T.G.I.F.: It’s Been A Long Week

~ Live & Learn

“It isn’t about peace, a quiet life, not feeling things, not experiencing things. It’s about the shit hitting the fan, and having the courage to sit with yourself, not hide, not deny–to observe the tumult from the end of the snake’s tongue.”

— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Grove Press; May 12, 2020)

Note: Photo by NB Hunter

34 thoughts on “T.G.I.F.: It’s Been A Long Week”

  8. Yes! It is exactly that. I’m surprised I don’t smell of shit with the amount of times I have sat with myself…
    And dammit, David. Another book I have to add to my “read” pile (I adored “This is Happiness” by the way)

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        2. And as the night struggles on one hour after another and I’m awake to see them all, awake and exhausted, I crave that feeling you get just before you go to sleep, when everything gives in. The fight ends. The fight of our thinking lives. Something bigger and stranger than yourself takes hold. Rest awaits. The relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. There’s nothing for you to do, or work out.”

          — The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping by Samantha Harvey
          https://a.co/38Vz7W1

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        3. Nights awake are the longest, largest, most cavernous of things. There is acre upon acre of night, and whole eras come and go, and there isn’t another soul to be found on the journey through to morning. When I don’t sleep I spend the night searching the intricacies of my past, trying to find out where I went wrong, trawling through childhood to see if the genesis of the insomnia is there, trying to find the exact thought, thing or happening that turned me from a sleeper to a non-sleeper. I try to find a key to release me from it. I try to solve the logic problem that is now my life. I circle the arena of my mind, its shrinking perimeter, like a polar bear in its grubby blue-white plastic enclosure with fake ice caps and water that turns out to have no depth. I circle and circle. It’s 3 a.m., 4 a.m. It’s always 3 a.m., 4 a.m. I circle back.”

          — Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Grove Press; May 12, 2020)

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  9. Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
    Wow!! I have to quote directly … “It isn’t about peace, a quiet life, not feeling things, not experiencing things. It’s about the shit hitting the fan, and having the courage to sit with yourself, not hide, not deny–to observe the tumult from the end of the snake’s tongue.”

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