Bailey Bryant > Recent Status Updates

"What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought?"

“how sobriety disabuses you of the sense of your having been a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcotic crown... the superficial details may change… but the algorithm is inexorable. A drug works till it doesn’t… we all have the snorting-spilled-coke-off-bathroom-tile stories… active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after.”

“We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.”

Should I just read the secret history

Oh my god???

"There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored - a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening - that was consonant with my understanding of love."

"What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, for in that way I would undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't, something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me. . . I could not get past it. . ."

This whole paragraph/section is doing something to me

“Patriotism is the biggest obstacle to internationalizing the struggle, and the idea of a people’s army ready to defend its borders is just a myth in the service of capital.”

“What if it was true that the masses of white Americans had not been fooled at all but that a critical mass of them had simply identified with a set of “interests” that were not purely economic and so powerful they overawed the class interests that liberals and leftists presumed should be broadly shared.” - The Case for Reparations

"say my disgrace becomes my obsession/ say i roam for days/ at its borders/ touch it to my tongue

Giving this another go

I can already tell that this is going to be terrible and I can't wait

"Please, I beg you/perform some crazy rite over me so things can either/ finally dissolve or finally become solid./ Please, I need something primitive and complex/ to relieve me of this world subdivided into better and better ways to avoid life."

I love love!!

"A statue isn't built from the ground up - it's chiseled out of a block of marble - and I often wonder if we aren't likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be... It's not what we do that makes us who we are. It's what we don't do that defines us."

Alright I’m going for it. I HATE that this white other made her main character Black and decided to throw in notes about what a struggle being biracial was. It’s weird and tokenizing and insulting and forced and unnecessary. Her point of view is so painfully limited it’s inappropriate for her to be writing about stuff like this.

I am EXTREMELY uncomfortable with this white woman's description of her mixed-race main character and also the story about being called an "oreo". Jesus. Also, there is so much over-direction in this, I feel like I'm reading the blocking movements of a play.

Are you kidding me??? This is so gorgeous “This letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.”

I want everything and I want to want less

“But the truth is I haven’t changed much. I still have so many of the same questions like, “Do we have control over our thoughts?”, but I am looking for a different way to answer them. I’m looking for new names for old feelings. My soul is still my soul even if I rarely call with that.”