too much driving / bell hooks / anxious? meds? / bad dreams
icon: "overwhelmed (the character Keenan from "Playing By Heart," with hands over their face covering their eyes and head tilted back)"
Today was intense as shit. I drove way too much. To the pharmacy, to get gas, then to the middle of Atlanta (I stopped halfway to have coffee and let my car rest), then to east Atlanta to eat with Kylei, then I missed my exit and my maps app crashed and I drove 20 minutes longer than I had to to get home, then I drove back to Topaz'. Ughhhhh.
But! I got to see bell hooks and Gloria Steinem talk. I didn't know much about Gloria before that, but now I think they're a badass too. Did a little too much talking, in a way that I associate with people who are used to getting all the attention so don't question how much of the spotlight they should share, but overall the balance was okay and I liked most of what they said. bell hooks blew my mind. The justice in healing is something I too often forget. I wish I could contribute more. Here are the quotes I tweeted:
"'tired' is a kind of privilege... When you work for freedom you cannot rest." if you're weary, pass the torch don't just check out -hooks
Men from prison expressed that they felt women were the only ones talking about sexual violence -Gloria Steinem
"Where is the space for us to honor our dialogue with one another?" We need to demand the space to process -bell hooks
"You must educate for critical awareness before you can have communication" -bell hooks
imagine in the world of social media being unable to read "if we want to talk about black male lives we have to talk about education" -hooks
"We're in a moment of participatory fascism... people don't want to take violence seriously" but until we do we can't end patriarchy- hooks
"domestic violence is the biggest indicator of all other violence... Police families have 4 times the rate of others" -Gloria Steinem
"Women are made to feel that their bodies are ornaments, not instruments" -Gloria Steinem
bell hooks on laughter: a sign of self-possession, of subjectivity, thus a threat to oppression.
I felt keyed up before going to see bell hooks and I thought it was excitement, but it lasted late into the evening, and it started to hugely wear on me. I hate that feeling of 'just missed getting into a wreck' going on and on and on. I think my body is reacting badly to the stop-start of missing my meds (I'm back on them as of last week but missed them for a number of days). I associate this feeling with depression and am really really wanting it to move on. I would like to be able to enjoy things.
*deep sigh* I laid on the floor for a while and that helped. I don't know why but that is calming for me like nothing else. Maybe it's a grounding thing.
Topaz said goodbye this morning while I was mostly asleep and for some reason my brain thought it was a forever goodbye, like they were dying or leaving the planet. It lasted about 2 seconds before the panic woke me up enough to realize that it wasn't like that. My brain can be incredibly pessimistic sometimes.