Original Piece - Blog Posts

mothers & daughters

i wish my mother liked me more

i know she loves me

she has to

i just wish she likes me sometimes

i wish i was all the things she wanted in a daughter

instead of all the things she didn't

i wish she liked me more

than she likes her religion

i wish i liked my mother more

i try, i really do

i just can't help but roll my eyes, sometimes

or sigh when she asks a question

i wish i could see past her flaws

or even love her in spite of them

i wish i could break the cycle

and yet around and around it goes

Intuitive abstract mini watercolor and pen

I am at 69 posts and I am overjoyed at the humorous sexual implication. And, as with any joy, I wish to share it with the world; to scream it from the rooftops for all to hear. Thrilled, I rush to my keyboard to quickly type out a short joke. However, I am met with a dilemma: if I make a post about it, the source of my joy will be no more, as it will be my 70th post. But, if I don't make a post, no one will ever know that it even existed in the first place.

So I must choose: should I commemorate this beautiful moment and, by doing so, end it? Or should I preserve this moment forever, but never celebrate it? Which kind of death is more real? To die in public or live in secret?

I save the post as a draft and promise myself that I'll come back and choose. I come back but I don't choose. The post just grows longer and longer as I promise myself, again and again, that I'll make a choice next time. If I can just perfect it, if I can just string together a flawless sequence of words for my thoughts, then the correct choice will be obvious - then I won't need to live in this moment forever.

My therapist tells me this is a recurring thing for me: to be caught between wanting to live in yesterday and wanting to control tomorrow. I think I'm scared of change. I think I feel small. I think I'm scared of being alone. I think I feel small. I think I try to control the things I'm scared of. I think I feel small. I think I try to bottle and taxidermize joy instead of feeling it. I think I feel small. I think showing people my joy is a proxy for feeling it. I think I feel small. I think death scares me but I don’t know which kind scares me more.

On one hand, I wish I could live in the moment and celebrate today instead of trying to preserve it. I wish that I spent more time making decisions and less time deciding. Despite being obsessed with time, I rarely cherish or enjoy it. On the other hand, I wish I didn’t need to publicly celebrate my time. I wish I could just enjoy something without advertising my joy. I don’t feel comfortable feeling anything unless you see it.

Caught between two bad coping mechanisms for deeper fears ways to cheat death, I think the only good choice is to delete this post, to accept that a beautiful thing happened (past tense) and to love it for an unimportant moment by my unimportant self. I think the only good choice is to love and live myself, even if I can’t do either forever. But, if you are seeing this post, you already know what choice I made. And, if you aren’t seeing this post, then you never knew that I made a choice to begin with. To you, dear reader, this post exists in quantum superposition - live and dead, made and unmade - until you read it. Like Schrodinger's cat, I exist in the blur between yesterday and tomorrow; I only live or die when you look.

Linear, in progress and with notes (and teacher’s help).