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“It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?”
― Anxious People
― Anxious People
“I wanted belonging to be something I could inherit, something I could step into fully formed. I imagined community as a space I could passively inhabit. It would be so many years before I learned that community was an action, something we build and rebuild and contribute to. That belonging is something we invent.”
― Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats
― Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats
“Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fogs in the valleys; cellos, dark windowpanes, snow.”
― The Secret History
― The Secret History
“Maybe, the darkness isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it’s a reminder that you’re capable of turning the car around, you know? You’re capable of rerouting from a very dark, scary path back to the light. You know how to go to that dark place now, but you also know how to come out of it.”
― Adelaide
― Adelaide
“Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn't need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don't dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I've forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.”
― Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
― Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
Belen’s 2025 Year in Books
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