mallika2608

020a – directives for the blues

Let yourself grieve. Take the time out to look at withering plants and cloudy days. To read worn-out books and eat left-overs. Allow yourself to taste your tears and feel your sobs. It doesn’t make you small, it doesn’t make you big. It makes you you and that’s all there is.

You don’t have to ignore that heavy feeling in your stomach, or your chest. You don’t have to suppress the shivers and trembles that bequeath your flesh. You don’t have to wipe your clammy hands, you don’t have to quieten your sniffles. You don’t have to be mature or strong-headed. You don’t owe that to anyone. You can listen to the child in you, you can reach out to the child in you. You can tell them everything they never had the pleasure of hearing. Recount your failures, recount your mistakes, recount your losses, there’s no harm in it.
You don’t have to respond to or engage with all the “negative” thoughts but you don’t have to shun them out either. When you call them negative you judge a part of you that you have no control over. You don’t have to drive them away for no reason at all. After all, they’re (of) human too.

Let yourself cradle the pieces of your broken heart. Honor the ones that won’t go back in anymore. Maybe bury them in the sand or wash them off in the sea, whatever floats your boat. Bid them farewell, they did good. Tell them how the rest of your heart will be with them sooner or later. But for now it needs to live on.
It needs to live on and it can’t carry around the dangling, broken pieces anymore. And for you to release them, you need to hold them. And for you to hold them, you need to look at them, acknowledge them. And for you to acknowledge them, you need to face your grief.

So let yourself face your grief. Let yourself look at happiness and feel wistful. There’s no hurry, you’ll find it when you’re supposed to. Let yourself be surrounded by love and friendship and allow it to not lift your spirits, if it doesn’t. Take the time out to play minor chords and smoke that cigarette. Take the time out to take tests you might fail at. Take the time out to meet people who’re going to disappoint you. Let yourself taste the cardboard of expensive pizza. The bitterness of expensive coffee. Let yourself feel the elusivity of attractive people. Of attractive opportunities. Let yourself see the dependency of love. The expectations of friendships. The attachment of comfort.

Allow the rain to be a damper on your plans, allow the sun to leave sooner than it was supposed to. Allow yourself to cry over all of it anyway.

Take the time out to grieve, so you don’t make the mistake of passing it on.

019b – the mundane is all we have

Thoughts think themselves. Words write themselves. Is this what they call free writing? Just letting your vessel do its thing? Thoughts can create feelings. Feelings can create thoughts. By that logic one can never be out of words. And maybe it’s true. Maybe we’re never out of words. Maybe it’s just the question of which words we want to share, and which we don’t. Is writer’s block real then? Or does it become real only for writers who need to get paid for their words?

I was thinking about how vulnerability on the internet doesn’t really get easier – not as much I’d expected. I went back to doing a bit of private journaling and realized I preferred it. I thought it’d have gotten easier by now. This could be another reason that I’ve been leaning towards trying to fictionalize my thoughts. Or preferring to write fiction, even though it’s tougher and slower.

Any person who’s successful in any field will tell you to do as much of the thing as you can. And yet, it’s hard to subscribe to quantity as a goal by itself. I know I need to set up more feedback loops to stay motivated. Intrinsic feedback and motivation is not sufficing, I know it’ll eventually die out. Or I at least need them for a push when I’m low on the intrinsic motivation.

I scoff at the mundane sometimes. It feels overused and weary and tiring. The green of the leaves, the blue of the waves, isn’t it all used up by now? But I know there’s a reframe there, it’s just about the arrangement and patterns. There’s just seven basic notes in the land of music too, and yet people have created beautiful things out of those.

You gotta keep practicing, that’s the only thing I can tell myself. That’s the main reason I want to keep doing this. And to remind the 5th grade me that I haven’t forgotten her. I haven’t forgotten how she wrote an essay for fun and thoroughly impressed the secondary English teacher who had no idea who she was, but was eventually happy to learn that she was one of her favorite students’ younger sister. To remind the 9th grade me who’d discovered the world of fan-fiction for the first time and was completely mind-blown for years to come. So much of who we are is where we’ve been, so sometimes I find comfort in drawing inspiration from the past.

