When I read Francesca Lia Blocks Dangerous Angels I always identified with Witch Baby more than any other character of hers. She’s the misfit with dark curly hair, alone inside herself. She’s the beauty curled up in the mud and beating songs into drums. She’s the girl with the cowboy boot roller skates photographing the world.

Witch Baby takes articles about all of the sad things that are happening in the world and wallpapers her bedroom in sadness. She takes on all that sadness even when she doesn’t mean to. She absorbs it and it becomes her.

It’s hard to see the beauty, you know? With all this sadness. It’s hard to hear the news without being angry and sad. It’s hard to know what my friends are going through without wondering why why why. I’m a sponge of emotion, absorbing sadness. The girl on tv who was raped with an audience, a friend who was recently diagnosed with an auto immune disease (you’re alive, you’re beautiful but it sucks and you’ll get through), the minuscule things and the elementary school shootings, cancer eats us away, hearts race, mental illness is a lump in our throats when all we want is to swallow.

So in a way I’ve always been a bit of a Witch Baby. But I write and I listen and I See as a way to get through, to move past and to accept. I can’t figure out how to accept all these realities. It’s like I’m just waking up to something really cruel. And yet.

I’m not grateful like I should be. I’m not appreciative, not deep down on my heart like I should be. I’ve got all this perspective and yet I’m still doing the wrong things, worsening myself. Something. I need to be kind to that voice. Be kind and move on.

Seek beauty.

Look for magic.

It’s somewhere.
It’s somewhere
I can’t stop the search.

Ps I found this photograph on tumblr here: what time are we upon