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“I need to remember how it felt to take the risk of being misunderstood: by you, by the whole world.” ❤️🔥❗️

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Jan 17, 2021Liked by Heather Havrilesky

This is what happens when you let others tell you what’s right and what’s wrong, hypocrites who don’t do as they preach. Freedom to me is being ok with not being viewed as the good guy.

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Jan 21, 2021Liked by Heather Havrilesky

Sometimes I think it must feel filthy to have so many of us project themselves alalslalalallllllll over you and I want to post you some lovely soaps and shit. Big blue ribbon, that country girl gingham plaid dress blue kinda blue.

...and yet others, I'm fucking 72% certain that's not a mouse back there in the other room, it's in fact you, you're all up in my shit rn and surviving on some skittles maybe, the skittles I skittled by my bedside the other night and left to lay like slop pig that I am.

it's u rite

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I love how I grammatically distanced myself with "themselves," ahahhaah what a ponce

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Jan 21, 2021Liked by Heather Havrilesky

OH MUST IT SAY MY LAST NAME

THIS IS WHY I DONT COMMENT ON THE INTERNET

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author

I don't blame you for disliking the lack of anonymity here, but these comments are funny and yes, I am the Skittle-eating mouse. Please buy the sour kind next time.

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ok i guess

u want anything else, going to the "corner store" now

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Thank you, Ken! This was helpful bc my "ah, fuck it" lizard brain will occasionally overmaster my disciplined attendance to life's minutiae, such as how I just moved & am in need of a job & had been doing so well with my benign google presence having been off social media for at least 6 or 7 yrs now bc I am constitutionally superior to the rest of you.

(or? sociopathically disinterested in what almost everybody else says and it began to make me think 'is that all there is?' every day but not in the peggy lee way?)

SO I'VE RECONSIDERED, and also discovered that I can have a fun gif.

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I have this enormous library of radio drops which play in my head, my brain is like a 6 mile long soundboard & that one gets some good play. I think I only have the “is comin’ on, is comin’ on, is comin’ on” tho.

It’s right next to a ~gonna get myself arrested~ drop, and over a “finally, someone let me outta my cage!” drop, bc these were all the same era and I’m now middle aged, hi.

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Jan 18, 2021Liked by Heather Havrilesky

ugh didn't realize how much i needed this, thank you.

1) We’re all lonely now but in the most claustrophobic way, knowing that our days are numbered

2) I just need to focus on what I own: tear ducts, heartbeats, these weird little veins still winding toward the sun.

3) I’ve been shrinking, slowly becoming someone who wants to be understood by everyone

4) Animals walk out into the cold air and follow the odd logic of their heartbeats through the dark hills

5) I'm still alive

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I have been shrinking too! What a great word for this. I am alive too and I mostly know bcs I followed the odd heartbeating logic for a few hours in an expansive metropolia today.

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I got this in a Tweet from Dinty Moore the other day: A work of art “has to surprise its audience, which it can do only if it has legitimately surprised its creator.” ~ George Saunders

It helped me free myself—or at least begin to think about freeing myself—from the self-inflicted, painful constraints of my “meeting the needs of my audience.”

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Jan 17, 2021Liked by Heather Havrilesky

"I’ve been shrinking, slowly becoming someone who wants to be understood by everyone..." I feel it. Last night, I was trying to work out a similar idea in a song lyric, something about not being able to say anything true while worrying about being misunderstood, about how one had to go--clarity or, what, veracity? I couldn't get it to work (probably because I was worried about being misunderstood) and gave up, had a drink, went to bed. Maybe giving up is the only way through this tangle? I don't know. Thanks for writing about the struggle!

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Jan 19, 2021Liked by Heather Havrilesky

reading made me think of Nina Simone singing "Ain't Got No" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5jI9I03q8E). thank you

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love this, thank you

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<3

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Jan 17, 2021Liked by Heather Havrilesky

I love your writing.

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most beautiful thing i've read in a while

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There’s a cover version of the Peggy Lee song by Cristina. As a pandemic anthem maybe it’s panthemic?

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