this is my replacement medium for building and expressing myself and my thoughts and my visions. I don’t want to connect with people over my body or my clothing or my home on instagram. There are a lot more interesting things about me than what I look like. It’s also been fun making weird, niche jokes to people on twitter, but tbh i need to stop shit-posting into the void. I want one big work, not lots of little ones. I want to connect over well-developed ideas and thoughts and places and pain and joy. I feel like I’ve tried to do that with Instagram, but it’s so easy to get swallowed up in a social media site intended to market lifestyles and products. I’m putting my effort into these really brief, unsatisfying, transactional interactions with people and creating a personal brand into these weird forms of social media for immediate attention, but what if I was playing the long game and actually built something bigger with my time? What if I read more books or wrote a book, or got published in Stanford Social Innovation Review or learned to weave or spent more time on the quadratic formula…really did anything that served both myself and others. I love that other people find value on social media, but I want something different for my life right now. Anyways, this is my new, albeit limited, medium for sharing bits of pieces of myself and my experiences. Expect strange things. 🙂 love u all.
things I want
wrote this in March? thought I published it. but I didn’t! here it is 🙂
– I want to be an ethical consumer and pay the true cost of things that I purchase; this means I need to be acutely aware of the business practices for items I need. It also means that I need to reject consumerism and its narrative that what we own defines us and our personalities. I need to be creative about purchasing used items and understanding what I genuinely don’t need
– I want to fully embrace the idea that beauty and goodness are not equatable. I want to think fully through social constructs about food and body movement and find a happy place as far from widely accepted but false narratives about what we should be or look like.
– I want to build routines into my life that bring me comfort, security, & joy
– I want to invest time in connecting and being with people who can have hard conversations and I want to leave people stronger and more confident than I found them (and vice versa)
– I want to let myself get deeply attached to people and things
– I just want to spend as much of my life as possible celebrating good people while always doing whatever I can to challenge our society to be a better place for the people in it
things i like in feb 2019
taking care of my little plant gals has been really rewarding. plants are not easy but remembering how to learn something new and how to nurture these little houseplants that just can’t fully do it on their own has been so nice. hoping to learn more and take care of trickier plants this year.
my favorite cactus of all time is located in san diego, california, and she is the most beautiful being I have ever met. everything there was so glowy and green and my whole life I’ve let me identity be hardened Montana girl who thinks nothing of snow but I think that the next move I make needs to be somewhere sunny and warm for as much of the year as possible. I am just happier in the sunshine and i don’t care how basic ass white girl that is.
I’m mostly post-ED enough that I can do things and make myself stop thinking about what I look like. I can wear things even if the world thinks they look better on skinner people. but it’s a settling process and one day I’ll love every single thing about myself and the next I’ll be unable to concentrate or be present with people or in projects I love because I’m grieving over my body not being what I thought it needed to be. it takes time and it takes acceptance and it takes investment. I’m investing time and effort into skin care and gym time (for how my body feels) and letting myself eat food that sounds good and tastes good. focusing on the feeling from inside, not how other people might perceive my looks from the outside. i don’t always feel worthy of the investments in myself that I’m trying to make, but I’m pretty good at talking myself through that.
sunsets are my everything.
my baby sis got back from an LDS mission in Hungary a few weeks ago, and i was the one who dropped her off at the MTC 18 months before and I was the one waiting outside of her gate at the airport to make sure she got back home in time. my younger siblings are my world and my pride and my joy. they are the best, most fun, funniest, wittiest people i regularly interact with and i love them with every part of my being.
I got to attend the AshokaU Exchange: Beyond Boundaries & Borders conference this past week. Some of the sessions weren’t super helpful, but the closing keynote changed me. The leader of the Fetzer Institute spoke about “The Case for Better Arguments.” I wish that I could write everything and all of my thoughts down because of how impactful so many different points were, but I’m just going to copy the ideas that are most easily shared through my written notes, if you want to explore anything deeper or hear about other really incredible ideas, I’d would happy to verbally (phone or person) chat or even argue about any of the discussion points.
strong democracy requires strong citizens, it requires being a member of the body, a contributor to the community, someone who believes by ethic and deed that no problem is only someone else’s problem. Unfortunately, our society/democracy actively promotes and allows sociopathic greed. we have created a culture of normalized sociopaths.
most people want to hoard. we feel like we have to make sure that even if we are not as privileged as the top 1% that we APPEAR in some ways to be as wealthy and powerful and privileged. we must choose individually and collectively not to hoard power or resources. we must choose to circulate.
all politics and policy is arguing over is different conceptions of “us.” so how do we build a bigger story of us? because the point of life is not to celebrate diversity, the point of life is to celebrate what we DO with diversity. We have all of this unactivated difference; what are we going to do with it?
we need a) arguments that are more literate in our historical context. b) arguments rooted in more emotional intelligence. c) arguments that are more honest about power and power imbalances. d) arguments where the objective is to understand instead of win and great things will happen.
optimism comes from the point of a spectator, but hope implies agency. it implies that we have the power and responsibility to change the outcome.
trying something new
hi. i’m marissa. i’ve found myself seriously contemplating my connection to and use of social media. instagram wreaks havoc on my mental health and self esteem, and i need to stop using it. i want to completely delete it. i find that i do, however, enjoy and see value in having a simple platform on which i can share pictures and thoughts with people who are genuinely interested in my life. i’d like to be able to share more intimate thoughts about my life and experiences combining words a pictures, but do not feel comfortable doing so on a platform like instagram, twitter, or facebook. so here i am, trying to create a safe, tidy, vulnerable little corner of the internet as a sort of public journal i plan on sharing only with people i care and trust (or who are creepy enough to google me). think of it as a sort of more serious and much less snarky finsta. 🙂
all pictures are mine.
if you’re seeing this, i think the world of you!
gettsmg 