small beauties (005)

a brief dying shriek

Aug 16, 2024

I’m currently staying in a convent and I have missed this quality and quantity of sweetness in my life, if ever I’ve had it before sef. (Thank you Mummy, I know you’re seeing this!) If there is one thing I love in this life, it’s a good home. A home where everyone’s needs are anticipated and everyone is eager to meet each others’ needs.

In response to the question ‘What is the best advice you’ve ever received?’, Michelle Obama said it was this from her mother: ‘Come home to be liked, we will always like you here.’ Every time I think of this since I heard this the first time, I sink into a deeper layer of wow, so that’s what that must feel like? It also makes me think of Blake Lively’s speech about Ryan Reynolds being hardwired to get home.

If you’ve been here long enough, you’ve heard enough about my 2016/2017, the last time I fought depression tooth and nail for my life. Looking back at that era, all I see is a gift that keeps on giving. You’re reading this newsletter because I fashioned a new religion for myself that year in the words ‘this too shall pass’. You’re subscribed to a platform called Restful because of the sleepless nights in 2016 I spent fighting with the cobwebs of the black hole—it had hands! I’m making a print magazine and thinking of it as a sleeping aid because after that shege, that moment right before I fall asleep became my favourite feeling in the whole world. Studio Styles exists because in 2019 as I went back and forth between feeling like a person in a paper world or feeling like a frozen-in-ice exhibition piece, I remembered Audre Lorde saying: “Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”

I collect these things—today it’s a Catalog of Small Beauties column, yesterday it was a series of IG highlights, tomorrow a physical space—to renew their lives by sending them to you and you and you because I planted a tree in my head in 2017 that has been nurtured by all the missiles of love other people sent out into the ether that met me.

I cannot overemphasise how much of a game-changer the tree has been for me. There is also a well, yes—what Restful re-presents in this dimension. But the tree, the tree, the tree… you ever see a tree and get the meaning of life? It gets attacked with chainsaws by bloodsuckers and parasites now and then, droughts and floods come and go, the wind breaks the windbreakers sometimes, but I look at that tree and I can see the efforts of my hands and the love of my God. It is under that tree that I’m able to entertain my kinspeople when they come visiting. I look at that tree and I hear a former therapist telling me, “Immaculata, you are resourceful!”

i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
-from ‘won’t you celebrate with me?’ by Lucille Clifton

And now these days, just like this guy talks about, I don’t remember really what that time felt like, I just know that I’ve now flourished the garden of my life with a million and one ways to keep me alive. This year, I say very easily “my life is only starting to feel bearable and enjoyable” but it doesn’t occur to me as easily how to describe how all the years before felt. The stories I remember I remember mostly/only because of the loving witnesses I’ve had in friends, counsellors, therapists, journals I kept, books, films, poems!

I wish I could go back and thank every single thing whose advice and company brought me out over and over and over again over the years, either by just being themselves or by actively reaching out to me. The Calm app, Chad Lawson’s Calm it Down podcast, Sampha, Eloghosa Osunde’s essays, all the poetry workshops I was able to attend thanks to Arts Council funding in London, the chaplaincy community at my university, every single mental health and disability support staff at the university, every lecturer in whose office I ended up just crying, friends whose ears I talked off that year, Gbope, Mogbitse, Tiwatayo, IfeOluwa, this list is inexhaustible. Gbope, remember that day I called you weeping on the street about how I had told Z I had caught feelings for him in the aftermath of his girlfriend’s suicide and how twisted and disgusting I felt? Hormone Monsters’s Lionel St. Swithins, the shame wizard, was really my patron saint.

Anyway, I say all this to say that it is against this backdrop in 2017 that I decided what worded tattoos I’m going to get:

Stay Here (on one wrist),

At Home (on the other wrist)

from ‘An Ecology of Intimacies’ 🔗 on The Marginalia

“At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment—a portable ecosystem of interdependent growth, undergirded by a mycelial web of trust and tenderness. One is profoundly changed by it and yet becomes more purely oneself, as projections are composted into candid relation.”
Sometimes, you meet someone and there is a very clear sense that you’ve both stepped into a portal of loving transformation by relating with each other. In this article, Maria Popova writes: “I think of how love may be the supreme creative act, the way it remakes the self and the world between selves.”
Without you I survived and with you
I live again in a radical augmentation
of identity because we have
effaced our outer limits, because
we summoned each other.

- from Forest Gander’s book Twice Alive

from ‘Relationships are coevolutionary loops.’ 🔗 by Henrik Karlsson

“Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.” ― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
When I meet a person who is truly, profoundly themselves, I sometimes think of a letter Charles Darwin sent to Joseph Hooker in January 1862 after receiving a package of orchids.
“Good heavens,” Darwin wrote about the Angraecum sesquipedale, an orchid from Madagascar with a nectary as long as his forearm, ”what insect can suck it?”
There must exist a pollinator moth with a tongue longer than any that has ever been observed, he conjectured later. The moth and the orchid must have evolved in dialogue.
This is what I infer when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. There probably exists someone who enabled that evolution of personality. A parent, a friend group, a spouse. It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. We need someone who gives us space to unfold.

All that’s on my mind as I type this is this song 🔗.

We will have to give up some things to feel that sense of satisfaction and completion that Audre Lorde writes about in The Uses of the Erotic. What will you give up today to feel more alive?
In Mr Hudson’s version of the linked song, he asks, ‘How the hell do we move forward?’ And I immediately recall one TikTok where this guy says, don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to move forward, it’s enough to just not go back.
‘It is not your dream that must be released, but your sense of possibility that must be awakened.’ - Brianna Wiest

Internet Gems:

It’s okay to care too much (blog), by Ava of bookbear express.
Open this wall (song), by berlioz
Nostalgia ULTRA (full album) by Frank Ocean

Listening to Nostalgia ULTRA, I’m taken back to 2011/2012, falling in let’s-get-married love with my first boyfriend and you-and-I-against-the-world love with my first best friend and breaking up with both of them. We’re all mortals, aren’t we? Any moment this could go. Cry cry cry, even though that won’t change a thing. But you should know, you should hear, beautiful bubble/balloons, that I’ve loved those good times here, and I’ll miss those good times here.