Things make a post

[kaberett]

1. Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine.
2. Walking along the south bank of the Thames, in the sunshine, with sebastienne; talking about relationships and Art and leaning arms on railings looking at the Thames; browsing books; eating dinner from the food market that happens outside.
3. The Southbank Centre itself, which contains music and Captain Awkward meets and a poetry library and ridiculous art and space in which people are permitted to just be - to take up space, to exist, to be noisy and delightful and communal and -- oh, oh, but it is good for my heart.
4. Poetry. (life is too short to live without poetry/if you've got soul darling now come on and show it me)
5. Imbuing art with meaning, as focus, and having it returned tenfold.
6. I am loved. I am loving.
7. My tomatoes are germinating. My peppers are... thinking about it. The parsley bought as a pot entire and eaten entire is beginning to reassert itself in its own way.
8. My ridiculous perfume collection is being very, very good to me at the moment - scent upon scent, layer upon layer.
9. Pear juice. I am really massively enjoying it at the moment. Also, raspberry sorbet and rye-and-caraway-and-sunflower-seed bread.
10. The gingko trees coming into leaf all the glorious way into work and back again.

There's some stuff swirling that is trying to coalesce and mayn't get a chance to over the next little while (see previous...). Nonetheless it goes a bit like this:

• trust as generative (thank you, sebastienne <3), and what this means for self-trust & also for intimate partner relationships
  
• having boundaries is not inherently abusive
  
• forgiving while remaining whole (I need to explore this for myself)
  
• performative empathy?
  
• what is it reasonable to ask for - of oneself and of others? how do things interact?
  
• beauty is truth
  
• the joyful wrung-out knife-edge of hard work, and why I'm healthier in my job than I'd be out of it
  
• gender and intersectionality

Comments

[calissa]

<3 It is so lovely to hear all this goodness going on. I've been reading your entries, though not commenting much, and it sounds like you are in a pretty good place at the moment. This makes me super happy.

I still think of you every time I look at my ginkgo tree. It is doing well in its pot, though the leaves are starting to look a bit sad now that we are halfway into autumn.

[kaberett]

:-) There is much to be grateful for. It is good for me to take moments to breathe amidst the whirling Everything.

I am so delighted to have passed the chain of associations on :-)

[shanaqui]

Mmmm, raspberry sorbet.

Yes, that's apparently my main response to this post.

[kaberett]

seems legit - it's why I bought it on my way home last night ;) I'm intending to sit out on the bench in our garden once I'm done with work tonight, with sunshine and a bowl of it.

[quirkytizzy]

I love your good things list. I need to do that, too. Wonderful idea.

What does performative empathy mean? And trust as generative? Like, trust that builds more trust???

I like the idea of art with focus. I very rarely have focus when I try to do my art (writing) and it always comes out better with focus. I forget that - the focus part. How that's important. It's good to reminded of it.

[kaberett]

I think it was one of my counsellors that got me making them.

Heh, part of the reason I write things as cryptic three-word prompts is that I'm not sure how to write essays on them just yet...

... but "empathy as performative": things about the ways I learn in public very deliberately and consciously as performance art, and about how I work being autistic but passing for allistic - and some of that is bringing that same deliberation & consciousness to expressing empathy in ways that are generally recognisable to allistic folk. (Thanks to shehasathree for throwing lots of awesome links on this my way; and for example, flippac and I are currently in situations with... a lot of parallels, and we're both autie, and a lot of our conversations take the form of, approx, A: this shit thing happened to me; B: this [analagous] shit thing happened to me. I did some processing. -- albeit with more abstraction and more... communication that we are bearing witness to one another's experiences through talking about parallels, often without making the parallels explicit; where in allistic company I'm very wary of doing that without a huge amount of scaffolding, because I know it can come across as ~all about me~.)

Trust as generative -- so re my recent post on Elementary: the latest episode of the show poked hard at three of my areas of trauma, but didn't trigger me. And some of that is that I already trust the show - if I'd come into it fresh, not knowing the backstory, I'd have found it much harder. And some of the shit TOG has done I... would flat-out not tolerate if we didn't have (admittedly brief+intense) history. He hasn't hit my red-button I-will-cut-you-off-no-further-questions-asked issue; but he has done things that would probably prevent someone making the transition from "acquaintance" to "friend" (but would have hurt me much less if it'd been an acquaintance doing them). How much damage can be done, and how much trust can be built, is dependent on context and on history.

[untonuggan]

yay for your good things! Thank you for sharing <3

[kaberett]

♥