How to feel better: A guide for the dark days
“The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”
We live in weird times and there’s so much to be anxious and fatigued about, and we’re always looking for ways to feel better. In this newsletter, I’m going to include some words I often return to as a form of self-consolation and I hope some of them make you smile today.
Jenny Holzer, From Truisms, 1977–79, Installation: Pilot Field, Buffalo, New York
“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959
Have spaces that comfort you:
In the words of Joseph Campell, “[Sacred space] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
Azuma Makoto, In Bloom #1 EXOBIOTANICA I— BOTANICAL SPACE FLIGHT, in Nevada, 2014
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”
- American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
Claire Tabouret, Self-portrait (in the studio), 2020
“To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To listen to stars and birds and babes and sages with an open heart. To study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions. Never hurry. In a word, to let the spiritual, the unbidden and the unconscious rise up through the common. This is my symphony.”
— William Henry Channing, My Symphony
“As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did… I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that creme caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Grayson Perry, The American Dream, 2020
“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories… water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study for Joe (_2010980), 2017
“We have to cultivate contentment with what we have. We really don’t need much. When you know this, the mind settles down. Cultivate generosity. Delight in giving. Learn to live lightly. In this way, we can begin to transform what is negative into what is positive. This is how we start to grow…”
— Tenzin Palmo
Bonuses:
Some of you may know that I’m looking to include crowd-sourced content on here every so often. Some ideas I have in mind right now:
Interviews/ conversations on something unique about you - hobbies/ lifestyle/ something you’re passionate about that you’d like to talk about
Posts featuring your art or writing or shoutouts to your content
Collaborative posts
I’m open to any and all ideas from you. If you’re interested in talking further, just hit reply on this email and let me know what you’re thinking. Alternatively, find me on Instagram and say hi!
Hi! I am visiting your substack following your instagram posts. they are all so beautiful and the idea to share these is so tender!
Here at the end you also wrote that you would feature what we (readers) wrote. Would you be willing to consider my writing in that case?
I have written poems and musings and would like to share them with you!