Please teach me gently/how to breathe

There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and these are the ones who make the world tick.

For years and year I’ve watched to see what people are going to do in any situation, so that I could do it too. I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too. I notice the way people dress, the way they treat their girlfriends and boyfriends — in everyone it seems there is something to envy. You can admire anyone for being themselves. It’s hard not to, when everyone’s so good at it. But when you think of them all together like that, how can you choose? How can you say, I’d rather be responsible like Mina than irresponsible like Margaret. Responsibility looks so good on Mina, and irresponsibility looks so good on Margaret. How could I know which would look best on me?

I’ve admired all the great personalities through the ages, like Andy Warhol and Oscar Wilde. They seemed to be so perfectly themselves in every way. I didn’t think, Those are such great fucking souls, but I did think, Those are some great personalities for our age. Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein—they did things, but they were things.

I know that personality is just an invention of the news media. I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there’s just temperature. So how do you build your soul? At a certain point, I know, you have to forget about your soul and just do the work you’re required to do. To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life.

~

Would you agree that a lot of my peers today are interested in being famous? I’ve often heard that while young people used to want to be doctors and ballerinas and firemen, now they want to win a singing competition.

How could we not want to famous? How should a person be otherwise? I’ve been wondering about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity. But for all that I love celebrities, I can’t help but feel upset that I moved to a place where celebrities actually exist. After New York, my hope is to live a simple life, in a simple place, where there’s only one example of everything.

By a simple life, I mean a life of undying fame that I don’t have to participate in. I don’t want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive—but not talk about it too much. And for no one to be too interested in taking my picture, for they’d all carry around in their heads an image of me that was unchanging, startling, and magnetic. No one has to know what I think, for I don’t really think anything at all, and no one has to know the details of my life, for there are only a few good details to know, and those are all in my head anyways. It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities.

In this way, I should be satisfied with being famous to three or four of my friends. And yet it’s an illusion. They like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am.

We are all insignificant, but we share in this by being on this earth at the same time. I look at all the people on my twitter feed sometimes and think, These are my contemporaries… These are my fucking contemporaries and they treat Instagram as an art form! We live in an age of some really great blow job artists.

I just. need more time to be a genius.

Though one good thing about being a woman is we don’t have too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For men, it’s pretty clear. That’s the reason you see them trying to talk themselves up all the time. I laugh when they won’t say what they mean so that we will study them with a smile. But you must try not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.

embrace despair, be bipolar, silence the censor, and knock yourself off center. travel. be an outsider, because outsiders have to stretch. 

I like this outfit because it doesn’t matter. I think that’s important.. I think that’s the cure. It’s like the first installment in the complete guide to not giving a fuck.

I’ve been staying up to read this:

I couldn’t find a copy of it at Strand so I’ve been reading it on Google Books. Terrible, though it’s really interesting. The book is biographical, written from a feminist perspective about Nietszche’s Nazi-loving sister, but there’s these weird incestuous undertones that almost make me shudder. Maybe it’s a time period thing but man, people in the olden days were really all up in their siblings (think Boleyn sisters).