#personal cartography

Fifty-two

Next birthday and I'm just in this moment realizing how far "off-script" I am. I'm laughing at myself. And realizing that I should do a lot more handwork, if a little mindless herbalist crafting clears my mind like this. But also that this is something I've had to learn over and over.

Not that I'm dumb, but I have ADHD, a shit memory, and, I suspect, alexithymia.

There is no script.

I didn't "have to get married before I was 30." I didn't have to have kids, thank fuck I didn't actually. I learned I was poly when I tried that kind of relationship at 33. Discovered I was queer, or rather admitted it after years of exploring, by 40.

I left the job that nearly crushed me but which I loved, also at 40, to start fixing my broken body and work on healing other wounds.

None of us are getting any younger. And we all have time to look at our choices, to seek love, to seek healing. To love ourselves just because we can. Or as a giant fuck you to all the people and forces and governments and corporations who want us to hate ourselves, to let them decide, that we should buy their solutions, literally and figuratively.

Just, y'all. Y'ALL. I didn't believe it when I was a teen and a little older, and some people tried to tell me "you write your own script." I thought I was helpless, powerless.

But I did have power. And I did have help.

I do have power. I do have help.

The pen 🖊️ is in my hand.

The future IS unwritten.

Weave, write, sing, dance, your own patterns, your own shape. Build YOUR own LIFE.

Make your own love (familiar, platonic, romantic...) Make your own meaning. Just, try not to lie to yourself very often, Okay?

That's ... Actually pretty key 🗝️🔐👀

Here's the herbal Wildcraft I did today that cleared my mind. Almost like magic, eh?

The Atlas of Mental Maps is an exhibiton of unique mental maps—maps depicting their authors’ personal perceptions of an area–created by Holocaust survivors and non-Jews, both portraying in a graphic manner their former homes: cities, towns and villages, which are located within the present-day borders of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova and Slovakia. Although these places were for centuries part of a multiethnic and linguistically and religiously diverse Eastern European expanse with a considerable Yiddish-speaking Jewish presence, the vast majority of them, if not all, were destroyed or radically changed during the Second World War. The uniqueness and specificity of that expanse has been lost and “unremembered,” and, thus today that area can be considered a forgotten continent or a blank spot in the collective consciousness of Europeans.

https://teatrnn.pl/wystawy/atlas/

For the English summary please visit the following link: https://teatrnn.pl/wystawy/piotr-nazaruk-the-atlas-of-mental-maps/

The virtual exhibition features a gallery of the maps from yizker-bikher (memorial books) and the holdings of the “Grodzka Gate–NN Theater” Center, as well as additional material highlighting selected maps (e.g., of the Polish town of Jedwabne and the Ukrainian village of Felshtin, both struck by violent pogroms in 1941 and 1919 respectively). On the website you will find documentation of our exhibit at the NN Gallery from May 2019, the exhibit's catalogue, and a gallery of compass roses drawn in mental maps by their authors. Furthermore, the virtual exhibition features a special section about professional Yiddish language cartography and includes a collection of Yiddish maps and a short glossary of Yiddish geography terms.