sometimes i think about a man

SOmetimes i think about a man, or two, or three, that i’d never want to be.

it seems that all they need from me is something to fill

something sad and empty

and when they realize there’s not an angel coming to save them,

i fall from the heavens

and cease to have flesh they never allowed in the first place.

i know i’m told that they love me and that i don’t seem to know what love is.

i’d like to pin one down someday

or maybe put one on a pedestal in a cage

and knock it down.

i would set them free though, you see

if they could answer one thing.

Do you see me?

i bet on you

There are certain times where my life flashes before my eyes for no apparent reason and I can’t help but feel an immense amount of gratitude and emotion for the life I have fallen into. Or made for myself, or have been destined to live, etc. to the point of tears. I don’t know what it is and I feel like the way I view it changes most days. And lately I’ve been finding that it really is doable to make everything you want a reality and I feel so close to things as a kid I really didn’t think were real. When I get this feeling, it’s strange how it transports me to an almost traumatic place of being a child - I somehow end up in my home at eight years old feeling that those moments in Colorado would never come to an end. It’s the strangest kind of nostalgia and it neither hurts nor feels good.

For those who don’t know me, which I suppose only a few may know this, I’m not close with my dad. It’s an estranged relationship and has been for my whole life, even though he was around for most of my time in Colorado before I left for California at 19. He was there physically but neither of us know on another at all. What prompted me to write this, after having not written one of these sporadic entries in a while now - was receiving a text from him tonight.

“Hey gorgeous. I got my passport so after a few months might travel internationally. So late summer or especially fall got some places to visit?

Problem is I have never traveled internationally so have no guide or someone who knows where to go.”

I tell him I think he’d like Germany and he agrees. We text a few more times and tells me he’s going to travel the world. And as much as this doesn’t feel true to me I really do hope that it can be. I’d love to go back to being a child and believing that were true.

And so occasionally when your father is 50 years old and you realize that your role in people’s lives changes so drastically as time moves on, and you grow and others shrink. It makes me want to treat everything with a childlike innocence and feel that the world and people can be softer as time moves on. Though many would disagree this is the world I want to live in in this moment to make it a little easier on myself.

A Rush to the head and blood red gloves

Murky water’s not love

Is lightness and warm and cool

To the touch 

You on this leather couch for eternity until 

Eternity is no more and I must go

To find that this world is sharp in your arms 

And out of them I’ve learned 

To note that leaving is necessary when 

My gut is punching me 

Inside on your bed this winter 

I wonder if it will be the last winter 

For us and my spring begins and ends with 

You’ve found me 5000 miles and 6 hours behind 

You in the past, we are and will stay. 

well known strangers

waking up in a sleepy stupor

with my head on your warm chest

i know you but don’t know you all that well, and yet

i know this comfort comes to an end

too soon

i will run my fingers through your dark curls

and fingers on your warm skin

which coast it will be this time only time will tell.

this feeling i know but not so well

and i hope someday it gets to stay

if not with you, then someday,

i will run my fingers through another well known strangers curls

or strands

and he will not be a stranger for so long and we can lay

in sleepy stupor comfort

someday.

misguided fool

It’s 10:08 PM here in New York City where I live, 8:08 in the place I call home in Colorado, and 7:08 PM in California where I find myself mentally living these days. The life I’ve made for myself across this space in different time zones and mental states makes me feel nostalgic and distant and confused a lot of the time and I think I’m always trying to catch up with myself and bring myself forward to my physical mind and body.

It’s funny how things are so synchronistic sometimes. My friend gave me some advice today. When things are shit, to take the approach of sitting back and treating life like a movie, and feeling affected but not to a point where it’s emotionally connected. She brought me to Nico’s song “These Days”, and while I was reading the lyrics it brought me a sense of comfort. A little later in the night my roommate put on Cat Power’s cover of the song as I was reading through the lyrics again. It’s extremely comforting and familiar like a hug from someone you love, a sort of validation. Of what? I’m not so sure. But I feel like I’m floundering so much lately and that’s sort of what I needed in the moment. I broke down in tears when that song came on. Sort of like a familiar hug when you’re holding too tightly to your sadness and it just comes out of you.

