mood board for the beginning of July

I’ve been quite miserable. You’d call me selfish — but I feel it more and more; I feel the need to be alone with people who understand without having to try. I need that sense of effortlessness right there — I just refuse to hold back these days. I refuse to settle for some lucidity of mind in my own privacy and then no more energy left, no more vitality left to keep me going. It’s all anxiety and restlessness. And — I find it more and more hard to waste my time on people I don’t truly care about for I feel they don’t care enough either. Or they do care, in their own way, but it’s just not meaningful to me whatsoever. Does it all lie in my complete inability to receive? At any rate, I think they surely like the idea — that’s why they obviously keep coming around for tea! But at this point, I can’t have that — and there’s no point, really, for they don’t understand, ever, and in all my misery I am still pretty arrogant and demanding enough to believe that it is my right to wish to be felt rather than be understood but that doesn’t seem to happen either. So, here it is: is it possible? I ask. Is “emotion” possible without “understanding” of some sort?
– Virginia Woolf, from Selected Letters

 

  
  

 

—Kristina Haynes’ writing (“turning so many people into poems that sometimes I forget to turn them back.”)

—Kristin Stewart’s interview about Welcome to the Rileys: “No, it’s not that I don’t know, it’s just that I can feel it... I think I’m just a little bit more sensitive to—I’m so—if you looked at a girl wrong now, I would fly across the room and kill you... I feel so, so, so, so protective of a certain thing that women have, and you... yeah. So that I definitely take from it, which is different, because I didn’t have that before.”

—Breed’s Monday Fix

—Favourite songs from Lana Del Rey’s new album: Black Beauty, Old Money, Ultraviolence, West Coast
— Lupita Nyong’o in Dazed & Confused magazine, on what her mother taught her: “She instilled in me that you don’t have to apologise for being a woman. There’s no apology in my femininity.” 

—Season two of Orange is the New Black. (I thought I would miss the Alex/Piper bit, but Nicky, Morello, Poussey and Suzanne took over for me. And Red. “Honey, you don’t drink poison and wait for it to kill your enemy.”)
—Willa Cather’s letter written to her brother on July 8, 1918: “I can fight it out, but I’ve not as much heart for anything as I had a year ago. I suppose the test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.”

—‘A Journal’ by Louise Glück: “I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow kept hitting the mirror and coming back.”
—Writing by Caitlyn Siehl: “I was not afraid. I am still not afraid. I will never be afraid again. Bring in the beasts with teeth like tree branches. Bring in all the men who will never love me. Bring in the monsters with faces carved out of stone. I am not afraid. They can eat me alive. I am not afraid. I will cut my way out of their bellies. I am not afraid. Never again.”

—‘What is a Boy’ by Charles Aaron in Rookie Mag: “These are all the results of a bigger societal problem, which is that we live in a patriarchy—a system in which men hold the majority of powerful social and professional positions that shape our society. It’s a totally shitty situation that hurts not only women, but everyone. Men close themselves off because they’re taught to value the traditionally “masculine” forms of power and success over being empathetic, honest, and communicative human beings.”
—Blythe Baird’s ‘Theories About the Universe’: “I am trying to see things in perspective. My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot have this, because chocolate makes dogs very sick. My dog does not understand this. She pouts and wraps herself around my leg like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in, she eventually gives up and lays in the corner, under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the universe has my best interest in mind like I have my dog’s. When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself: ‘Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt.’”