Notes from a sentimental girl

Or the ramblings of a crazy person, your call

I’m back! Finally after months and months in a drug and pain induced haze, my mind is free enough to write again. I’ve been writing a lot, mainly nonsense but there is just something so incredibly comforting about writing for me. I feel a strong urge to write everything down, every memory, every thought. I want to capture every thing, hold my journal in my hand and say, this is all of me, please hold it tenderly. I dream of making my life into art, making meaning from this life with art. Use my experiences to make someone else feel less alone. Where this impulse comes from I don’t know, perhaps I wish to take my mind in my hands and wash it in a stream. Let the run off form into nourishment for the wildlife. Put my mind back in my head, cleaned and purified. Perhaps I’m just writing as a confession. I am overly critical of myself, but who isn’t? I have so few memories I want to hold onto those I do have.

But why me? Why are my thoughts and memories worth writing down? I don’t think there is an answer. There’s nothing that makes me any better or any more special than any other person. I think of one of Angelina Jolie's speeches¹ (which I urge you to watch) in which she says “I don't know why this is my life, and that's hers”.  I too am sure there are women just like me in Palestine for example, with more talent, with more important things to say, yet they do not have the opportunity I have. While for instance here's nothing wrong with telling children they are great and will do great things, but now that I’m 20 I find much more solace in knowing that I am not the greatest and will not do the greatest things. Instead I will do my best, my greatest, but to judge myself, compare myself to every other person in this world, is futile. There will always be someone who is better than me, and someone who could have been better than me but never got the chance. So I settle for my personal best. I have the opportunity a great many don’t, and I’ll do my best with it.

I also struggled to write because I’m scared of people telling me I’m wrong, or that I’m making them look bad, or something to that affect. I know that my writing is just a reflection of my world, but I’m scared others won’t see that. They’ll think I’m delusional or lying to make them look bad and make me look like the victim. I’m terrified to make definitive statements about myself. What if my image of myself doesn’t match your image of me? Of course they won’t match, that's what being a human is, seeing things through your own eyes. Art is the translation of that, into something others can see. Love is another translation, a sharing between one another, seeing things through another's eyes. Still, if I say, I’m quiet, and you disagree, will I disintegrate right there? Dust to dust. Poetry has been the hardest these days. Perhaps because of its concise nature, I see my mistakes tenfold, they scream louder in my short lines than in long paragraphs. 

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Some of my sentimental things <3

I have a camera on my shelf, collecting dust. In the past two years I’ve only touched it when I’ve needed to get a book from behind it. There’s a roll of film in it with pictures of an ex, of the places we went together, the things we did. I have complicated feelings about the trip the photos are from, and complicated feelings about the whole relationship. I just can’t seem to pick up the camera and finish the roll of film. I also can’t just throw the film away. I’m stuck in sentimental limbo. I threw the flowers he gave me in the compost. I felt like I needed to do something symbolic to show that I was done with him, that I was closing that chapter of my life. Yet I still feel guilty about that, even though I hope to never see him again, and I assume he did the same with my belongings. 

I’ve always been a sentimental girl, collected boxes of mementos, for every year, every person, every experience. I collect books and records and clothes, fill every inch of my room with sentimental things. On the shelves behind my desk I have an Edward Scissorhands snow globe from my godfather, and a framed cross stitch from my godmother. On my desk I have framed polaroids of my dog and a statue my dad made of my old dog. I have two other frames on my desk, one with a photo of Patti Smith and another with a photo of Frida Kahlo. The Patti Smith photo comes from the dust cover of her latest book, which my parents bought for me at Christmas. The Frida Kahlo photo comes from a book of postcards of her and her art my mother gave to me. 

On the top shelf of my bookshelves, I have an old bottle of the perfume I wore in high school. I can’t seem to use it up, or get rid of it, or even wash it out. I haven’t smelt it in years either. But one day I imagine I’ll want to. Any time I see or smell Shalimar by Guerlain I think of my mother. Think of seeing Frida Kahlo’s old bottle in an exhibit at her house. I think of the conversation I had with my mother in the garden of Frida’s house, a rare moment of extreme vulnerability from my mum. 