I suppose we all like sharing stories, sharing parts of ourselves with parts of the world. Some of us like to do so with crowds and tables full of people, some of us perhaps with fewer people. Some of us from behind our screens, some of us from right in the spotlight. Engagement (that social media easily provides) is nice, I’m not going to deny that, but there’s definitely something significantly more satisfactory about writing a post of a decent length. Of course, I’m the one who gets to decide what that length is for me, so it’s all chill.

–

References: [1]

019a – ghost town

They sit on a park bench overlooking the Painted Ladies, unsure about their place in the world. She knows where they are, she doesn’t know what they’re doing there. Tiny drops of water grace their shoulders as they let the almost silence settle between and around them. Almost silent – not completely so. There’s the sound of the rain and the cars, to start with. There’s also the light chatter of the last few people who haven’t gone home yet. Or some who’ve stepped out again. Almost silent – not completely so. That’s how it mostly feels in her head as well. It’s almost midnight, she never really steps out of the house this late unless it’s to visit people in their homes or to come back from such visits. It’s been ages since she’s been out out this late. She hadn’t realized San Francisco on Sunday nights is almost ghost town.

The night’s precious to her, it always has been.

She wishes she’d feel safe, she could enjoy it so much more.

She wonders what she’s doing with life, giving her time to strangers, putting herself in strange, new (sometimes terrifying) situations, hoping to feel something. She’s trying to figure out what she wants from life, though she knows she may never really end up figuring it out. She’s recently started taking medication for anxiety and depression and she can’t wait for it to take effect, there’s a huge part of her that can’t wait to feel normal, in some ways.

“How do you not know what you like?”, he asks, sending her into a spiral of self-doubt again. How does she not know what she’s into? Is it really that easy for most people?

She knows she doesn’t like the cold and the rain and feeling unsafe. She always knows what she doesn’t like, she’s not as articulate with the rest. She doesn’t feel fully safe here in this city but she doesn’t want to go home, either. She’s not sure what’s holding her here. It’s not the promise of riches, or career prospects.. it’s something else. There’s this idea of accessibility that she’s unable to let go of. She’s been interacting with cool people online and a lot of them aren’t based out of her home country. A lot of them are based out of the country she’s currently living in – America, the land of opportunity. It was never really her dream, but now that she’s lived her for a while, she’s found dreamlike things about it.

He doesn’t offer a lot of information about himself unless she asks, so there’s always a lull in the conversation as she contemplates follow-ups. He never really denies when she does ask though, and that keeps it going for them.

She’s changed her mind about wanting to make money out of writing, she saw some numbers and was disillusioned, at least for the time-being. She knows she doesn’t love her day job but she’s trying to make it work, until some of the other pieces fall into place, even if they do so for a little while. She’s only 25, she doesn’t know why she’s so worried. She doesn’t even know if she wants a conventional life – the house, the family, the kids. She knows it’s just natural selection trying to do its job, making her believe she’s short on time. It’s an everyday struggle, one she can’t seem to find her way out of.

She’s always on the edge lately, except for when she’s sleeping or eating. She’s started holding a lot of the anxiety in her body, since she’s become afraid of holding it in her brain. There was a time when staying home felt consistently safe to her, that’s not the case anymore.

It’s raining heavier now, they decide to head back. They walk over the mulch and the mud, she complains about her shoes. He doesn’t care as much.

The night’s precious to him, it always has been.

018b – thoughts are cheap, my darling

She sits in a chair and looks at the pink lilies sitting on the table. She’s divided them into different bottles since she didn’t have a vase to put them out into, but she’s happy with the arrangement. She’s grateful for the one who helped her pick them out, she’s not sure if she’d have bought them if she was alone. She doesn’t fully get why these small acts of kindness make her so happy, but they do. She feels a little silly when she thinks about all of this, but she’s also happy it’s generating words for her.

