Husky mind

Recently, I was rejoicing quietly about the fact that I had been communicating with people in a professional capacity without excessive post-comms rumination. I didn’t do anything directly to attain this freedom, though I thought I might be able to trace its provenence. Regardless, it felt like I’d magically put things in their rightful place, instead of amplifying their importance and peril.

And then my grandma took bad and was taken into hospital, and there was not much for me to do to help. So, what little I could do, I did, peripherally and imperfectly, and then I tore it apart afterwards for every imperfection. The situation itself was, of course, important and perilous. But my part in it…largely uninfluential. I tried my best to help in a situation where people more capable than me were already handling everything, and that was all I could do. But it triggered my self-absorbed belief that if I’m not the MVP I don’t deserve to be playing. So I wasted a bunch of thoughts retroactively optimising my conduct – wishing that I’d been, at the very least, flawless in my execution of said peripheral tasks, so I could escape the fate of being considered, by any objective measure, a net loss.

And then I went to read to kids at my son’s school, and failed to maintain an appropriate level of order. The teacher handed me a pile of books and directed me to a room with the kids, which was not exactly what I’d expected things to look like. Straight off, I made the mistake of being ambiguous about what behaviour would be acceptable, because I hadn’t figured how this whole thing was going to work. So I spent most of the rest of the time trying to convince them to stop playing with toys and listen to stories instead. And then I sat in a tornado of self-criticism for most of the following night, unable to sleep for thoughts of how I should have handled things better, what this said about my parenting, when and how I could redeem myself, how irritating my incompetence must have been… A violent stampede of thoughts, altogether too concerned about myself, unable to simply accept my conclusions and go to sleep.

And I know this is why, generally speaking, I’m better at the things I do than most other people. Because I literally obsess over my flaws, at a rate completely out of proportion with the attention they deserve for normal human functioning. That does result in accelerated progress. But it also results in needless suffering. And, sometimes, it’s not worth it.

It’s why I also have a tendency toward avoidance; avoiding things that don’t matter because my brain will act like they do, and avoiding things that could matter because I’m scared I’ll crumble under their weight. If I’m going to do things, I prefer to have no choice in the matter. I’d volunteered for the school reading, and that was what made my inner critic more vicious, because to be anything less than perfect when I’m inflicting myself on others is a mortal sin.

But I am wondering if the problem is that my brain is built for bigger, tougher problems. Perhaps I’m like a husky without a sledge to pull. So I’m fabricating sledges to give myself something to do.

The only way to test that hypothesis, though, is to hitch me up to something heavy. Voluntarily. Are there any easier hypotheses to test first?

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Take the shirt off my back

I think I’m at risk of starting to look like a homeless person.

You see, my eras are defined sartorially. I buy clothes, I wear them ’til they break, I keep wearing them until the situation becomes untenable, I fix the clothes, I wear them ’til they’re unfixable, and then I reluctantly toss them and buy more clothes.

My boots, my coats, my trousers, my jumpers, my bags; they’re all wearing out. By which I mean they are all already broken, but haven’t fallen off me yet. I was out walking earlier, and realised the cuff of my winter coat has worn away to the extent that it is revealing its white innards. It has holes everywhere else too, inside and out, but the exposed stuffing seemed to be The Wake-up Call. If I do an honest inventory, a lot of items are going to find themselves in the bin.

I do have nice clothes, too. The ones I don’t wear as much. The fancy ones. But come to think of it, some of those are looking weathered.

I guess I get attached. I get attached to the person I am in these garments. Attached to their particular utility. To the history I have shared with them. To the fabric that will never precisely exist again.

I’ve always been like this – the more dilapidated the clothing, the more I love it. It used to be an aesthetic choice, and sometimes it still is. But if I could look from the outside, I think I’d see it differently.

So I guess its time for a new era.

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The lost meander

high contast black and white, grainy photorealism, parent and child walking together down sunlit street

I think something I have missed over the last year is living slow.

Not that I can say I’ve been living fast, exactly. More like I’ve been running along the knife-edge between adequate accomplishment and exhaustion. Getting the things done I needed to get done when I needed to get them done, and then crashing out while they didn’t need doing. All the while not really seeming to go anywhere all that interesting.

This morning my son and I took a leisurely morning walk to the local shop, and while we meandered through the sunlit streets, I realised how long it had been since I’d felt that peaceful ease of not having anywhere in particular to be for the next while, and just enjoying the slow journey from here to wherever we might go.

There is a lot of rushing around these days, but it’s not all rush. I try to build in parts to our week where we can slow down together, but the only way I can wangle it is if they do double duty – they need to tick off some other kind of purpose; education, enrichment, socialisation…there’s an undercurrent – an ulterior motive – and my body knows it.

