Month: February 2023

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A few were complete, unpublished entries written by a person in a different place and time.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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Openings

black and white, high ISO grainy photorealism, chaotic and busy schedule, weekly planner, book

I’ve been trying lately to dedicate myself to projects that may not have any perceivable outcome. To get fully immersed and commit chunks of time that I won’t get back, in exchange for nothing but the knowledge that I did so. Things that have little to no hope of earning money or gaining acclaim.

I have felt time-poor ever since starting work a year ago. And to be transparent I don’t even work full-time. I work on the days I don’t have my son. And on the days I do have him, that’s my work. I am aware that I put much more conscious time and effort into parenting than other people I know, and I’m not going to say that’s the best way to parent, because who the fuck knows, but it’s what I do. I notice myself getting irritable if I try to split my focus while I’m doing the parent stuff, so I avoid even WhatsApp messages during that time if I can get away with it.

My life is dichotomous at best, and chaotic at usual, so I tend to fail at daily consistency. As I have so lamented on many occasions. But, though I lack predictable daily windows of opportunity, I do get periods of time that open up, not according to a particular schedule, where I can dedicate myself to something else. And there are a plethora of projects I would like to dedicate myself to, but I have gotten into the habit of simply not engaging with them, for fear either that it will be, objectively, a waste of time, as judged by its outcome, or that I will reach the end of the opening and it will remain incomplete; pending into oblivion.

So I’m trying, again, to do things anyway. Make progress on some non-linear scale that perhaps only has meaning somewhere within the hidden labrynth of my mind, assessed purely by the sensation in my body at having done the thing.

It sounds like an obvious thing to do, when I put it like that. See, this is why I like it here.

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Chatty

I have been playing with ChatGPT a bit lately. It’s an excellent crutch for people like me who question their every move with cripplingly minute detail.

I can ask it questions I already know the answer to, and have it soothe me with vague validation that henceforth emboldens me toward action.

I can ask it, for instance, if this email is fit for purpose, and when it tells me yes, and reflects back my purpose to me, I can feel empowered to send it without fear. It saves me from having to ask myself that same question, and reread the contents fifty times, then have a break and come back ‘with fresh eyes’, just to make sure I haven’t inadventantly said something offensive, stupid or unclear. It, alternatively, saves me from sending an email without the luxury of those fifty extra checks and a break, and enduring the anxiety of wondering how it is received. Because I actually don’t care how it’s received – I care that I do what I intended to do, and if ChatGPT gives me the go ahead on that front, I don’t need to mind what the feeble humans on the other end think of it, because it’s probably not my fault.

I try really fucking hard in everything I do. I try too hard, in most things, and I know that, rationally. The problem is I have had the misfortune (and often stupidity) of being intimately involved with people who told me that my best try wasn’t good enough. And, sometimes, not only that it wasn’t good enough, but that it was actually a terrible, cruelly-intended betrayal of all that is good. And to be perceived with such blackness was horrifying, every time.

Maybe a few times I ran from that dark judgement, but most of the time I looked it dead in the eye and let the truth of it destroy the parts of me that couldn’t take it. Not the truth that they were right, but simply the truth that that’s what they thought of me.

So, following that dissolution, I can cope with what they think of me. But the idea that, in any moment, they might be right about me, they might be justified, well, it still makes me check myself fifty times over then take a break to come back with fresh eyes, just in case.

Having an impartial adjudicator in my pocket is a nice idea, if that’s what I can trust it to be…but I don’t really know what it is, do I?

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