Night time’s precious to her, it always has been. She tries to conform to societal rhythms to function better but she just does so much better from the hours of ten and three. She now thinks of it with the context of her generalized anxiety, and it makes much more sense. Lesser interruptions, fewer people demanding things from her, lesser accountability, fewer things for her to solve..

She doesn’t actually have problems with focus. She knows she’s good at focusing for hours on end if the conditions are right. Conditions that the night easily provides. She doesn’t think it’s super sustainable though, since waking up around eleven in the morning leaves her with little time to chase the sun.

She’s been using these friendly hours to write lately, but she might have to consider using them to catch up with some of the work from her day job. It’s quite ironic, she knows that.

Even the motorbikes don’t sound as noisy when she’s writing about them at 12 am. They drive her crazy at 7 pm though. She wonders if if she can use the flexibility of working remotely to her advantage. She knows she was enjoying it all when they’d just started out, almost a year ago. She doesn’t know when it all went haywire.

One thing she likes about the act of writing is how she can go from “thinking” to “doing” without much effort. She knows it’s almost common knowledge how thinking is easier than doing, and writing allows her to become a doer, for whatever it’s worth. Even if it’s often a thought dump, she likes how she ends up with something to show for it. For the time she spends thinking said thoughts.

It wasn’t easy tonight. She got distracted multiple times, she got distracted by the internet, she got distracted by tiny chores. But at some level, she knew it would happen as long as she came back to it. She recently read something about how there’s five elements to the human experience. These are – the form, the perception, the feelings, the mentality and the awareness. She thinks when she writes like this she’s almost speaking from the awareness’s perspective. It’s interesting to her, she almost becomes detached from the other four. And maybe she does. She likes to believe she does. When one becomes detached from the other four, they’re left with a purified form of awareness, she’s heard them say. She likes the idea of it. Ideally though, she’d want to be detached from the awareness as well. But it’s okay if that’s too far into the future.

She knows she’s taking it one week at a time, one day at a time, a few paragraphs at a time. That’s all she can do, really.

–

References: [1]

018a – can we make it in time?

A puff, two, four. His first cigarette of the day, two, three. A honk, two, a few too many. He finishes his pack, he wishes he had another. The car in front of him finally moved an inch, two.

There wasn’t much in the world Aakash really cared about, but he valued being there for his friends. He was finding it terribly hard to accept that his best friend was struggling to get through a depressive episode at home and he might not be able to make it in time to help. He tried calling him. A ring, a text. Voicemail. A prayer. ‘Fuck’, he swore.

He’d never been so upset about being stuck in Delhi traffic, even though he complained about it everyday, ever since he’d started driving. For all his promises about how he’d get out of the country soon, he knew he wasn’t really sure if he wanted to leave. There was a reason he hadn’t talked to his manager about potentially quitting soon. He had the options, he had the admit letters in his inbox, starred and marked unread for him to access easily, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready. For one, he genuinely didn’t like the thought of leaving Dev alone. He knew he wouldn’t be alone alone, but he also knew that none of their other friends really understood Dev’s struggles as well he did. They never seemed to have the same sense of urgency, the same sense of concern. Dev had never said anything though, of course he never would, they both knew they were adults with their individual, independent hopes and dreams.

A sigh. The traffic was finally moving and he was breathing a little normally again. He typed another text: “Yo I’ll be there in 10, you hanging on?”. A familiar swoosh told him it was delivered. He found himself speeding, touching numbers even he normally wouldn’t. He knew he was creating quite a bit of anger in people as he passed them, but he believed he was justified. They didn’t know what he knew, he thought.

They didn’t know what it can mean to not make it somewhere in time. They didn’t know what regret can do to someone. They didn’t know about the promises he’d made himself that one night. The night his life had, for the lack of a better word, changed. The first time he’d lost someone. Really lost someone. They didn’t know the value of time. They didn’t know that sometimes you have to push aside rules for things that really matter. For people that really matter.

