I'm hurting: living In A Bookshelf
Am I a book, man, or a bookman? *trick question: am i even living?*
This past week, I felt like I was living in a bookshelf.
“Can’t do this stupid simple job. Money well spent huh…”
Why does fragility hurt so much? I really wish I could fully embrace all aspects of my humanity without any pain and mistakes. Sounds divine, right? To enjoy all the luxuries of being human without any limitations. My pain and mistakes make me feel less beautiful because we don’t exist in vacuums as humans. Our pain and mistakes can break everything around us, including ourselves.
"Please, someone glue my pieces together. Sparkle and fill my cracks with glitter. Make me shiny and gorgeous again."
We fall down as people all the time, and when we do, we feel useless. As kids, our parents punish us for falling; we go to timeout. In school, teachers might exclude you for falling. Or, if you’re like me, you’ve been physically pushed down by everyone and everything. We look around, yearning for someone to step in and pick us up, to make our pain stop. We look for someone to make us “shiny and new again.”
Will anyone finally take on the role of this ‘someone’?
"And as the vacuum goes, I disappear. No more glitter on my cracks. No one to glue me back together."
Hmm, I guess no one will.
But who are we waiting for? Maybe it's God to comfort us, maybe it’s the love of our lives to warm us, maybe it's an addiction to numb us, or our parents to soothe us... We all want to look in the mirror and be beautiful, but still have utility.
We might just fear existential irrelevance:
“More of a decoration rather than useful. Now, SHATTERED in pieces as I now am..."
So why are we so fragile? Why did we wait around instead of gluing ourselves back together?
Living in a bookshelf means you’re most likely a book. So let’s admit for a second that we are books, but books aren’t even that fragile; they can survive for really long periods and tell stories to many. That is unless they get wet, ripped, or are poorly neglected… but that’s not the book’s fault, it’s the actors in the world.
As books, we could sit in our brokenness; we could stay on the ground, suffocating on top of the other books. But I don’t think that solves the existential irrelevance problem. It only maintains the reality of being broken, which isn’t satisfactory because there’s something more to us...
“Fill my cracks with glitter, and make me shiny and gorgeous again.”
Maybe we should just accept that no one else is coming to fill our cracks with the glitter. I mean, maybe someone will the first time you break. But unfortunately, it’s in our nature to keep breaking and falling off the shelf. At some point, no one will be there but you sitting there suffocating under the other books.
This is beautiful.
For one, the beauty of being a book on the bookshelf is that you can flip the page and never know where your story will go next. You can observe the reactions of your readers, but only as they read putting you in the same boat of experience. You will fall down, but you also get up, and until you run out of pages, there will be more and more opportunities to fall down and get back up to keep adding to your pages.
The secret I have to share for making it to the end, is that anyone reading this is not a book... they get to be a bookman(a human book), which means we can author these pages as we go based on what was on the past pages. We can glue ourselves back together again, with glitter glue, Elmer's glue, duct tape, or even super glue if we can afford it and want to decrease our fragility, ahah. Divine is fine, I guess, but only if you realize you are the divine you’ve been looking for. Through chaos, your art brings clarity. Through brokenness, we possess the tools to make ourselves whole again. Thank you Lena for making my week a lot better.
#SovereignSetTheory
Sidenote: This is one of my favorite poems I’ve ever heard. I have the privilege of living with such an amazing artist at Nautilus. The true pinnacle of great art for me is relation, and I’m not one to connect with art very often. Walking through museums is often quite a painful performance because I feel forced to perform connection with pieces for a signal of taste. In a world where it feels like everyone connects to something, it felt like my soul was broken as a result of this. But connecting with Lena’s art taught me I’m not broken; I just didn’t have the narratives necessary to understand art. I didn’t read the page in my book where I put myself back together again because I hadn’t gotten to that stage of my life where I could connect. Yes, I shamefully only know 4 major artists by name, but now I know 5 and am friends with the best: Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, Picasso, Basquiat, and Lena Kaouki(my fran)!
Divine Is Fine (Story #1) by Lena Kaouki
Contact me at mackenziemichellefisher@gmail.com if you’d like to be connected with her before she’s unreachable :)
Lovely essay. "What happens when our environment fails us" is suuuch an important question. Especially now, where most social circles are so unhealthy, consumption and prognosis-oriented.
Something I've yet to figure out is whether we aa humans can *always* "glue ourselves back together", irrespective of the original damage. So far, sadly, it seems there are limits to one's own healing abilities (though of course there are some Herculean outliers).
In some way, your writing reminded me of how resilient and wonderful the act of mere existing can be. In another, more somberly, I really think most of our modern environments are absolutely abysmal at helping people lead better more fulfilling lives. Except, of course, casa Nautilus ;)
MK, I enjoyed reading your perspective on Lena’s art. The choice of title is excellent!