Erin Friedly > Recent Status Updates

When one writer gives a nod to another excellent writer. Having one character read another Joy Harjo. *chef’s kiss*

“Yes, the permanence of leaving is hard to reckon with, but I suppose I love the dead in part because they are no longer here to ask anything of me, to be dissatisfied with who I’ve become. There is a mercy in that.”

If the future is anything it’s disabled, and that is true for everyone if you don’t believe me just wait.

Empathy is not knowledge, but the curiosity to know.

Because another way of saying it is there is a limit to what one can understand in abstraction at some point the knowledge needs to move into your body for it to be fully known. It needs to go from unformed to formed, soft to hard.

There must be a knowledge that is different than dread. Of knowing in my deep bones and fascia that deep pain will always be present in sites that also excavate love, but what will be left of me when I am full of the kind of love that also empties me completely?

What if my love lets their addiction kill them?

The only thing that pulled at them when they were in the church was their love for me. Raya said, “They didn’t think they could do what the church kept asking them to do because they loved me so much and that contradicted what the church people were telling them was okay.” In the room, at this, I crumpled. I crumple now.

This feeling will crack me open. I will not recover, but then I think of how I have been in pieces this whole time. My little life, there is nothing to recover.

Here’s an exercise. Go to the mirror. Look yourself in the face and say out loud, “To take care of you is not normal I can only be it temporarily.” Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time. What would happen if we decided to say the opposite?

From the Cree language, it is not I am sick but this sickness came to me. 🤯 This resonates.