‘Fuck’, he swore again. His rumination over the past wasn’t helping anyone right now. He finally slammed on the brakes. He’d reached Dev’s apartment building. He haphazardly parked the car and ran upstairs. Knock knock knock knock knock. He rained a swarm of knocks all over the door. He tried the doorknob, realized it was open and blasted inside.

‘You could have replied to my texts, bitch!’, he yelled at the empty living room. ‘Dev! Dev?’, he continued to yell and seek. He entered his bedroom and finally saw him sitting on the floor, staring into nothingness. Not an unfamiliar sight. A breath, two. A sigh of relief.

‘Hey, buddy’, he sat down next to him. He exhaled a few more breaths. He knew he’d made it in time.

017 – we have no egos to protect

Sitting on the couch and thinking about the ego again tonight. There’s a strong inner critic in me that puts me down left and right so others won’t. I’ve had negative history with people who’re overconfident and assertive that at some point I decided to “never” be that way. I internalized that so strongly that I never evaluated whether I have a choice. I want to work towards a healthy self-perception.

It makes sense that I could supposedly deal with my fears (being disliked, rejection, not belonging) if I realize that I have no ego to protect.

I suppose it might be insane to think of these big clouds of fear and try to resolve them. I can only take them on case by case. Notice when they come up, acknowledge them, analyze situations cognitively and take action accordingly.

One thing I don’t love is how much they also show up in my language. I am so afraid of being assertive and saying anything too strongly. I am not happy with the amount of “I think”s and “I feel”s I add in my sentences. Sometimes they’re warranted, and I can let them stay if they really feel right, but right now I think I’m erring on the side of having too many.

I’m struggling with my motivation behind writing. There’s a part of me that wants to write for myself, there’s a part of me that wants to think about the readers. I talk about this struggle in pretty much everything I write these days. Should I consider if there’s ways to solve this? Did I quick google search and god there’s a ton of writing advice online. Don’t feel ready for that yet.

My fear with writing “only for myself” is whether all of this is coming across as “too self-indulgent”. I don’t really have an ego to protect though, so I could technically be okay with that. Self-work can be embarrassing when we’re starting out, and I suppose accepting that can make this easier for me. But accepting that requires continued doing, so I suppose I just have to keep building the muscle. I also know that I can only get to the potentially interesting stories that I want to tell once I get these surface level stories out.

I know that publishing everything I write has been good for me, though. It’s made me more consistent, I’ve never written so much, so consistently. But it has been a bit addictive in that I don’t always feel like going out and getting things done. Maybe that’s the self-indulgent part of me. I keep getting the feeling that I’m trying to think my way into satisfaction and happiness. Maybe I do need to set some goals for the month this weekend. Cannot keep reflecting my way out of them.

I suppose I have to look at the cost to this kind of self-indulgence (for the purpose of this post I’ll just call it that), if I want to decide whether it’s a problem. I have a couple of ideas that I want to explore and write about, in ways that could be more satisfactory (since I believe they can be more coherent and meaty in ways these self-talk posts can’t). Or, thinking about it more clearly, adding aesthetic or functional value to even a few more people could be better than only adding value for myself.

I’ll also have to confront myself a bit, am I just lazing around when I’m doing this? Is this actually adding much value to me or am I just running around in circles? I don’t know if I’m ready to think about these questions yet.

I can think of a helpful reframe though. Once we get done with the things we need to say, we can start thinking about the things we want to say.

I’m considering adding a satisfaction rating to each of these posts. 0 being the satisfaction I get from not publishing anything at all, and 10 being the satisfaction I get from publishing something I’m really proud of (in terms of aesthetic quality or meaningful content or perceived value add to other people), I think these reflection-y posts lie somewhere around 4/5. If I can observe this over a period of time and throw in a higher satisfaction post once in a while, I should be good. I won’t tell you guys though. 🙂

I’m definitely being lazy. I know it’ll involve more time and effort if I start thinking about quality. It’s alright though, I know I could get there eventually, if I wanted to.

