more important it is that you do it.
Your body is good. It is helpful to think of her as a person. Regardless of how you feel towards her now, any experience of love you have ever had traveled through her to get to you. Don't hate how sensitive you are or try to dull your ability to feel so that you can give more or be taken seriously. Eventually if you keep at it you will fool some and receive a modicum of respect but it will be rooted in deception and you will always know the difference. It is not worth the atrophy of your soul and it does not work - one day something small will tip the pending weight and your body will feel all of it (and this will not kill you but it will feel like it is).
When your body does revolt, don't hate her for having had enough. Don't hate the slowness of healing or the awkwardness of the work you make in grief. This is the work that has no price.
No one else knows what it feels like to live inside your body. Have enough integrity to stand by your decisions without making them someone else's responsibility, especially when you end up wrong or wronged. Your life is your own.
You don't have to try to be original. You "just" have to remember who you were before everything happened.
No one gets to be "young" for longer than anyone else.
The reason why nature is so healing is because it reminds you of the beauty of things living as exactly what they are. Seek this reminder as often as you are able. Seek it alone whenever possible.
Spending all your time trying to analyze yourself is very tiring work and you'll actually learn a lot more by focusing on ideas and projects that are a part of you but larger than yourself.
You build trust with your creative intuition when you show up for her on days you don't want to.
Be honest. It shows when you aren't.
It is actually not important at all to be understood. Please don't make your work wait on it. Curiosity is more than enough.
Just because you admire someone's work doesn't mean they can be trusted. This is less true if you also admire their life. Concerning other artists, the latter is much more important.
Emotions only last about ninety seconds in the body if you let them pass through. Resisting them only means redirecting them to a different time and location.
Pleasure is medicine. And it is your right. There are many who equate it to indulgence and want to draw lines around it for you. Don't let them. Your body knows the difference.
No one is all good or all bad. Maintaining that binary for others means you will inevitably turn it back on yourself. Don't live inside an impossible question.
There is no small love. And you can never truly lose someone.
I love you very much. I didn't always, and learning to has meant the difference between life and death. At several points you have to choose whether or not you want to be here. You can stay without living, but you'll know. Your body will tell you. She'll never stop telling you.