In My Notes (App)
It's literally what you think it is, bestie! Yellow Brick Road.
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It’s eclipse season. There was a Sagittarius Full Moon yesterday. Mercury is retrograde soon, and everything is literally anything but fucking chill. I’m personally focusing less on manifesting, and more on what already exists in my knowing. I’m tending to the seeds I’ve already sown so to speak, and working on that patience they call a virtue. Frankly, I have little capacity for new thoughts and I’m trusting that maybe being tapped out is an opportunity in its own right.
Today, I’m literally sharing old/newish notes. My creative process is my Notes app. It is a huge challenge for me as a writer to sit down, stare at a screen, and channel an open portal to write my story. Instead, I wake up, grab an iced oat latte because I’m a bisexual, and go on an hour long walk. On this walk, I drift and ramble and muse and hope and and and….I write. Avoiding walking straight into bikers, cars, and streetlights, I put acrylics to phone screen and tappity tap away until my thumbs can’t tap anymore. Then, I try to sit in front of a computer and expound on ideas that are simple and tasty and stick to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter, to be savored by the spoonful instead of baked into a silly cookie if you know what I mean. Like, not everything needs a dissertation or a whole thing to be poignant and rich.
Before celebrities decided to co-opt Notes App Culture to beg for forgiveness for saying the N-Word, we - the anxious bitches, overthinkers, and writers - ran this shit. At times, my Notes app has been my diary, running log, the only confirmation of my reality when I gaslight myself out of how I felt or experienced something. It has been my rough draft launch pad for stomach-churning texts. Sometimes, it’s been my saving grace when I’m on the move and simply know I’ll forget if I wait to be at the computer. Sometimes, I am jotting down a dream at 3am and other moments I’m making a grocery list like a normal person. Many are terrified of someone else seeing their notes. I personally have found some less than savory shit in a Notes app or two when I was messier and less boundaried, and I’m not proud of it, but we’re honest here. As for my Notes app? You’re about to find out.
No one has ever accused me of being mysterious. Here are a series of divine downloads, utter nonsense, and things that seemed significant in that moment for reasons I cannot explain in long form which I have either written or re-discovered this week and a short recollection of what the hell I may have been thinking when I wrote them:
Hopeless but Romantic?
In light of last week’s Sunday advice column which you should definitely read here, I took a gander at the list of traits I will identify in my soulmate. Not what I’m searching for. Not how I’m building and Frankenstein-ing a human. But how I know someone out there is simply existing without me in mind, but with me in Spirit, and how I will be able to see them and recognize something meant for me. It has since expanded and evolved into several other lists by prescription of my therapist which I will share in Notes app reveals moving forward if you’re into this sorta thing, but this was the original and most eyeopening for me.
At the bottom, you’ll notice the date December 18 (of 2019), jotted down knowing I would return back to this when my heart was mended and I could discover play in romance again. I wrote this while in active heartbreak every day and in anticipation of even more when I finally mustered my way out of abuse and unkindness and unworthiness and rejection.
Woken up by a nightmare of my own making, I created this list at 6am while laying in bed with someone who I knew had not a single one of these qualities, and most likely never would. Looking back, I am this person described. I’m also much closer to finding my counter than ever before because of it. See kids, manifestation does work. It’s the whole intentional and aligned action to go with those powerful thoughts that really does the trick.
What does success even mean anymore?
I’ve just been thinking about how much my definition of success has shifted now that I know longer live paycheck to paycheck, feel the need to prove myself to people who were not in my 1:1 Zoom with the universe to circle back on what the fuck I’m doing here, or a nonbeliever in magic of both the practical and mystical sense.
While on set last week, I was considering how I have seldom received any single “wish” or manifestation that is based in optics - what other people might view as achievement - and when I have I’ve regretted it. Mostly, I receive what I’ve always desired to feel and now I manifest in feelings and defined success by settling into them. For example, my definition of success this year was finding emotional safety. I’ve set greater boundaries around how I share myself in the digital space, moved into an apartment of my own, distanced myself from anything that put me in fight-or-flight, and I feel of higher accomplishment than I have in a very long time - feeling the ease of what happens when I manifest from the inside instead of the outside.
As for how I define success in the longterm, and what happens if I don’t achieve it - I’ve decided I don’t need to find out until I find out. I’m not sure if it’s any fun to live the story knowing the ending.
Kind of Emo Mo
Idk…being online and watching people get clawed from ivory pedestals on which they never asked to be placed for being “violent” is stressing me out. Cancel culture doesn’t exist; we know this. But we are fluctuating between the knee jerk reaction of carceral punishment for perceived wrongdoing and what actual restorative consequence for being harmful could look like and it’s resulting in a lot of nonsense.
Anyway, I was thinking about how we all harm people every single day. It is as certain as our breath.
Words from The Brooklyn Museum
I went to the Brooklyn Museum for the day, and wrote down words which I read on the placards of some of my favorite pieces and rolled off the tongue and felt good to my brain.
Magnet for Good Luck
I was on my way to a hair appointment, and wasn’t sure if the stylist would wash my hair, but decided I would simply not do something I was paying someone else to do (shouts out to my Type-A’s) and leave my hair in the messy bun I woke up in. Five minutes into the walk, a bird shit right on top of that messy bun marking a first in my life of being shit on by a bird. The worst part? I had no napkins and truly did not want any part of that bird shit on my hands without being able to scorch my skin with hot shower water immediately, so I simply left it until I got to the salon while giggling the entire way.
In one of my favorite movies to watch when I’m feeling like a divorcee for absolutely no reason, Under the Tuscan Sun, Diane Lane’s character is bargaining for her villa in the countryside with an old Italian woman and just about to lose out when a pigeon flies into the house and shits on her. The woman takes it as a sign and gives her the home well below her asking price, thus starting Diane’s journey to self-actualization.
One of my fondest memories of my maternal grandmother, Bonnie, was walking the dunes along Kohler-Andrea State Park. A seagull pooped right on top of my sweet grandmother, who couldn’t even say the word fart without blushing, and then she peed herself a little bit from laughing so hard. I’d never seen her so undressed, so young, like I was seeing her before she was a grandmother, a mother, or a wife. Anyway, I couldn’t be too certain that this bird shit wasn’t a Sign so I had to take note in case it became the most important day of my life. I texted 4 people about it and they all responded “That’s good luck.” So, I have that going for me.
Why Can’t A Bitch Cry?
I posted about having a post-therapy cry a few weeks ago which I deem an entirely natural and normal occurrence, and people were literally sending me the number to hotlines. This made me realize that people have yet to accept that tears are better out than in, and made me consider perhaps how little I share of myself that way in public spaces even when I think I’m being vulnerable.
Crying is something I do almost daily because I want to. Not as an inconvenience or crisis or catastrophe, but because I have lived over a decade of being weighed down by the tears held within while I was drowning from the inside. I’m tired of expressing that I’ve had a nice cry or felt angry without being met with genuine alarm, when I feel liberated and available to my joy by being available to all other feelings. I remember being frustrated that we’re clearly at a stage in mental health awareness where we can address that feelings exist but don’t necessarily want to witness them play out in physical form which is…interesting and alienating.
That concludes this week’s Notes app reveal.
To thoughts which may have been brilliant, but lost in “idk if that makes sense.”