It’s a new day. Sitting on a chair and trying to wrap this up. I’m feeling quite proud of the relationships I’ve built and deepened in the last year or so. Don’t know whether it has to do anything with me or their own niceness but regardless, these are things that I’m extremely grateful for.

Sometimes I consume content which distracts me from the things I wanted to write about. I don’t even remember them anymore. Detachment feels quite depressing sometimes. If I am detached from the world and detached from myself then I won’t have as much to write about anymore. Though I know that’s not true and connected detachment can be a thing, I don’t yet know how to balance the line.

There’s a lot happening in the world these days and I often feel quite guilty for not keeping up with it. What is up with the collective pain of humanity and the numerous ways in which it shows up? Politics feels like a scary, dense realm to even think about.

I’ve jumped around a lot in this word-vomit (we’re back to calling these that, aren’t we?), so I’d like to end with an exchange of words that took place around six months back. I’d met someone new and we were talking about our hopes and dreams. Naturally, I’d mentioned writing. “What would you write about?”, she’d asked me. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”, I’d questioned back. Thinking about that wistfulness again tonight.

016 – the mere-exposure effect

I love writing. Or at this point I can simply call this filling up a page with words. It genuinely makes me feel alive. I was going through a phase of loneliness and I kept going back to this idea of “a person is a person through other persons”. And that still may be true, but since I’m not feeling lonely anymore, I don’t have to think about it all the time.

So once (or while) my basic needs are fulfilled, writing genuinely makes me feel alive. Sometimes I want eyes on the stuff that I write, but often I don’t care as much. It’s almost addictive, letting the words flow out of my head, through my body and out on the screen. I think I genuinely achieve flow when I write. Not always, but often enough to enjoy it. And sometimes I’ll aid myself with good music and a nice beverage.

Nothing new, but conflict and being misunderstood is still on my mind, a lot. I don’t currently want to dive deep into it since I feel like it’ll bother me. But I suppose I could dip a toe in and see whether it does.

I had another argument with my mother today and she expressed annoyance about how we’ve been disagreeing over pretty much everything. Now, I do believe I am someone who is very vocal about things I don’t like, specially within relationships that matter to me.. but I think it gets a little complicated with parents or “unequal” relationships. I think something that might be hard for parents is to look at their children, truly, as adults? I mean we often disagree and argue and face conflicts in friendships too, but they’re rarely so intertwined with emotions and history, I suppose.

Anyway, I genuinely think most conflict or dislike is rooted in a lack of complete understanding. And I don’t just mean this in relationships and people, though it’ll obviously be easier to make a case for that. Even “ideas” should be easy enough. Though I think we can “disagree” after a full understanding. What I’m curious about is “dislike”.

The one I’m more interested in is with things like art and “creative” things. I wonder whether the hypothesis “if I don’t like something, it must mean I don’t fully understand it” can be true. I once told someone that I don’t really like EDM, and I always support that with the reason of “I haven’t really heard it enough”.

There’s beliefs in psychological theories of love and attraction that proximity and familiarity can increase both. The reasons might seems obvious but I’m not sure if they are. I also wonder if we can apply the same to art too? It would make sense right? We’re all quite used to the phrase “it’s grown on me”.

What happens when this occurs, let’s say in case of a… song? Do we simply get more “familiar” with it, or do we actually somehow understand it better?

So looks like the mere-exposure effect does apply to all sorts of things, including things like words and paintings. So how does this work? Do we know anything about the reasons or causes behind this effect?

Did a quick search, seems like the two main reasons behind this effect are

reduced uncertainty, and
increased understanding and perception

There was a time when I used to think that art is more valuable for the aesthetic value it provides rather than being something one could understand and/or resonate with. I used to often click pictures only for their form and not care much about why people were liking them. People would often say “I don’t get it” to some of my posts and I would just say things like “that’s fine, you can judge it purely based on form”.

