#23 Moms, self-optimisation and silence
Authors get vulnerable
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I've been away for a few weeks, which means I had many great options to send your way this Sunday. I have been blown away by two very vulnerable takes on mother-daughter relationships from
and and chose some other companion pieces where authors were also feeling their feelings and showing vulnerability. Enjoy!A Fate Worse Than Death
To be a girl with mommy issues
My mom was a stellar student, she used to do her homework before she allowed herself to go out and play. All of our relatives on her side of the family loved her. She was helpful and she was considerate without having to be told to be. She was a cheerleader, and she was popular. She only went to college for one year, but that didn’t stop her from going around the country and making her mark. My mother has lived in so many different states, and every time we visit one of them she’s remembered and loved.
I’ve always wanted to be like that. Someone who has made an impression on so many people, someone who’s remembered like that.
idle gaze 057: self-curation is everywhere
Wherever there's an attention economy, there's personal branding.
The cult of personal branding continues to reign supreme, and its latest visible manifestation can be seen everywhere on the streets of Berlin.
Standing in the queue of a local coffeeshop, among the largely monochrome attire, someone is wearing a cheerful pink top, with the following handwritten message scrawled in a sharpie: “looking for an apartment or a room in Berlin”. The public announcement is rounded off with a wonky, but affectionate smiley.
The slot machine isn’t working . . . .
Last week I was watching the ideologies of productivity and self-actualization and value run through my vacant mind. I was exhausted and coughing and felt like they had a lot more energy than I did. I couldn't fight back. I couldn’t comply, either, just to shut them up. I thought about the people who have to fight all the time just to be able to be: to be healthy, whatever that means to them; to be able to find some kernel of self that isn’t shot through with someone else’s marketing copy; to be able to drop down into the body’s muscles and tendons and the places where the feelings lurk, even if the feelings are sodden and despairing and wondering and longing after something else.
Finding your hidden treasure
an invitation to silence
Silence purifies, silence empties.
By taking refuge in the silence and allowing our minds and hearts to become quiet, the stagnant pools will be freed and the stream of living water will flow again from the depths of our being.
— Benignus O'Rourke, Finding your Hidden Treasure: The Way of Silent Prayer.
What you're feeling is Weltschmerz
Have you felt it recently? That sensation of despair mixed with cynicism and powerlessness coursing through you?
That’s Weltschmerz.
Literally translated as “world-pain,” Weltschmerz follows in the German language’s long tradition of forming apt and amusing compound words.
On My Mother’s 64th Birthday Had She Not Died by Suicide
A short reflection on the profundity of a media hiatus and self-forgiveness
In the years before my mother died, after her second divorce, before she bought the gun; she drank.
The years before my mother’s suicide were the last of her forties and the last of my twenties. We had always been separated by only twenty-one years. In the last years of my mother’s forties she drank more and more. In the last years of my twenties I drank less and less.
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wow! thank you so much for sharing!
Luiza, thank you so much for sharing my essay. <3