Tag: literature

Let’s talk about adversity. Getting personal. (long)

Published on by Tosha Michelle31 Comments

Let me tell you about trials and tribulations. This girl has been through some things. I’ve developed a few annoying habits because of said things, but talking about myself in the third person shouldn’t become one of them. 😜 Here’s a bit of my adversity story. We all have them.

Just like everyone, I’ve had my fair share of adversity. I was born premature and due to complications this caused irreparable damage to my optic nerve. Translation, my eyesight is beyond screwed. I’m legally blind and as a child, I struggled with epilepsy and a condition called Chorea. On top of that, I was a shy kid who was overly emotional and cried a lot. It made me a great target for bullying. Thankfully, I came into my own during my university years. As an adult, I’ve battled depression and anxiety. The latter has been debilitating on occasion, but these days, I’m more equipped to survive. My emotional fortitude has grown stronger with each trial. I’m blessed with a wonderful support system. More on them later, but these people make all the difference.

Adversity has been a wonderful teacher. It has taught me to believe in myself, to fear change less, and to step out of my comfort zone. I never want to become stagnant, constantly stuck in a quagmire of my own making. I always want to have something new to share, to never stop evolving as a person. There’s been times when I wanted to let my disabilities, or past hurts hold me back, but I’ve always persevered. Partly, because I’ve realized that coping means looking beyond my own worries, and concentrating on helping people with problems much greater than my own. The world is so much bigger than our own issues. Focusing on helping others is a great way to get out of our heads and be productive. It also makes one less of a selfish, self obsessed Mofo. Ha! Trisha Paytas, I’m looking at you.

Despite limitations and setbacks, I’ve written two books (with another on the way). I’ve got a Masters degree in Criminology, and research work that keeps me busy. I have a partner who loves me, and after a few uncertain years, a relationship that is thriving and stronger than ever. I am so grateful for his strength and spirit. He hit midlife crisis mode for a minute and we grew apart. It was a strange time for both of us, and could have ended in a few different ways. We honestly were on separate paths for awhile, but somehow managed to find our way back to the one we knew by heart. We married so young, just a couple of college kids, but thankfully, those two former kids are closer than ever now. He’s the responsible, go getting, charming, witty, loving man I met all those years ago, He makes me laugh, looks out for me, and puts up with all my quirks. We’re lucky to have each other. It’s wonderful to have someone to walk through life with, who will hold my hand during hard times.

We also have two amazing girls, (more young women now) not to mention, the best and brightest feline kind has to offer. Tucker says, “hi”. (Little Georgie could use your prayers, but that’s a story for another time). Just send out positive vibes into the universe for him, please) Very soon we will either be building or buying our fourth house together. Life truly is beautiful (even during trying times).

I’m grateful for the people who have come and gone, and the people who persist and remain. Each experience has taught me so much. I’m thankful for every moment, and each memory that has become a part of who I am, and who I will be. Sometimes unanswered prayers become our saving grace. If only we could see that in the moment, imagine how much suffering we could avoid. I really believe everything happens for a reason, (even the things that almost break you) that every journey takes us where we’re suppose to be. I’m thankful that every hurt (eventually) has brought about a renewal of spirit and desire to never repeat past mistakes. I’ll always miss and remember fondly those temporal people who helped me grow and shared their lives with me for a season. They were just what I needed for that moment and time. Lessons they taught me won’t be forgotten.

However, it’s the ones who are still here that get my unwavering affection and undying loyalty. I am a ride or die person, and I give my all to the people I love. My goal is to make their lives better and show up everyday. I try to put out sweetness and light, but some days it’s more snark and sassiness. marked by my homespun quirky awkwardness. I’m down with anyone who appreciate nerdy things, history, art, nature, music, antiques, traveling, Netflix, reading endlessly, the joys of being utterly silly, the comfort of yummy food, and talking about the most random things.

Having said all that, we’ve come to the purpose of this post. I know. I’m such a chatterbox on occasion. No! Really! 😜 I’d like to share some of my favorite quotes on adversity. I hope that if you’re struggling that these will lift you up. Sending lots of love to everyone. Thank you for reading. ❤️

“You should never view your challenges as a disadvantage. Instead, it’s important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages.”

Michelle Obama

“We don’t develop courage by being happy every day. We develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.”