But it makes sense now that form could also simply be the first layer or signal to a potential understanding? It’s one of the biggest reasons we conform to societal beauty standards as well, right? To signal an understanding of society.

It makes sense then how repeated exposure could work for reducing the dislike for something as well. First, the danger and uncertainty and fear is eliminated. Once that’s done, we could become curious and more open-minded about really perceiving and understanding the thing or the person.

Does that mean that given enough time, intent and courage we can “grow” to like anything? Probably does. Feels like good news to me, lol. (Now I remember how this is one of the biggest arguments used by the proponents of arranged marriage setups as well.)

This is great. If we start here, we then don’t have to pick things simply because “we already like them” or “we’re already good at them”, we can have the freedom to pick things (or people) based on other factors. Though this sounds great in theory, I already feel an anxiety about time coming up. It tells me how I’m conditioned to want quick returns.

—

Since I’m veering towards thinking about this from a romantic relationships perspective again, it might be a good time for me to think about my values and the things I care about —

Being self-aware and living without least regrets
- If I like doing something I want to be able to do it but I also want to be somewhat aware of why I like doing it
- If I want to do something but I’m not doing it I want to be aware of my constraints and know whether I plan to change them or not (if they’re changeable)
  - If they’re unchangeable that’s fine, but I want to be aware of them as well
  - Note to self (call grandparents tonight)
Health (physical and mental)
Connection (with humans as well as living beings as well as… nature?)
- Being “there” for people

I can’t (at this moment) explain how this came up from whatever I wrote above, but until two years ago, I used to be quite sure of the fact that I want to have kids. I’ve been questioning this for the last year or so. I think the more people I meet who “don’t plan to have kids”, the easier it becomes to question it as well. And sure, it might depend on whether I’ll meet someone I want to spend the rest of my life with, and what their preferences are, etc. But so far it’s nice to be able to even question it.

015b – addiction + short posts

I want to understand what addiction is. In my previous few posts I mention how some activities might make us feel good in a potentially illusive way. Obvious examples that come to mind – mindless social media content consumption, video games that aren’t truly challenging or fun anymore but simply dopamine releases. (I’ve felt this when I was going through an online Catan addiction phase.)

I want to check whether that’s true. Are some activities simply dopamine releases? And even if they are, at what point is that okay and what point do they become addictions? I want to find this out so I can review my current addictions and maybe do something about them.

So a quick skim of some seemingly trustable sources suggests that substances or behaviors are addictive if they’re interfering with sleep or real life, taking too much time or in general creating negative feelings if withheld from the consumer. So I can say for sure that I was addicted to Catan since I remember getting pretty sad and “bored” when I wouldn’t find good company to play it with.

Now if I had to do a quick listing of what I think my current addictions are, I’d probably go with these:

Sugar (since I get “real cravings” quite often, throughout the day)
Hot water showers (since I cannot imagine changing this without a ton of mental and physical effort)
Social media + engagement (Twitter is the platform I’m most “addicted” to, for the last couple months, I think)
Writing (or “publishing”) (I’m a little worried about this since I do find myself being distracted from work due to this, almost as if I’m chasing a “high”. I “dislike research” but I’m also doing quick skims and reads, barely enough to be able to reference them, barely enough to get something out everyday)
- I did a quick “can writing addiction be a thing” and it looks like it’s almost a laughable idea? So, uh, probably my anxious little mind scaring me off of everything.
Caffeine – I don’t think I’m as addicted as I used to be until a few months ago, but I know for sure there’s something here since I keep saying that I’m only addicted to the thought / idea of a “tasty beverage” but I haven’t yet found anything without caffeine that works well enough.

I think these are mostly it. I don’t think I need to be working on any of these at the moment, since I am currently working on reducing some of my “constraints”. Most of them are related to body dysmorphia and exposure therapy, and it makes sense that I come back to that now that I’ve decided to value my time again.

