Bravery

[kaberett]

Vienna Teng, Stray Italian Greyhound:

Oh, no not now, please not now
I've just settled into the glass half empty
made myself at home
And so why now? Oh, please not now
I just stopped believing in happy endings,
harbours of my own

But you had to come along, didn't you
Break down the doors, throw open windows
Oh, if you knew just what a fool you have made me...
So what do I do with this

This stray Italian greyhound,
these inconvenient fireworks
This ice-cream covered screaming hyperactive thought
God, I just want to lay down,
these colors make my eyes hurt
This feeling calls for everything that I am
not

I'm not that kind
I'm so good at shooting down any notion
This tired world could change
It's all been bought,
well at least that was my line
No use in spending all that emotion
when there's someone else to blame

But you had to come along, didn't you?
Rev up the crowd, rewrite the rule book
Where do I go when every no turns into maybe
So what do I do with this

This sudden burst of sunlight and me with my umbrella
Cross indexing every weatherman's report
I was ready for the down slide but not for springs to well up
This feeling calls for everything I can't afford
to know
is possible now

What do I do, do I do with a love that won't sit still?
Won't do what it's told
What do I do, do I do with a love that won't sit still?

Please not now, please not now
Please not now, please not

What do I do, do I do with a love that won't sit still?
With a love that won't sit still
What do I do, do I do with a love that won't
With a love that won't sit still?

What do I do, do I do with a love that won't, that won't sit still?
Won't do what it's told
What do I do, do I do with a love that won't sit still?

Everything that I am, everything that I am
Everything that I am, everything that I am

Last night I sat on Brighton beach and listened to the waves come in and ate chips and onion rings and talked with sebastienne about this and that and the other and bravery - various different media we imprinted on, which boil down to: you can't be brave without being scared.

Which -- obviously resonates with all my current Feelings about being afraid, and the varieties thereof; but also ties in to something else I've been thinking, that I fake bravery by calmly and quietly making space in which other people feel safe to risk speaking their hopes, thereby neatly avoiding ever being the person who goes first or ever being the person who looks scared or, really, ever being the person who takes the risk. I close myself off with fear, and dress it up prettily enough that by and large people don't notice. (I'm perhaps being unfair to myself here: I put my shonky python up on github, and I put poetry up here, and both of those terrified me to the point of day-long adrenaline spikes when I started; and now they're just things I do, without fuss, and that represents more progress than I think about terribly carefully most of the time.)


A bit relatedly, I've been thinking some about compassion and generosity, and about how I might consider going about feeling compassion for people who've hurt me (specifically, I was thinking about how in the hells I might ever feel compassion for my father). And I... don't think I can. I think I can pick apart how they got there and feel pity for them, but that's condescending; compassion, I think, presupposes an equality I don't feel inclined towards; perhaps that I don't feel safe permitting? Something to come back to, I suspect.


& lastly for tonight - trees-post to come tomorrow - we have home internet again; and I am deeply frustrated that a gorgeous wing-backed purple corduroy sofa left on the kerb by some neighbours for rubbish collection tomorrow morning is just too awkward for me to have managed to get it down the stairs solo when I got home at 1am, so I am just going to have to hope that the "please don't take this away" note I left on it is respected and I can badger my housemate into helping me get it down the stairs in the morning, because it is squooshy and comfortable and the right shape for curling up on and I really want it, okay, and I even know where in my room it would live.


Goodnight, Dreamwidth. xx