Barbara De Angelis

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”

Napoleon Hill

Move Along

Thoughts and Things 

Published on by Tosha Michelle30 Comments

Hey y’all. Happy Thursday! Isn’t October such a beautiful month? I love the cooler weather.  I hope you all are enjoying it too. I appreciate your continued support of my blog. WP is such a lovely community. I’ve really lost my taste for social media recently, but I always feel at home here. Thanks for that. 

Okay, now just a few random things for today in my typical list fashion. 

1. I am having outpatient eye surgery in January. I’m really excited because it will help my vision and also remedy this awkward head tilt thing I do. I’m all for anything that gives me more vision and less awkwardness. 
2. Flying to Boston a week from Sunday. Going to spend a few days in Salem Massachusetts and Portland Maine. I’m really excited because it looks so pretty.  Lots of travel in the works. Planning a trip to Seattle and Vancouver in the spring.  Scotland next fall. I’m a homebody by nature, but I do have a bit of wanderlust in me. There’s so many places I want to see. 

3. I’ve mentioned this before, but over the last couple of years, I had kind of lost my soft demeanor. I was really starting to become jaded towards people. It felt like there was just one betrayal after another. It was starting to make me bitter and really untrusting. There was a hardness about me that had never been there before . However, something has started shifting in me recently and I feel more like the old me. I’m learning to let go of grudges and bad feelings. I’m really feeling my humanity again and my empathy is in the driver’s seat, but what’s with all the idioms? Geez. 

Look we are all screwed up. Sometimes people hurt us and sometimes we hurt people. Hopefully, without intent or malice, but it happens. In our society we are so quick to cannibalize someone simply for making a mistake. It’s really disturbing when people find joy in the downfall of others. I wouldn’t wish pain even on my worst enemy. Negative energy just breeds more negativity. 

I’ve always worried that I was too soft and empathetic, too much of a sucker. Mostly because other people labeled me as gullible and too Pollyanna-ish  I realize now that I would rather be soft and kind, than angry and petty. I just want to love people and be giving. Just don’t make me hang out with them. Still clinging to my antisocial self. Ha!

5. My lovely penciltastic frienf Eric has a new book out. It’s titled Pantheon and it’s a must read. He’s such a gifted writer and a wonderful human being. A little about the book:

“Eric Syrdal’s Pantheon is the novel told in free-verse that you never knew you needed to read. Epic in scope but always deeply rooted in its humanity, it defies genres and expectations. “Pantheon is a thrilling philosophical journey exploring the depth and meaning for one passing through a metaphorical world of inner demons and dragons, goddesses of the soul, of warrior and poet. A journey that crosses boundaries of time, space, and perception. I am captured by the intimate revelations of this intuitive and sympathetic protagonist battling the dark ages of his subconscious moving instinctively forward into innerscape, relying upon and exalting the virtue goddesses that guide and deliver him from barbarity and trial by ordeal both physical and spiritually as he transports from one state of being to another, from one point of time to another”Holly Rene Hunter””

You can purchase this little gem by clicking the link below.  

Pantheon
Quote for the day


Happy music 💕

You Can’t Will It So.

Published on by Tosha Michelle62 Comments

image

I know we’ve just met,
and you think I’m well
put together. But don’t
be surprised when I fall
apart on you, and ramble
on incoherently about
my insecurities and how
sometimes I feel like a
black hole. But that’s okay
because I never trusted
stars any way.

God, I’m tired.
Will you put me
in your car and
take me home?

I want to rest now.
May I sit at your feet
for awhile and share
my shadows?

Did you know, in the
story of my life,
I often feel trapped in a
washing machine set on
and endless spin cycle?

And guess who can’t swim,
and how did sharks get in here?

Doesn’t it all sound so hopeless
and bleak in a Bronte way?
Emily, not Charlotte.

It isn’t. Note, I’m always happier
and sadder than my poetry suggest.

And there’s no moors and
Heathcliff (that sorry bastard)
moved to France forgetting
Cathy ever existed.
(fils de pute)

It seems to me art and
life are more than nothing.

And there’s a soulful sweetness
in the sound of my soul dropping,
even if it’s shy and barely there.

I’m here to tell you, it’s all about
being filthy with yearning and grief,
and the knowledge that living
is all in the brightening and darkening,
in the hurricane swirl of emotions
that cracks our skulls and disintegrates
our hearts to bits and starts them
up again.

Maybe that’s why I’m forever
kissing the sand and waiting
as the ocean swallows my
name again and again.

-Tosha Michelle

Upon Hearing of Your Passing.