I have a book on my shelf all about Amy Winehouse and her things. There are beautiful spreads of all of her belongings, arranged haphazardly. They give a full image of a full life tragically cut short. There seems to be a common thread amongst artists of collecting. I suppose you need to collect at least memories, ideas, thoughts, to fuel your work. There’s something almost spiritual about things though, the story they carry, the meaning you give them. I think of how Patti Smith’s bookshelves mirror my own, and it makes me smile. I always love looking at peoples bookshelves. I always learn so much about a person from both the books they own and the way they display them.

I’m looking at the moon. Its the same moon Sylvia Plath and Frida Kahlo and Amy Winehouse looked at. The same moon Patti Smith looks at. Every person is connected, every person made of the same stardust. My mother sang ‘Moon River’ by Audrey Hepburn to me as a baby, as a lullaby. The song plays unexpectedly from a playlist on shuffle. I’m brought back to how it felt to be a child, completely at peace and safe in my mothers arms. Whenever friends are sad, or drunk, or both, I rub their backs the way my mother did to me as a child. It works every time, there’s nothing more comforting than a mothers arms, even if your real mother brought only anxiety, theres a greater mother, or perhaps just the mother she should have been, could have been. 

While I’m sentimental, I also have horrible memory, so perhaps the only reason I collect sentimental things is to keep the memory with me. Today I lost the sponges, when putting away the groceries. I could remember holding them, having a conversation with my dad about them, but I have no memory of before or after. Even when I did find them I couldn’t remember putting them there, in the back of the cupboard. But I think, and hope, my sentimentality is deeper than an antidote for a bad memory.

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"the opposite of grief is not laughter or happiness or joy. It is love. It is love. It is love." Akif Kichloo, Poems That Lose

Whenever I feel sad, or emotional, which is often because I’m incredibly sensitive, I always always remind myself that to feel, is good, is right. Give yourself to your emotions (within reason and in the right environment obviously), stop fighting them, feel and feel wholly. When you feel sad and suffer it is proof of life, proof you are a human. You can only feel these things if you also feel joy and love. If you read something in the news that makes you sad, that's a good and beautiful thing. You have love and empathy for others, for animals, for nature. When something in your personal life makes you sad, perhaps an ill loved one, a loss, please take it as proof that you loved that person, that thing, that time in your life. We get one shot at life, so why not feel everything you possibly can, experience everything the world has to offer. 

“Grief is love's souvenir. It's our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price." Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

Our perception of grief and what it should look like is partly created by the Kübler-Ross model², a comforting linear structure to hold onto when all hope seems lost. I know I’m in the depression stage so I know soon I’ll be in acceptance ect. However no one model can explain grief for every person, life just doesn’t work that way.

One side of my bed is cold, I turn my back to it, you are no longer there, so why do I still feel you in my bed. My grief is the cold pillow your head once laid on. There is a hologram of you made up from my memories, taking up that blank space, on my bed and in my head. I know you were once there because I feel your absence now. The you in my memories isn’t the real you, and it never can be. My memories change throughout the years, conform to create a reality my mind can wrap itself around, something not as abstract as reality. 

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” Joan Didion, Blue Nights

Jeremy Lipking Interlude, 2013

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So much of our world is created, man made. Language creates our reality, I think in english so my thoughts can only go as far as english language does, though I feel the edges of my thoughts. I try to reach out but once there I can’t grasp anything, I can’t bring it back so I can write it down. In romance languages when you say you miss someone, you say ‘you are missing from me’. Once I learned this simple phrase so much more of my life made sense. The tone of your voice, your particular choice of words, their order, it all creates our world. It dictates everything. Italian is my favourite language in the world, because it was born of poetry³. Theres something so beautiful about how we have created words, so many of them, to try our best to create something more permanent, more tangible, from our feelings. There are so many gaps in the english language for how I feel, as I imagine there is in all languages, so we end up using art to get as close as we can, and isn’t that magical?

1. You can watch her incredible speech here: https://youtu.be/2ATgxOp31oI?si=XKjsmf1LZTJlNw85

2. Also known as the Five stages of grief

3. “Dante is considered the “Father of the Italian Language.” Born and raised in Florence, Dante’s works were not written in Latin, which was used by well-educated citizens at the time, but rather in the Italian dialect of Florence or “vernacular.” Dante set a precedent by using the local dialect, which ultimately became the standard for Italy’s national language, uniting the country’s diverse regions and dialects.” (You can read more here)