This is an article without the extension. See that messy format, and how the actual article content only takes up a fraction of the page? It's no wonder it took me 7 hours to write that paper.

The drama (c.1860). Honoré Daumier (French, 1808-1879). Oil on canvas. New Pinakothek Munich.

Illustrations of Geraniums taken from ‘Geraniologia.’ Published 1787-1788 Illustrations by Pierre-Joseph Redouté and James Sowerby.

someone: knocks on my door 

me:

Shout out to people like me who have parents who are loving but are black holes of emotional labor… It took me a long time to realize that it’s okay to have mixed feelings about your parents, about your relationship with them.

Sometimes parents can love you but be somewhat toxic to you and your growth, and that’s a very hard realization to come to if you, like me, grew up extremely close to them.

Sometimes parents can love you genuinely but lack emotional maturity, forcing you to perform disproportionate amounts of emotional labor. Some parents manifest symptoms of their mental illness in ways that are toxic to your mental illness.

Some parents, like mine, try so hard to be good parents but fall back on habits of emotional manipulation because they haven’t processed their own traumas and are modeling behavior they grew up with. That doesn’t make their behavior acceptable, and it’s okay to feel exhausted and hurt when they betray you. You don’t have to forgive every mistake.

I want you to know that it’s okay to protect yourself, to need some space apart from them. The love you have for your parents is still valid, and you are making the right decision.

Placing a safe emotional distance between myself and my parents has been one of the most difficult, heartbreaking processes I’ve ever gone through… it hurts to try to curb the strength of your own natural empathy around people you love. It feels disingenuous to your heart’s natural state.

But I promise you, you are not hard-hearted or ungrateful, and you are not abandoning them. You are making a decision about your own emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

I know what it’s like in that confusing grey area of love mixed with guilt and anxiety, of exhaustion and quasi-manipulation and unreciprocated emotional labor, and I promise you, you are not alone.

  Kitano Tsunetomi (1880~1947) 

Artemis:  Ive posted a detail of this before, but it was very small and low quality. See High-res of the top image.  

Eugène Atget, Staircases in Paris, c.1900.

It’s one of Oscar Wilde’s most famous aphorisms, taken from the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s a rejection of the theory of utility in art, i.e. that the value of art is quantifiable according to some external measure, such as moral goodness, didacticism, capacity to impart political sensibilities, truthfulness—and that a work of art should be primarily evaluated according to that measure. 

Instead, he’s articulating the view that art is autonomous, self-sufficient; utility does not inhere in art, but is put upon art by those who apprehend it. He’s perhaps most famously associated with the saying “art for art’s sake”. 

"All art is at once surface and symbol.Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.” 

He’s expounding a theory of radical aestheticism: all that matters is Beauty, the subjective, irreducible, and often inexpressible sensation of pleasure created in a person when they apprehend art. 

(NB: that this theory appears in the Preface to Dorian Gray, a book which gestures toward the immorality of lives lived purely according to immoderate aestheticism, is a good reason not to take this saying completely seriously.)

1890. Projet d’une traversée du pole Nord en ballon.

Print at bottom shows a cross section of the basket beneath the balloon, “Le Sivel” during its expedition to the North Pole. Interior of cabin includes a central living area occupied by four men, an area for housing several dogs at left, and a work and supply area occupied by one man at right. Print at top left shows the balloon in flight; a line hangs from the balloon and rests on the ice.