sid🍀

It makes you ill.

It makes you tired.

It scars you over and over,

cutting so pervasively,

the wound can never heal.

Until one day,

you catch yourself saying their name,

like a reflex,

like a yelp.

You try to outgrow it,

to drown it in routines

and hobbies and other bodies.

But it still lingers.

You can’t ignore it.

This gnawing,

this pressure,

this hunger in your chest.

That tightens when you breathe

and loosens only to choke you harder.

You can erase messages,

delete photos,

try to build new routines.

But it keeps screaming anyways,

calling for what it can’t have.

Until thinking of him becomes a form of self mutilation.

I’ve been chewing myself raw.

I am caught between two forces, pulling me apart.

Do I show him my longing in all its earnestness and its humility?

Do I let him see how love spills from me, out of my ears, my eyes, my nose.

How my heart bleeds,

open, sensitive and unstable.

or do I contain what consumes me,

strangle and straddle it into submission?

Should I approach you with carelessness, as though you were already gone?

Do I enrage you?

provoke you?

humiliate you?

I think I want to be deeply understood by someone, to be known so intimately that there’s no room for mystery and still be adored.

I have spent much of my life feeling misunderstood, misrepresented and unheard.

I think I pay extremely close attention to people…or at least I try to.

And although I love the people in my life, I have never felt this same devotion returned, this mutual adoration, this obsession with knowing the other as though it could make yourself whole.

I’ve been feeling very strange lately, strange in every sense of the word. I feel disconnected from myself, and I keep wondering what it actually means to be disconnected from oneself. I find myself questioning what I want, who I am as a person, and how much agency I really have over that.

Of course, there is the nature versus nurture debate. I could talk about how my childhood shaped me, or the influence of media, friendships, or genetics and biology. It feels like there are so many forces outside of me shaping who I am. That leaves me wondering how much say I truly have in becoming myself.

Is who I am just a series of choices I make? If that is the case, then I am not a very good person. I sometimes feel like when I look inward, there is nothing there at all. I feel empty, devoid of anything meaningful. My fear is that if I look closely enough, I will find nothing, and that everything I have filled my life with is meaningless.

I do not want to be overly dramatic or bleak, but I feel deeply frustrated and unsatisfied with my life. I am doing the things I am supposed to do. I talk to my friends. I try to keep up with my schoolwork. I try to care. But what am I meant to do when I care so little? I do not know how to show up for myself, and I do not know whether what I am doing is right.

This leads into another question I have been circling around, about fitness, health, and the constant discourse surrounding it. People talk endlessly about health, about bodies, about discipline and improvement. I find myself caring so little about the body I am in. I feel like I matter so little. Why should it matter what I eat or what I do if none of it seems to matter at all?

There is this internal voice that says I should lose weight, go to the gym every day, smile more, want more, be better. I should want a happy relationship, lots of friends and all of the other things deemed acceptable and I do love those things. I love the people in my life, and I am deeply grateful for them. Still, I constantly feel like I am outside of myself, watching my life from a distance. I hate this feeling.

I wish I could exist in the present moment without being consumed by my thoughts, my feelings, and how I am being perceived. Everything feels centered on me, all the time, and I am exhausted by it. I do not know what to do. Sometimes I think maybe I should focus on helping others, or doing charity work, just to get out of my own head.

I want to stop worrying about my own problems because, in the grand scheme of things, I do not matter. That sounds sad, because I know I do matter. I want to help others. I want to feel deserving of help myself, but I do not even know what kind of help I would need. I am an adult. It is my responsibility to brush my teeth, get up every day, and deal with my own shit.

I keep thinking about a quote from a book I read: my heart was broken a long time ago, and it is not anyone else’s job to fix it. That feels true, and it frustrates me. I am constantly thinking these thoughts, turning them over in my head. I keep believing that if I verbalize them enough, organize them, or turn them into art or music, the feeling will disappear. It does not. It stays, because it is mine to deal with.

Although candid photography is considered lame and overdone by some, there is something incredibly beautiful about being able to show my friends themselves in their natural state. Completely unposed, caught off guard, yet always breathtakingly beautiful.

I struggle very much with my own self image. I find myself unable to look at photos of myself unless I am wearing makeup , posed and sucking in my gut. Yet, I exist in front of others as I am, unposed and unprotected. The dichotomy between our natural selves and our artificial presentation is fascinating, and also terrifying.

I can only hope my friends see the beauty in me the same way I do them 🦉💭

Anyway …here are some fire photos I have taken of my friends :3 I love them all so much!!!

In a patriarchal world, sex is one of the few places where I feel I have power. I am in possession of something that men are taught to want above all else, something mythologized, feared, and fought over. Something that has made grown men cry. Something men have killed for, raped for and written entire manifestos over when they are denied it.

So there is this moment when you are with a man. When you are kissing. When you feel him get hard. Your body becomes the object of desire, and his want is visible, undeniable. He pulses towards you, towards entry, towards permission.

For this brief moment, there is power.