Give everything you can away without losing yourself

My message in a bottle in full, with all of the edits and all of the thinking about it, is on this La Biennale postcard from Venice, it says, “Give everything you can away without losing yourself.” That was the edit that I made, it says “edited for Jaz,” because the first part of it before I wrote that said “Give everything away without giving yourself away.” And then we both thought that maybe “giving yourself away” in English sounds like a magician or lying or has the implication of deception. So the edit that is really the message is give everything you can away without losing yourself, which I think linguistically gets closer to the concept I was trying to write about. The other thing that the postcard says is “everything everywhere all at once,” which was a note which made sense, but also as a note to watch something, because I’m always looking for the important things to look at. 

To elaborate on that message that I put in the bottle: recently I have been wanting to balance or thinking that the balance between giving oneself creatively and trying to retain or maintain boundaries is more important for me than it used to be, because I think it’s very  hard to not want to be in a situation where you’re making something and put all of your energy, which I think inside of a capitalist system, particularly the one in the United States, looks like all of your energy, all of your time, all of your resources go towards trying to make something outside your body that culminates in this event that is important—and if you don’t do it, then you’re failing. Recently, I’ve been trying to find more of a balance between thinking about my own body and also in taking care of my own body. What that means by taking care of other people inside of a system. So the idea of being able to give everything away that you can of yourself without losing what makes one feel centered inside of it, is what that message was about.