The days here in New York have felt longer and more brutal than I anticipated. I feel a heaviness always and a cold reality check most days as soon as I wake up. If I sleep anymore that is. I can’t seem to find any sort of release here like I could in LA, and there’s always the question on my mind if I’m romanticizing LA now that I’m out of it.

I wake up around 10:30 most days in a foggy stupor and try my best to get my day going and find purpose in actually doing things. It’s cold and grey and I don’t feel any friendly eyes around me and in general I feel pretty alone, both physically and emotionally. It’s got me thinking about what actually matters to me and what would actually feel good to have in my life, the people, the atmosphere, environment, hobbies. How do I feel about myself even? Which clearly is the main issue. I feel like everything I do can be so stupid and even the things I’m writing about are so silly. It’s hard to have such self deprecating thoughts so constantly. I think a lot about what it might be like to really feel content with oneself with no qualifications needed to be in that state. No job, no piece of art, no connection, no significant other. I have been trying to figure out also what makes this life worth it in the end, and I’ve started to think it has a lot to do with the experiences, and the way you’re able to make other’s time on this planet a bit easier while you’re moving through the world. I think that might be the only answer a lot of the times. We’re all here together and life itself is a really strange and sad place. It’s not soft, and I think that we’re all here for whatever strange reason, but though we all have our different ideas of purpose of this short little lengthy breath of life we have, I think that there might not be a purpose other than to really feel and experience what we’re moving through. And by doing that, maybe just maybe, if we are working towards being our most genuine selves, we can make those we touch shoulders with have a little bit of an easier time.

research on beauty (working)

A collection of words I find over time about beauty. I think, to me, and I’ve tried to express what I think of beauty many times and it always comes out too passionate and a bit scattered. But to me - I think that beauty is nothing more than the honesty a person has when they move through the world. In the way they talk, how they treat people, what they watch listen to - how they love. It’s not about the content either, it’s truly how honest they are with themselves and the world around them.

The most beautiful things in this life require so much vulnerability to the point of being almost bare to the world. Which is hard when it’s not the safest place to do so. I think those people who can get to that point understand that all of the protection they need is really in the strength of knowing themselves. I cry when I interact with beautiful things and people because I think that it reminds me how special everything in this life is. I feel less sad about what could be going wrong in my life and more about how blessed I am to be able to be here and have these feelings. Whatever kind of feeling, rejection, confusion, happiness, being drunk, crying, flying in an airplane. All of these things are just the most incredible things simply because there’s the opportunity for all of them. I don’t know. It’s 11PM on a very dreary day in New York City and I’ve been low for weeks now. But I feel lucky to even be feeling this way right now. It’s pretty beautiful.

“Beauty is a willing loss of mental control, surrendered to organic process that is momentarily under the direction of an exterior object. The object is not thought and felt about, exactly. It seems to use my capacities to think and feel itself.”
― Peter Schjeldahl

“Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.”

-James Thurber

“As if you were on fire from within.
The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”
― Pablo Neruda

“I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves-there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

-Joan Didion

“For as long as I can remember, this has been one of my favorite feelings. To be alone in public, wandering at night, or lying close to the earth, anonymous, invisible, floating. To make your claim on public space even as you feel yourself disappearing into its largess, into its sublimity. To practice death by feeling completely empty, but somehow alive.”

-Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts

“Sometimes, I don’t mean to be so public but it’s hard for me to separate my life and my work. They’re both one and the same, and both are important to who I am and how I express myself.”

-Maryam Nassir Zadeh

“When you know you are infinite, you know all you need to know, whenever you need to know it.

The timing is ordained by the cosmic clockworks and how fast you learn. That is to say; how quickly you catch self-destructive patterns which you can consciously release, while stating their clear intent of benevolence.

Trust and know that your intent is your compass of life. The quantum winds will take you there. All that is required of you is to hold your compass and keep it pointed at the most benevolent outcome for the entire universe.

Think on an infinite scale, there is nothing else but what is powering your heart.”
-Sejeluho

“This morning I sit, a body of heat and weighted blood, reminding myself to remember myself. I am forever making history. When I try to do things I used to do, they no longer feel right. When I try to slip back into the places I used to squeeze myself, it’s far too uncomfortable. This is what happens when life grows, and life can only grow. We lose the ability to pretend. Once you know it, you can’t unknow it. Nor can you carry on as though nothing has changed. How inconvenient.”