We used to meander through the sunlit streets for no particular reason almost every day. And maybe that’s over now, but I hope not. I hope I can add it back in.

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Decision tree

high contrast black and white, grainy, tree planted in ground, growing arrows pointing in different directions

I just went through and deleted all of my drafts.

Most of them were unplanted seeds – random thoughts I liked the feel of but never enough to nurture into more than a few sentences.

A few were complete, unpublished entries written by a person in a different place and time. Eloquent, witty, no longer representative of either who I am or who I want to be. I thought it might be hard to part with them, but they had their time, and in it I decided to hold them back. They don’t have a future, unless I’m living my life wrong. Which, of course, I might be, but I’m not going to bet in favour of that reality. So they’re gone, and that feels almost as good as writing something new.

A few years ago I ripped up all my journals. I meant to burn them, and I tried once, but I didn’t have the equipment necessary to start a good enough fire. And I never got the equipment. And at this point I’m unsure whether I just dumped them in the recycling, or squirreled them away in a suitcase to be uncovered at some later date.

The decision to burn them felt liberating. Then, later, the failure to burn them felt relieving. Now, honestly I don’t care what happened to them, but if I find them, I’ll throw them out. They don’t represent me, and they hold no interest to me. I remember who I was in them. I’m sure there’d be a few surprising cringes lurking between their lines, but broadly, I understand their writer. And their writer was not me. And nor was she someone who had very much to teach me.

Before the big rip, I’d considered my journals precious. I would return to them, and experience new revelations. I was dealing with big lessons and the process was agonisingly repetitive. After the rip, I flip-flopped a bit, and so their usefulness swung from better off dead to in need of resurrection and back again. I’m not sure my decision over whether to burn or dump or store made any difference to that journey, and I’ll try to keep that in mind.

If you’re not sure what to do yet, the choice might not matter that much anyway.

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Conservation or conversation?

high contrast black and white, grainy photorealism, winding path made of words

My last bunch of posts have been scheduled in advance.

And I changed my theme to try out some of the wordpress functionality that I have been thoroughly ignoring for some time. Then I regretted it when I saw the results, but ploughed on bravely.

And I connected this to my Twitter account. My barely broken in Twitter account with 100 followers that rarely tiptoes beyond vss365 prompts and replies to Lex Fridman.

Then I didn’t like how it displayed the first post, so I deleted it, and panic-disconnected, then added silly AI images to my posts, then reconnected, and then it didn’t display the same way again so the images made no difference, but hey, at least we all had fun.

I seem to be trying something new. Something somewhat uncomfortable.

I might even stretch to a complete blog overhaul, given I’ve now spent several hours just making it look not too horrific to bear. Though that does sound ambitious.

I had been conserving myself for a long time, because for a while after my last relationship, getting through the day was the priority, and that didn’t feel guaranteed. But what once was a survival tactic has now become an easy habit. One it’s probably time to break. After all, what could I be conserving myself for, if not this?

I’m better when I write. That part’s simple. So…why not also make it a little bit complicated? Just a little bit – just enough to let it feel serious. And why not expend some of my preciously conserved energy on it too? At least enough to let it feel real.

I don’t know where I’m going, but if I don’t go, I’ll never find out.

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The kindness of strangers

black and white, grainy photorealistic image, one person handing a tangle of worms to another person

I don’t know if you know this, but I come here to, like, work my shit out. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the other methods I employ probably aren’t as good as this one. For some reason, writing myself clean with a dose of radical-though-likely-subconsciously-biased honesty, in front of downwards of a hundred strangers on the internet, plus a few people who know me, plus occasionally some people who want to date me, is the most effective way of detangling the dysfunction in my brain.

Of that ragtag audience, my favourites are the strangers, mainly because I can allow myself to believe that they are here because of something inherently interesting in what I am writing, rather than simply morbid curiosity or some sense of affection for the person I am outside of the confines of this space.

I don’t mind at all the other people being here; I don’t feel constricted by their presence (though I can imagine a reality in which that became true), it’s just that they play into my belief that there is nothing inherently worthy in what I have created here – they are here because of their interest in me, and probably their interest in me is what dictates how much of this disjointed monologue they’re willing to endure. The people who know me do have a habit of occasionally countering this by telling me they think it’s good, but of course they’re being more generous than genuine, right? And the people who want to date me, well, that’s a tangle of worms, isn’t it? Should I be flattered or offput or suspicious or grateful? Who the fuck knows?

Truth is, this place is part of me. People who come here have the opportunity of knowing me better, in some ways, than the people who know me out there. And I am grateful for anyone who takes the time to do so. But the meaning I take from their willingness to read my words is about them, rather than about me. I see it as a kindness. And maybe that’s best.

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