Taylor Church
Bio
Omnivorous reader, author of two books, maniacal maker of lists and nuanced notebooks.
Stories (4/0)
Hypophora
Whether we want to admit it or not, much of our life and our thoughts revert back to our own existence. We worry about our purpose, our utility as human beings, and the dusty path we are on. We see the mess that we live in, the mistakes, the beauty, and a million other things with emotions and views we will never be able to fully explain. Some questions that pop into our heads are too painful to actually ask. Am I lovable? Am I going to be happy? Is this what I’m supposed to be doing? If I’ve been depressed before, will I be depressed again? Sometimes they all come unbidden in moments of weakness and inadequacy. And sometimes they simply linger in the shadows of the foreground like hidden jungle-cats.
By Taylor Church5 years ago in Beat
Deal-Breakers
I have three little torn pieces of paper, one the backside of a receipt, the other two sticky notes that have long abandoned their stick with scrawled letters on them. One has four unrelated words on it, a list of terms I liked, and wanted to stick into a piece of writing. One has one line with two opposing ideas. And the other has bullet points and ideas, and question marks near the ideas that are bad but that I refuse to cross out because they were nonetheless, my ideas. The question mark is only for my ego; that can take on life forms, and fancies itself to be a genius and a saint of words.
By Taylor Church5 years ago in Humans
These Weary Hands
David Foster Wallace once wrote: “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” Though written in a work of fiction, knowing Wallace struggled with deep, paralyzing depression, and that he would go on to take his own life at age 46, these words hold a certain autobiographical sting to them.
By Taylor Church5 years ago in Psyche
Loyalty to Happiness
Today an hour or so before twilight, with the sky a blend of white and azure, clement as any January day I have seen in years, I read a sentence that made me consider many things. Near the end of a particularly beautiful if not structurally vertiginous short story, the affair of a man named Nino was briefly described. The narrator recalled, “…So Nino sometimes embellished his life with extramarital adventures, in order to display his loyalty to what he called happiness…” What sort of tickled or brushed against my antennae here was not the mention of infidelity, or the suddenness of which adultery was brought up and then moved past. It was the fact that Nino had, at least in his mind, remained loyal to something, namely, what he considered to be happiness. And so, I couldn't help but wonder what deep down I am truly loyal to. After all, we all have our devotions and allegiances, be them virtuous or otherwise.
By Taylor Church5 years ago in Motivation