—

I don’t think short essays should be this short. I feel like this was barely anything worth putting out into public, but I know I have space for a short post so I’ll probably end up doing it anyway. I think, so far, I’ve been posting mostly “notes”y writing, and that’s fine since that’s what I started with. But I think it might be nice to consider investing a bit more time in connecting notes, ideas, observations and maybe making stories out of them? Or maybe starting to think about the value in it for a reader? I know I’m cheating (a lot) by adding information that’s not truly relevant to the topic I originally started writing about, but I also think that’s okay since that’s probably a sign of something else. I think the information I’m receiving here is that I don’t fully believe in a “purely quantitative” goal. I just borrowed a goal that someone else had for themselves since it felt like a nice goal to follow. But if I’m still not feeling good enough about “just putting some words” on a page then it definitely means that I need to reevaluate why I’m following this goal.

—

References:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

015a – a rainy summer San Francisco afternoon

It’s a rainy afternoon. She looks out the window towards the buildings and the skyline she’s been seeing for over a year now. She can’t help but think of how it’s only been a few months since she’s started associating them with the feeling of “home”. For the first time in months today, she sees them from a different angle. For the first time in months, they catch her eye and invoke that feeling of newness, the feeling she thinks one can only get in hotel rooms in new cities. The feeling one can get if they were to look out of windows of such hotel rooms. It’s mysterious, adventurous, inviting, all in a single frame. She thinks the mystery comes from what she’s looking at, not from where she is. It’s mysterious because she’s not there, because she can only look at it. There’s a part of her that feels anxious about stepping out of the house. She might have wanted to walk towards the buildings otherwise.

There’s one in particular that stands out among the others. Brick red in a sea of beige and grey. As the sun steps out to test the waters, her feelings fade away a little. Almost as if they don’t want to be examined in good lighting. Almost as if they’re afraid of being seen. She thinks they faded since the former gloominess had reminded her of a certain few days in Italy. A certain few days with her parents a couple years ago. It was the last time she remembers being awed by the newness of a place.

Things had changed quite a bit a few months later. She’d started feeling much more anxious much more often. She would almost always feel less present in situations. Less focused on the things around her, since a big part of her attention would almost always be on herself. It was the result of what her anxiety was centered around. Or so she thinks.

It’s still beautiful outside, yet she notices herself coming back into her own thoughts. There’s been no visible change, but she’s transitioned to a different person in a single moment. A moment ago she was fully consumed by the beauty of everything outside of herself. Now she’s only interested in everything related to herself.

She notices how her window (that she’d earlier propped fully open to capture of a picture of the said view) is now stuck and doesn’t close. She notices how she’s wishing for some food to make the observing experience better. She notices how her room’s cluttered and suddenly she’s disillusioned. Or as some would say, re-illusioned.

She feels lost in thoughts. She doesn’t feel like there’s a point to what she’s seeing or doing. She knows the feelings that had come up were precious to her, and there’s a part of her that wanted to stay in them, understand them, and maybe even share them. She wishes she could make someone else feel the same way. She thinks that’s crazy, she doesn’t think she has the skills to make that happen. But there’s something that’s not letting her move on to the next block of the day. She’s trying to write and she doesn’t want to stop, she doesn’t want to get up and order food or whatever. She wants to stay here. She wants to go back thirty minutes in time and feel all of this all over again.

She’s grateful for the circumstances that have allowed her to stay home this week. She’s grateful that her anxiety didn’t come up everyday for a whole seven days, she thinks that’s what allowed these feelings to come up at all, and for her to notice them, and for her to be able to stay with them. She’s amazed by how she’s been overwhelmed by a “positive” emotion after ages. She knows this was happiness, though she also knows that it’s gone, at least for the time-being.

She almost wishes the sky would be gloomy again.

