"so theres this fathomless pregnant void"
girls own the void (& beyonce apparently). on facing the unknown.
You know that thing where smokers substitute their cigarettes for jelly beans or gum or whatever? I think I’ve been doing that with my phone. Since I’ve cut back on drinking & stopped habitually smoking ouid I’ve subconsciously been subbing in screentime for dopamine hits to stimulate my ADHD-riddled brain. I activated screentime on my phone two days ago; at some point prior, during my excessive doomscrolling, I saw that Beyonce was trending after removing her icons on Twitter, Youtube, Instagram & Facebook …apparently, that happened with Lemonade too, so the beyhive (her fandom) is speculating that she’s about to enter a new ‘era’ and release new music.
ps. follow me on twitter, im new & ig is dying a slow death
I love that for two reasons, one the void as full of potential with opportunity and two, like an erasure or removal of current ‘face’ in order to reframe & contextualize in a different way. It reminds me of when Kim Kardashian1 showed up to the Met (September 2021 edition) in a full black Balenciaga body stocking complete with a long black ponytail trailing behind her, embodying nothing but so very distinctly her.
Growing up I was scared shitless of the unknown. Space? Absolutely not, I still haven’t seen Star Wars. The ocean? Somehow I love her and pools freak me out more — probably the fault of some b-horror movie I saw at my grandparents’ house when I was, like, nine or something. I was raised Christian, so like, the thought of living for eternity in heaven? Fuck no. I’d wake up from nightmares of orange & yellow neverending spirals SCREAMING at the top of my lungs. I must’ve freaked my f*mily out in the middle of the night too many times because my p*rents sent me to church to talk to the pastor’s wife. She tried to appease me in her gentle softspoken voice by telling me my favorite food, fruit rollups, would also be in heaven — it didn’t work. Fruit rollups are fucking amazing but even then I knew that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.
note: Apeirophobia is the fear of eternity & boundlessness. Aperiophobia is known to cause panic attacks & most often starts in adolescence or earlier. It’s caused by a deep existential dread about eternal life/oblivion, I’ve just been like a deep-ass sensitive puddle since near birth apparently. It’s often connected to thanatophobia (fear of dying). Sufferers report that they often feel derealisation, as if they are living in a dreamlike state with a distorted sense of reality2.
Life is a cruel joke because I’m also going through my Saturn Return in my 8th house aka the house of the occult, death, sex, secrets & taboos. So I have the pleasure of returning to my existential crisis about why I’m on this godforsaken rock that’s hellbent on violent self-destruction. Saturn is the zaddy planet and course corrector so he’s been making me deal with my unquenchable desire for external validation through accomplishments that, to be honest, I’m not sure have ever felt like ‘accomplishments’ to me. At first, I thought, what a shitty realization. I’m back to square one because ugh idk, I kind of don’t want to do the thing I’ve dedicated the last thirteen years of my life to—or at least in the way I’ve been doing it. But, slowly it’s been like, cool, maybe it’s not starting over, maybe I’m pulling back the framework I’ve trapped myself in. What if these barriers of what ‘is’ are something I’ve created? Is this all just self-imposed? Maybe these traps aren’t even there in the first place? Everything I love to do I have been doing but I’ve been overlooking or not giving it as much weight as some of the more conventional achievements I strived toward because of societal pressure ~cough cough: MFA~.
I’m a recovering workaholic that was raised to believe life was suffering (ty colonialism & the legacy of slavery) so every first of the month since shit hit the fan in December, I’ve been losing my shit, like full-on the sky is falling Chicken Little shit. I have relentlessly trapped myself in an anxiety spiral knowing I cannot work a traditional job with a boss because it does not work for me. Even though I know that I’ve been sitting in my house beating myself up and trying to hold onto some sense of stability until I realize I need more. Then I burst out of my anxiety death trap and manically throw my projects into the world to gain more financial stability3. Rinse, repeat. It’s physically exhausting.
Funnily enough, I just got off Zoom with my therapist & she brought up how I ruminate on the unknown. Like, I get so stuck in my head hoping to cling to some false sense of safety that I actually end up sabotaging myself. And like I know this but having someone say it to you like that? Actually pretty freeing, until I get trapped in my safety catatonic state again.
There’s something about embodiment thorugh language that really helps me. I’ve always loathed the limits of identitarian language as in I’m a ‘black’ ‘bisexual’ ‘woman’ who is an ‘artist’. I want to be free of these limiting labels that don’t capture my full essence. These labels feel like thick mud that pulls off your shoe. I want an escape. I want to be an amorphous & unknown power to the systems that be, creating my own definitions terms of existence. Paradoxically, the thing I’m most scared of is what I most desire and if I don't go towards it, I’m going to feel imprisoned for the rest of my life & then it will be an eternity. Philosopher & writer Nina Power quotes artist Hito Steyerl in an essay on the void & feminism saying “How about siding with the object for a change? Why not affirm it? Why not be a thing? An object without a subject? A thing among other things?”4
I’m fighting all of my old defense mechanisms that gave me a perverted sense of safety in order to reach the safety that I’ve already been creating. The void isn’t actually a void, it’s an adjacency, it’s always in relation, pregnant & fathomless.
xoxo, Sydney
And that has to do with some issues I have with having the rug continuously pulled out from under me re: emotional/financial abuse but my therapist is like ‘chill you always figure it out; maybe it’s time for a trauma specialist’.
The object being selfhood
You didn’t have to gag me like this. But I think literary domming is probably my unknown kink. You have a way with thought that converts language to image and in this case medicine. I love the concept of agreeing with the object. Incorporating this as a dogma, lol