-Yrsa Daley-Ward

i’m in a vessel, i am a vessel

“I wonder if I’ll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.” -Eve Babitz

Colorado is “home” as I knew it, a small city northeast. I remember home feeling extremely imprisoning from a very young age and I think I’ve always had it in me to leave. It was never a question. I think back often on who I was as a child and how I viewed the world and strangely enough I think it’s very similar to now. There’s always been a bittersweet taste to life. I do think that I had a pretty broad perspective and there’s no real reason why. I was sheltered for the most part and was not heavily influenced by anything, unlike many upbringings. I think there was almost more of an indifference in being raised as a consequence to fear and an unstable home.

I do love my family, I do love my story so far. I used to not understand how it was fair. How certain things that people feel was fair, and why certain people could drink themselves to a place of not feeling, why certain people had to be around that. And why it was okay that all I knew was heartbreak at home. And for that matter, why so much of the world has so much heartbreak in their home. The older you get the more you’re told that in comparison your life is really good. I believe sometimes people don’t get to be told that they can feel whatever they want about things, but then take responsibility for it after they do feel those things. I think when you let yourself see yourself in these feelings, these moments, they can mean everything and they can actually help heal.

I have extremely vivid feelings and sensory memories from my life, from when I was a kid to my first few years in LA, I think it’s a gift. I think everyone has the capacity to do this but, again, I’m not sure how much liberty people take with that.

Home can be defined as a place where one resides. A word closely related to home is origin, and the definition of origin is the point or place where something begins, arises, or is derived. There’s a song I listened to the other night while I was driving on the freeway called Cancion Mixteca, it was a cover by Harry Dean Stanton. The lyrics translated to English are:

“How far I am from the ground where I was born!

Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts

Seeing me so lonely and sad like a leaf in the wind.

I would like to cry, I would like to die of feeling.

O land of the Sun!

Sigh to see you.

“It’s a blues song. Homesick. I say when you’re truly at home, there’s no more suffering. No more leaf on the wind, no more crying.”

In daily life I think a lot about the people around me. I think a lot about where they’re going, where they came from, what they just stepped out of personally to come into publicly. This person sitting across from me on the J train on the way into Manhattan looking out the window. Is their home in Brooklyn? Did they wake up happy? Do they like their job? I was in the car with my friend the other evening in New York, on one of the bridges looking at all of the life in the buildings. All of the square yellow windows in concrete boxes stacked on top of each other all filled with thousands and thousands of stories, and the energy that fills these lifeless structures and makes them ground for the most interesting things to happen ever in those exact moments never to happen again.

I wonder if people had ever walked by my home when I was a kid and wondered what went on inside and in the lives of the four people residing in it.

Do we have an endless number of homes throughout or lives? Do some people have two and some end up never finding it? Is homesickness the same thing as longing in general?

The day I left Colorado to move to California I remember extremely vividly. I was at my Nana’s, my sweet Nana and Pampa’s house with my mom where I really felt my mom’s sadness about me leaving. She asked me while tearing up, “Are you sure you want to go?”

No matter how much I had known for my whole life that I wanted to leave home, it was one of the most difficult things for me to do and I felt my heart stay behind for a long time.

I moved to California, first to San Diego to stay with my aunt. Because I had no money. Before that - I went to one year of college in my hometown and became extremely depressed, I was in an extremely dark place for a year and it go to a point where it was really quite bleak. But that’s for another time.

I cut my bangs, I went to Paris for a month with my graduation money, then decided I was moving to California. Again, cut to having no money and no clue how to make it work. Nineteen years old was my beginning.

I stayed with my aunt for about five months and commuted to LA whenever I could, to shoot, to meet people, to just be in LA. I was obsessed with it and immediately knew this place was my home. It was for me, made for me. It was somewhat of an awakening, very personal to where I think I began to understand that life was more than what you’re birthed into. And that I really had the right to make it so.

