06 Eylül 2021, Pazar
saat: 06:45
I just vacuumed the entire apartment so I can get immediate, tangible validation that things I do actually matter. for some reason my only answer to being stressed or overwhelmed is becoming even more hyper-organized than usual.
even though I want to work on this writing project I am for some reason now dragging my feet making the transition... why is it so hard to switch gears or get started? I know it’ll be easy and fun once I actually manage to do it. I think I’ll make myself do a timed idea-generating sprint just to get the words flowing and then see how it goes from there. usually, that’s enough to just like.. overcome the inertia and get myself moving.
"A month passed, and it was time again for Marcus to return to his research. He had been avoiding it because it wasn’t going well.
Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ‘60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ‘80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.
When Marcus started to think this way, he couldn’t get himself to open even one book."
(Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing)
carry me to my fainting couch, please!
