Phantom Threads. 🤍
(the tragedy of enduring)
hello, sunshine! i have some media recs at the bottom, don’t miss them.
without further ado, here is the first post:
in January, i stumbled upon an earnest story written by GennaRose Nethercott. though humorous and punchy, her meditations on the nature of longing struck me. to describe longing as a creature with legs, some anthropomorphic being with the mind to follow sadness, was a prose not lost on me. it reared its messianic head until i had no choice but to write about these phantom threads: grief, longing and the tragedy that we call ‘endurance’.
grief is often written about so precisely. with sage shadows and an almost juvenile shading of anguish. what fascinates me, however, is the anger that perseveres despite its own yearning to be still. that is perhaps, part of what makes grief so contrarian. so much of it is the plain unwillingness of our emotions to dissolve. and so, we understand that what we’re actually looking at, is love captured and stalled from being a comfort. rather, it has no choice but to consume. love, enduring. Jamie Anderson put it so beautifully: ‘Grief is just love with no place to go’. albeit, it doesn’t land this beautifully when you’re in the throes of pure heartache.
upon digesting this, i was faced with a new thought: if this is grief, then longing is its physical manifestation. we feel its ache; it’s craving to undo our spines, seeking out what is typically unable to return to us. what a harrowing thought. that these phantom threads grow limbs and haunt us. and maybe, just maybe, we allow them to.
and that, my friend, is where we meet endurance. all of these emotions, this battle of the mind and the spirit, the waging of psychiatric war. it’s all just endurance, doing what it does best: reminding us of our humanity. of our sensitivities and inability to truly detach from empathy. what a cruel and gorgeous teacher.
i would like to think that there is something profound about these revelations. but i quite like the idea of leaving things open. giving them air to breathe. so, i invite you to think more on these phantom threads. and not just think but engage with them. there is nothing quite as necessary as an internal deconstruction; the urge to think beyond us, till we become more. take the time to do that friend.
see you soon. thank you for being here x.
🎵:
A Prayer of My Own - Nick Mulvey
Give Up The Ghost - Radiohead