The angst to get to Los Angeles was the most real and most painful, inspiring, and motivating feeling I have ever felt. I was so close and so far away at the same time sort of an outsider looking in. I shared a bed with my eight year old cousin for five months, worked at American Eagle part time, babysat a newborn who cried for the entire six hour shifts every single time I’d watch it all in order to get to LA as soon as possible. I refused to quit because trying to find a new job meant less time making money. Five months later I moved in with my friend Morgan and started paying her some rent and sharing her bed with her for a few months, until I then moved in with my first real love, while in transition to move into my first place where I rented the dining room in a quaint little one bedroom off of Lucile in Silver Lake. Then signed my first lease on an apartment in Thai Town.

I still selfishly think LA is made for me. It’s still my home. And now I’ve got a new home on the east coast.

I’d like to know what others think of home and what home is to them, where they consider home and what makes it so. It’s our origin, where we leave everyday or where we left years ago.

Naked and Afraid: Los Angeles Girl in New York City

Friday night. I’m sitting here writing this, naked but in my five dollar seamless undies from Target, drinking Trader Joes carrot juice on my fifth night as a New York resident. A fifth of the clothes I own in two large suitcases overflowing behind me. In a studio somewhere in West Village a good friend was nice enough to sublet to me; the perfect location for the New York fancy lady cliche of my dreams. And on my seventh breakdown of the week and the same piece of advice holding me together, I am starting to like it here. And yet, still miss LA. Which when I planned this move, of course I thought that I wouldn’t be thinking about LA at all.

I’ve had endless discussions with people about the LA vs NY topic and it seems there’s definitely more similarities than not with what most people say about both, but in order to gather my thoughts for no particular reason other than to stop the constant comparison in my head, I think I’ll go ahead and discuss.

Los Angeles. I’ve been told by many people that I seem to embody the idea of the LA lifestyle, which I can’t tell is offensive to me or not. But maybe what it is is that I love being naked? Could be. Maybe it’s the dreamy, impalpable nature of Los Angeles. LA has a way of making me feel like my life sort of slowly passes me by but I don’t seem to care that it is. That nothing is real anyway so each day blends into the next. I think the concept of LA is difficult to grasp and for someone who seems to be told often that I’m difficult to get ahold of, I may have more in common with Los Angeles than I think.

I love LA. Don’t get me wrong, no matter how much I seem to want to get away, she has been my closest friend through all of it. My demise in the same way, but I’ve learned everything I know from her. She is sweet and warm but can be so lonely. And when she is mean it lingers. I think I’ve become obsessed with her to the point where I can’t see myself not returning, but for now I want tangible.

I’ve been thinking about moving to NYC for quite some time. My first trip to New York was a few years ago after a pretty bad breakup, my first love you could say. A very toxic, passionate relationship. It was November and only a few weeks in advance did I decide to book a trip. I’d always wanted to so why not when I was at my worst? New York changed me. Coming here, seeing the city from the plane was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and is one of the moments that I can say truly took my breath away. This energy is unlike anything else, and it’s the energy of people doing.

Well that was four years ago. I stayed in LA for a few more years, and was able to come back due to another long distance relationship during covid, which I’m so grateful for because I think it made me realize that this change was on the horizon. I hate to place blame on things because ultimately I do believe that we are in charge of our destiny and with that, everything we do in our daily lives. However I do not feel that LA after a while was a place where I could continue growing, at least for right now. A dear friend of mine who I do tend to ask advice from often, (I ask for a lot of advice from a lotta people) gave me a great anecdote. One way of looking at life is that we have to ways of going about things to end up exactly where we’re meant to be: destruction and maintenance. If something is no longer serving you in your life, you’ve outgrown it, the universe will ultimately lead to the situation ending in destruction. Only in order to turn you onto the next path to where you’re supposed to be. The second, is that you feel that something is no longer working for you and you decide to take action, a bit more proactive, but I think comes with more resistance because you are choosing to break away from the comfort.

