"By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future."
- Zelda Fitzgerald
1. I'm waiting for this book to arrive.....
Having been a massive fan of F.Scott Fitzgerald since reading The Great Gatsby in my teens, Zelda Fitzgerald somehow hadn't featured on my radar until I recently learnt more about her life and death a few weeks ago here. I was always aware that she was also a writer, and that there was a tension between herself and her husband over his success. Her story reminds me a little of that of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as both women suffered mental illness and were artists/poet/writers in their own right but not as successful as the men they were married to. I wasn't aware until recently, however that Zelda was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and that she was institutionalised for most of her adult life, finally dying in a fire in a mental hospital, which also killed eight other women patients on the same night - 10th March 1948.
I decided to order this collected writings to try to get to know her more, she isn't a woman that I would typically identify with as she was white and privileged..... "the quintessential southern belle". However the fact that she married "as a way out", and that in the article I found above it describes her as "struggling against her traditional southern upbringing and its societal constraints to create a new independent identity for herself and others"...makes me curious about this women who history might forget in the shadow of her successful husband. The oppression of women who were clearly privileged in that time and place, in terms of race and class, is a difficult subject but Zelda's is a story repeated for so many women.....simply because they are women.
2. Last Saturday I woke up to the news of a Trump rally being called off in Chicago and watched the news videos of Jedidiah Brown speaking out, that seemed to echo something of the civil rights demonstrations from years ago, and that must inspire hope in the face of the support for the Republican candidate for the presidential nomination who is famous for his words of hatred and division. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be living in the USA and to be faced with years of shootings of young black men and boys, or to be Muslim or from other ethnic minorities..... and now to be faced with words of hate and fear on a daily basis.
Then this weekend I woke up to this news video.....
3. Here is a really powerful analogy for racism and the impact on an individual that I've never heard before.... and a really powerful article from a Mother of black sons about racism and the invisibility of white privilege.
"She took my hand and ran her fingernail across the top, and asked me if it hurt. Of course I said No. She responded, “Well, what if I keep doing that over and over in that same spot for years? Eventually the skin will break, it will bleed, maybe fester and scab over. Then someone else comes along, does the same little thing which normally wouldn’t hurt, but breaks the scab open, and you scream and howl in pain and punch them in the face. That is how years and years of discrimination wear on a person, and why sometimes we react in the ways we do.”
-
Christy Richardson
4. I'm really liking this link today.......Seven things to do when you just don't know what to do.
I'm taking Jamie's really good advice and have worked through the list.....and I still just don't know what to do....number seven right? Surrender? Getting up every day is enough for me right now and surrendering to whatever the day brings. It feels a little bit like I am in hell most days so I know that this can't go on for much longer. In the meantime......
5. I'm being distracted by The Easter Rising 1916 today and found that this lecture was really informative as a starting point for understanding the history, on the 100th anniversary of the uprising which left almost 500 people dead. More than 2,600 were wounded. I also found this Guardian article about Irish women's lives at the time and since the Easter Rising.
6. Every week I find that I cannot do without the Right Brain Planner blog and that whilst I cannot seem to use what I find there as constructively as I would like right now, the words and ideas do bring me some comfort in the moment. Clearing a Path was a blog post by Teresa earlier this week and has really helped me to think about "hope" and how to keep trying when you've lost sight of your vision or when your vision no longer seems possible for you to achieve.
How to manage that fear of failure.
How to manage the reality of failure.
How to change your perspective about failure.
"You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy. I have never met a heavy heart that wasn't a phone booth with a red cape inside. Some people will never understand the kind of super power it takes for some people to just face the day."
-
Andrea Gibson
7. And then there was this...just beautiful and breathtaking and......so frightening to contemplate.
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| Dappled light on tree trunk - September 2015 |
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