Published on by Tosha Michelle48 Comments

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Years from now when I read of your passing, I won’t imagine you in some abstract place. I want to picture you where you were the happiest- by the stream, where the ocean is never far, with book in hand, countless chapters, and no one to interrupt you.

Relaxing under a cerulean sky, blue-winged birds soaring.
The years, an heir to what was, golden, swinging light
as a breeze on an olive branch. The sky opening in their final valediction.

The sunlight dusting your hair, the fringe of grass.
The water from the stream flowing upward against the backdrop
of an eternal, carefree day.

The wisp of yourself pouring into the syntax in front of you. Words open again and again. Never taking back what they promise.
A thousand words to sustain you. Peace hemmed cover to endless cover.

Paused on the footnote of the page, you look up. Freedom in your gaze. Liberation in the moment. How still you are. How content. The words happening here. You look back down: your finger in the book. Your heart still, attuned to the glimmering of the stone.
The precipice attained.

-Tosha Michelle

A wonderful video for wonderful people.

Published on by Tosha Michelle8 Comments

This guy. This video. Check it out. It’s transformative. Be sure to follow. If you love language, literature, culture, and guys named Joseph, you won’t be disappointed

Have a great weekend. Make it one to write about.

Selected Essays and Squibs by Joseph Suglia

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On The Clouds Eating His Shadow.

Published on by Tosha Michelle28 Comments

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The clouds drank in ravens

making the pines lucid.

His shadow fell beneath

the sky. If she listened

closely, she could hear

his melodic cadence

delivering soliloquies

adrift on the wind.

He as he was

She as she became

Awake. Aware.

Taking color and form.

Both somewhere between

what was there. What’s

not there. Someone you

remember and can’t

quite forget.

Lost mail on someone

else’s kitchen table.

The parenthesis enclosed.

Time takes away. Gone

in an instant particles

of the past.

She stays.
(She can’t stay)

Tired from this slow

burning off of yesterday.

That which was lost

will not become again.

She always thinks she

see gleams of him,

glimpsed and then gone.

The stem decimated but

drowning in rose petals.

No longer powerless

to the undertow.

His presence merely less,

but no longer wholly more.

His shadow falling,

falling into dust.

The only sound she

hears now is her

voice turning into

an early frost.

To every poem there is

a time and season.

Seasons that coagulate

into lost years.

In this one, she scourges

the past with lyrical ease

The wind no longer

contradicting itself.

Her pen drops ink

of flames, no longer

pointing to the sky.

Dr. Syntax gives her a

lollipop and a clean

bill of conscious.

-Tosha Michelle

“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

Published on by Tosha Michelle5 Comments

F. Scott Fitzgerald ❤❦♪♫

My relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald has evolved over the years, but he is still one of the great literary loves of my life. I discovered him at 11 years old when my aunt gave me a copy of The Great Gatsby.. I read it all in one go. After that,  I was hooked and quick to read anything Fitzgerald had ever written.  In middle school and high school, I was taken by the romance of it all. His books were magical; the parties, the glamour, those beautiful lyrical prose.  It was only after I was older and began reading about Fitzgerald’s life that I truly came to understand the depth of his work.  

Life for a while was a great shindig for Fitzgerald.  He married the love if his life, the belle of the ball, his first book This Side of Paradise was a huge success, but so much can change in a decade. Success is fleeting, the belle would stray, be forgiven, go mad and end up in an asylum. Fitzgerald would lose himself in gin and insecurities.  He would die of a heart attack at the young age of 44 at a time when he was just finding his creative voice again.

Fitzgerald is not unlike you or me. He was man who understood grey, the fading of the seasons, the sting and zing of a lived life.  I hope he is at peace, his final chapter written much too soon.  When I am in a particular melancholy mood, I read Fitzgerald’s work and let his words guide me, Knowing that the man behind the text understood life’s nuances, that dreams are often lost in the dirty laundry, that the heart is constantly bending itself and being reshaped, that often failure is just a deceptive voice, that we have to move with the taste of change and finally, that everything has a conclusion. Or does it? Fitzgerald’s words will last long after our cars are replaced with hearses, his ancient ledger of living verbs, nouns, and adjectives, a future pearl for a new generation.

Now if you will excuse me, I’m feeling a bit blue today. Gatsby is calling, like a hidden note, I wonder what his pages will reveal today.

“It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald ❤❦♪♫

F. Scott Fitgerald ❤❦♪♫

❤❦♪♫