I will say that leading up to my move I felt things that I had only felt leaving my home in Colorado, but almost a bit worse. I created a space for myself in LA to decide who I want to be on my own, who Brittany really is and what makes her feel alive. Those things are more real to me than anything else and I feel very lucky, blessed, grateful - to have had the courage to create myself there coming from a very afraid and naive place at 19. I see myself driving up to LA three to four times a week from San Diego just to be there, then me finally living there, sharing a bed with a friend for a few months. Upgrading to a dining room bedroom, then finally my own room. Driving down PCH towards Malibu, all of the flowers. A nighttime that certainly doesn’t feel real whenever I think about it. There’s this quiet beauty about Los Angeles that creates a deep pit in my stomach whenever I think about it. It is both beautiful and so dark at the same time, and two things I would never want without the other.

I now see myself sitting on this couch, on my fifth night in the city waiting to see what space I create for myself here. I think she’s quite beautiful just the same.

"In Los Angeles, one laughs to survive, enjoys oneself not to enhance life but in order to live at all. That society is so vaporous and tenuous that the only alternative to a spiral of loneliness and fear is a self-contained, steady, pleasurably focused attitude. The L.A. cogito: I laugh, therefore I am. The laughter is ramified and refined. Only with time and effort does a visitor learn its language. It is the absolute form of civility in a civilization that enables nobody to mature beyond adolescence. It can be erotic and quite beautiful, when one hears its undertone of sadness. It can be disturbing, when one catches its overtone of hostility. It is the sound of grown-up children determined not to be afraid.” By Peter Schjeldahl from his essay in Ed Ruscha 1971-1975

Cover image by Ed Ruscha

firsts

I decided I wanted to write a blog, I started one weeks ago and deleted it because I thought it was silly. I have no idea who will stumble upon this whenever they click my website but it’s literally just me rambling right now. Maybe my thoughts might help in some way? I’m not sure. But I think now more than ever it’s time to take my ideas and thoughts into heavy consideration about how important they really are. Just for myself. I think this is a good start.

I feel like this year in particular, but a lot of my time in Los Angeles has been filled with a lot of doubt. Doubt in myself, my capability to sustain my life out here, my talents, my voice, everything. I think it’s been a slow process but I think I am in such a dark hole lately because I’ve completely silenced myself and my ideas. I do not have the energy to create something, I barely have the energy to shoot anymore because I am so low on self esteem.

The last thing I want to do, especially today, is dwell on what has gone wrong. I have been in a mental state that feels as close to rock bottom as I’ve ever been with only one instance I can think of that might have been worse. I think that every little thing in my life has completely gone bonkers and I feel entirely out of control of my whole life. I can’t even get myself to pay attention to reading a book? This morning in particular, and yesterday, and the day before, etc. were insanely rough for me mentally and emotionally. I am not the kind of person to give up, ever - ever. But I felt pretty close to it.

Something I found to bring me solace was nature, of course. I went hiking at Tuna Canyon (though insanely windy) being with the elements was incredibly helpful. Even if it did only last a few minutes.

I have been fighting with myself for quite some time on the idea of failure. I feel like I’m failing here, staying in LA in the middle of a pandemic making my mental health even worse on myself and somehow spending more money even when I’m not paying rent?? or I feel like a failure by leaving LA and trying something else for a while. Though this morning, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to make something happen is by DOING something. Even though I feel like I’ve been doing something for months. You can’t change what’s happening if you keep doing the same thing. I need to be creating and I realize that they heavy financial strain that’s entirely out of my control has been thwarting any ounce of creativity I have in my body. So I guess it is time to try something different for a little.

I hope that whoever might read this will understand that you’re so not alone if you’re struggling right now. I think that it all feels so normal now that we feel the need to be incredibly productive again when in fact, the pandemic is just as bad if not worse than it was in the beginning. I hope that you have a moment where you realize that life will continue on in your favor, if it doesn’t feel like it now, then someday. And until then it’s time to find even a thought that gives you a glimmer of hope. Therapy is good. Been trying to get myself into a therapist for a week now - but there are options if you need and don’t have insurance based on income.

This first post honestly, there is no theme that I want the rest of the blog to follow or anything. Just simply marking where I’m at at this time in my life. Maybe I will start something where I read a book and do weekly analyses on them. I’m not sure. But if you’re reading - thanks for sticking around and come back for maybe more centered writing at some point!

Brittany

Cover image by Cal Lindsey