014 – it’s okay if life is just one season after another

What if I somehow allowed myself to unwind with writing or with chores? What if I somehow resisted the urge to check twitter or instagram or other social media except for when I want to post? What if my breaks became productive? And honestly, I dislike that word a lot sometimes. But I don’t mean productive in terms of capitalism or whatever, but something that either leaves me feeling better or is otherwise necessary for me to do. Scrolling and mindless content consumption is just something that might give me the “illusion” of feeling better. Right now I’m writing since I’m waiting on a response from a coworker, I should probably be working now instead, but I’m mostly okay with the work I got done today so might as well as do something that leaves me feeling good.

What if I really looked at why I’m unable to let go of so much of my stuff? Why am I attached to things that I haven’t used in a couple of years? I’m definitely a hoarder. And I wonder what the need for “backup” items is. Where does it come from, what does it tell me about myself? What does my stomach feel so tense whenever I think about everything I should let go of? I know part of it is simply the fact that I’ve been putting it off for a while. But the other part I think is simply that.. I feel like I’m not ready to face all of it. Hence I escape and write about it. I suppose I could simply look at it from a “grieve old things, make room for new ones” perspective too, and that could help.

Okay I got distracted. I’m going to switch to using my personal laptop instead.

I think when people say “keep yourself busy” they forget to say that they probably mean “keep yourself busy with things you like to do”. It’s probably obvious but to me I feel like there’s a lot here that I missed out on. Sometimes I make random plans (e.g. social plans, vacations) to “stay busy” but end up feeling worse.

I think I need the time to really look at what I want to be “busy with” next, so that I don’t regret the decisions as much. Regret can be a pretty annoying feeling. Landing in situations where I feel like I don’t have enough control to change can feel extremely heavy. I think once you make a lot of wrong decisions you get quite wary of making wrong decisions again. Though I also think that self-blame for the past and fear of the future is probably just misattribution to some feelings that exist in the present.

I think the internet makes me feel like everyone really has it all figured out. People talk about moves and big changes and it feels like they happen quickly for many people. And maybe they do, but they also happen slowly for a lot of us, and there’s probably nothing wrong with that? I’m in a much better place than I was 6 months ago, and 3 months ago, and 3 weeks ago, and I can probably allow myself to be really grateful for that.

The planning phases are important. But being smart, compassionate and honest during the planning phase is important too. Maybe I was planning in terms of “finding joy”, whereas what I needed to plan for was simply “reduce worries”. It’s like being in an unhappy marriage and planning to find love, whereas the better plan could simply have been getting out of that marriage. Recognizing progress is important for future progress.

And who says I can’t find joy in the little things even when I’m reflecting on the past and planning for the short-term or long-term future? In the past, some of the best things have happened during these periods of limbo and transition. I think I can romanticize pretty much anything. So if I decide to make these temporary periods special, I know I’ll be able to do so.

The pizza dinner you have the first night you move into a new place, sitting on the floor and making plans about the colors you’re going to paint the walls. Developing romantic feelings for a city when you know you’re going to be leaving in three months. Coming to a new city for an internship, planning to only focus on work and getting to know the city but ending up discovering a love for cats instead. Saying goodbye to friends after a vacation and getting unexpectedly warm hugs from some of them.
It’s probably all there, should we choose to look at it. I don’t know why I used to have this feeling of wanting “permanency” and “stability” before letting myself experience joy and happiness, but now I think it’s not that important.

In fact, were these things special because they were ephemeral? What would it really mean, for me to have a permanent job and a (mildly) permanent house and permanent relationships? Would they really be permanent or would I only think of them as permanent? Does the (often false sense of) security actually add much value, or is it mostly illusive?

I have spent a lot of time telling people I miss them. I think the right thing to tell them is that I’m thinking of them. It’s so much more true. I think when we think of people, we’re probably thinking of some specific “time” or moments with them, we miss that. We can’t miss the people because we don’t even know who they might be now. I have spent a lot of time trying to mend broken friendships. But yes, maybe these things were important and special only because they exist in memory, and only because they changed.

So it’s okay that the next few months of my life are going to feel like a summer. And it’s also okay if that’s followed by another.

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References: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9324238-the-meaning-of-the-river-flowing-is-not-that-all