Happy Day

My day has ended, and I am about to go home and sleep. My coworker, who also clocked out at 6 am, is starting her week's end. As I sit, waiting for the cafe to open at 6:30, I realize that the lady behind the counter is likely starting her day. 

This is all perfectly normal. No one is alarmed. No one is passing judgment or offering critiques. We accept the variability of roles and schedules.

If we can all be in different stages of our day, why isn't it acceptable to be in different stages of our lives? Why does progress have to have a relational component? Why do we need everyone around us to be so damn similar to us? 

The Coworker, Lady Behind The Counter, and I are different individuals working for the same company. You and I are different individuals navigating the same planet. We are both having human ecperiences, but we are not experiencing life in exactly the same way on the exact same time-tables. 

That's okay. In fact, it is more than okay. It is perfectly normal.

Good morning 😁

Good night 😴

Happy Monday

Happy "Friday" 

or simply...

Happy Day ❤

Back To You

***Harry Potter Spoiler Alert***

In JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Ginny Weasley shares all of thoughts and fears with Tom Riddle via a diary. Unfortunately for Ginny (and the Wider Wizarding World), that diary belonged to Lord Voldemort, aka Tom Riddle, bka You Know Who. Riddle's diary contained a piece of his soul. 

As she, Ginny, shared herself, her soul, with Tom Riddle he used her self-disclosure and trust against her. Ginny's trust and confidence in the diary created a parasitic connection between her and Riddle. He began to feed off her soul. He weakened her, almost to the point of death, to strengthen himself. 

To our intense horror, we later learn that Riddle's diary, along with Marvolo's ring, Slytherin's locket, Ravenclaw's diadem, Hufflepuff's cup, Nagini, and Harry Potter himself all contain pieces Voldemort's soul. Before Voldemort can be killed for good the pieces of his soul, his Horcruxes, must be destroyed. 

As I was thinking of this whole soul splitting, draining, and attaching business, I thought I most related to Ginny. I inadvertently jeopardized myself [my soul] by trusting the wrong individuals. Ginny was the victim. Lucius Malfoy used her as a pawn then Voldemort preyed upon her.

I could even relate to Harry,the unknowing and unwilling host to part of Voldemort soul, on some level. Voldemort tried to destroy Harry, and when that was unsuccessful, he attached himself to Harry creating a strong and complex connection that could not be severed without drastic measures.

With reluctance that teeters on denial, I have to admit that I can relate to fucking Tom Riddle. I have unwisely split myself [my soul]. Although it was not via dark magic, it stemmed from darkness  nonetheless...

When we act in fear, self-loathing, and or self-hatred, we mutilate ourselves and thus our souls. "The soul is supposed to remain intact and whole. Splitting it is an act of violation; it is against nature." (Professor Slughorn) 

Unlike Harry, Ron, and Hermione, we do not have to go on the hunt for soul fragments, and we, those of us who have violated ourselves, do not have to engage in any further self-destruction. I think the only way to reintegrate one's self with one's fragments is to choose love, self-love, on a daily, sometimes minute by minute basis. 

Self-love means refusing to participate in anything or with anyone who diminishes you. It is rejection of thoughts that affirm the the worst of you. It is self-discipline and sometimes it is even self-indulgence. Sometimes self-love is using your powerful, beautiful voice, and other times it is standing in your powerful, beautiful silence. 

Whatever form it takes, self-love is always restorative and compassionate. It always seeks to strengthen the "incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole." Self-love calls the fragments of self back home, back to you.

"You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!" said Dum-bledore loudly. "The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort's!... he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole." -Albus Dumbledore

Well-Read Black Girl 😁

Deliberate Illumination

"But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that." -Jeanette Winterson | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

"I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it." -Jeanette Winterson

"As it is, I can’t settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and timeconsuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy.

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met...One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s."

- Jeanette Winterson | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Happiness is not a potato.

"The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea. 

Or the people who found Atlantis.

Curious people who are explorers must bring back more than a memory or a story, they must bring home potatoes or tobacco or, best of all, gold. 

But happiness is not a potato."

-Jeanette Winterson | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Stories

"...Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end."

-Jeanette Winterson | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Exodus

"Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one."

- Jeanette Winterson | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Finally Miss Jewsbury yelled so loud even I heard it. ‘This child’s not full of the Spirit,’ she screamed, ‘she’s deaf.’

"Once I went deaf for three months with my adenoids: no one noticed that either. 

I was lying in bed one night, thinking about the glory of the Lord, when it struck me that life had gone very quiet. I had been to church as usual, sung as loudly as ever, but it had seemed for some time that I was the only one making a noise. 

I had assumed myself to be in a state of rapture, not uncommon in our church, and later I discovered my mother had assumed the same. When May had asked why I wasn’t answering anybody, my mother had said, ‘It’s the Lord.’ 

‘What’s the Lord?’ May was confused. 

‘Working in mysterious ways,’ declared my mother, and walked ahead. 

So, unknown to me, word spread about our church that I was in a state of rapture, and no one should speak to me.

One Sunday the pastor told everyone how full of the spirit I was. He talked about me for twenty minutes, and I didn’t hear a word; just sat there reading my Bible and thinking what a long book it was. Of course this seeming modesty made them all the more convinced. 

I thought no one was talking to me and the others thought I wasn’t talking to them. But on the night I realised I couldn’t hear anything I went downstairs and wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Mother, the world is very quiet.’ 

My mother nodded and carried on with her book. She had got it in the post that morning from Pastor Spratt. It was a description of missionary life called Other Continents Know Him Too. I couldn’t attract her attention, so I took an orange and went back to bed. I had to find out for myself."

-Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

"Write what you know is reasonable advice. Read what you don't know is better advice. Reading is an adventure; adventures are about the unknown...Literature is mix of unfamiliarity and recognition...As we travel deeper to into the strange world of the story, the feeling we get is of being understood...It's the story or the poem that is understanding us. Books read us back to ourselves...Read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact." 

-Jeanette Winterson | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

When I was younger, I wrote to hold on to embers of sanity. Many, many times writing was the only coping tool I had through bouts of loss, depression, and uncertainties. It would, without fail, strengthen me. If I could express it, I would survive it, so I wrote myself stable.

In the last two years reading has become my primary source of solace. 

When I read, I feel connected---more alive, more human. Reading tethers us to hope. It expands our capacity for compassion and empathy. It challenges our assumptions and enhances individual and collective knowledge. And it redirects one's focus from self to others and somehow that helps to see one's self and experiences more fully and clearly. 

Reading, for me, is an offensive, sometimes preemptive, stance against isolation, catastrophizing, depression, resentment, disquiet, hopelessness, regret, and a range of unnecessary insults.* In short, reading is an act of war against the forces in life that accommodate mental, emotional, and intellectual destitution.

I read the Harry Potter series for the first time this year, and I just finished my third reread on Sunday. I am struggling to wait for my lovely friends to complete the Good Days section of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, so I can greedily inhale the rest of that wonderful read. I am starting Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit with great anticipation.

There is so much I don't know. I'll be reading for a lifetime. Thank goodness for that. 😁