Tag: writer

Are we not what happens to us?

Today, I feel distracted but aware. Stagnant and paralyzed by either thoughts or their absence.  I suppose I am trying too hard to make things work, to make myself useful and good. I had a soul-enriching conversation the other day. I left the room elated, ready for any shadows lurking around the next corner. I felt proud. I hardly feel like that anymore. The default lately is listlessness. My willingness disappears before it even falls into the periphery. I asked someone the other day if we mistake melancholy for contentment. I knew they weren’t the same, but the somber, this suspension, seems not uncommon. I wake up to the emotion, faint in its appearance but apparent in its imposition, as it looks at me straight in the eye as though I must nurse it all day. I sweat the day’s efforts so I can marinate and soak up the dregs. The week wears me well. I reify the week’s emotional residue by emoting what this is I am experiencing, before I can allow myself to leave my desk.

Write anything. Write shit.

The day’s highlight: my son’s deliberate arrangement.

Write about the impermanence of worldly pleasures and pain. Write about new buildings, deforestation, and lavish getaways. Write about isolation. Write about squeezing yourself into a space that you don’t quite fit in. And how you oscillate, deciding how to perform, that you fold into yourself anyway.

I stare into boxes where I am shelved, but I don’t stare long. I nod at assumptions, without agreeing to them. I save the small talk and prepare for misunderstandings. I hear the familiar dial tone when we disconnect, and I still hear it when I hang up.

Through this evolution, we emulate ideas and identities, and become ourselves anyway. We wonder if we would be confronting the unconscious mind if we were to leave what isn’t serving us. We ask ourselves whether we are only allowing the good and not the whole in this lived experience. We shuffle through work and passions and misplace our values. 

I am divided between seeking growth with caveats and authenticity and peace. Then I forget why I began in the first place.  I remember where to find the exit door, yet my paralysis keeps me directionless.

We try to become and embody as much and as many as humanely as possible, and are reduced to feeling empty, frayed, and corroded.

reorienting, moving through time and space

Reorienting from losing your balance; moving through time and space. Yeah, it feels like that. Those two are never too far apart.

The cerebellum, a component of the cerebral structure, receives unconscious signals from the body. The cerebral cortex deciphers these signals, noting where the body is in space, particularly during movement. Shifting and flowing through poses can help with balance and proprioception.

The cerebellum is responsible for muscle memory. It detects imbalances and coordinates body and eye movement. This helps us adapt to complex movement patterns, making them feel more second nature.

a good place to wait

The other day, I was at a good place to wait. I shuffled through my options and browsed a few job postings online. The job descriptions sounded inconceivable, leaving me tone-deaf. They were resoundingly plangent and eerily atmospheric like from a bad dream or an alt sci-fi world beyond me. They were lengthy and esoteric. Like, What does this even mean?

I’ve eaten the dust of trailblazers, envied the prosaic lives of my wealthy peers and known the ridicule of highbrow intellectuals. It must be common to feel like this: to live parasitically off others to satisfy, or at the least address, that pang of literary hunger, and to feel a tad dated with the slow, yet aggressive prevalence of artificial intelligence.

I am in this interim, but I was just here. I haven’t recognized whether to capitalize on what I know or deviate from a path I’ve been walking. Lately, it’s a lot of feeling stuck, waiting for any available opportunity to emote what this means. Opportunities these days mean a quiet empty house for a couple of hours, a good sleep and being aware of my thought patterns. If the opportunity presents itself as accessible, I’m lucky to string a few words together. A few years ago, I convinced myself to stop looking for meaning, but to start, to throw myself into the abysmal vacancy knowing I had nothing to lose.

I needed to humor myself.
I needed to write like them.
Move and shake like them.

a good place to wait

But I also needed to retire this idealistic view of where I needed to be and instead, identify the process.
I needed to write words on Post-its to keep words close to me at all. I found myself referring to dog-eared pages of books from seven years ago to recoil in emotion. My subjective attitude toward reality has always shackled me to this writer-life, far from a career that I found only exists in my daydreams or others.

I needed to continue feeling alive, despite feeling unwell. Recognize where the fount of my inexhaustible force, that zeal, is. Is it dormant in the continuity of thought and feeling? Found in the relentless quest of finding meaning? Is it deep in the crevice of struggle? Somewhere in between relationships or fact and fiction?

Lately, the world has been loud and infallible at cajoling me to move and live based on the grounds of logic. But as writers, we know that we are spurred by sensations and instincts, qualities we ration to keep our identities preserved, ourselves known or our sanity whole. It is our insanity keeping us alive, albeit brittle, and functional to seek greater depth in understanding and connection.

However, the disconnect, the chasm, never felt or looked so vast as it does now.

S P A C E

It was yesterday when Facebook posts were either inner monologues or rib-tickling, witty remarks on a good day. I still look forward to Instagram captions that aren’t too far from diary entries, ones that do not yield to back-and-forth harangues in the comment section, but rather support, or better, no comments at all.

Just space.

But why can’t we just listen?

Holding space for others is not natural. Because while we itch and fidget with this relentless dire need to speak over listen, nothing, let alone effective, gets transmitted to the receiving end.

The ego merely does not exist, it pervades. It pools around. Bleeds.

How do we notice what’s unfolding when we are too preoccupied with overlooking? How do we ponder the mystery? Wistfully stare into questions?

I neither know how to feel nor know what to believe on most days. That’s okay. Not knowing is terrifying. But it allows for receiving. Committing is an uphill battle when you are often inspired by contradictory things, people even. I bop from one polarizing state to the other, from self-deprecation to self-idealization. I am a POS to those close to me and a saccharine joy the next. It’s paralyzing most times and I often do nothing, like almost not posting this. If I never knew how to commit to a 9-to-5 job or how I feel about today’s chaos, it was maybe my middle-of-the-road approach and my processing of information, that came at me in droves.

My neurosis can account for that.

But I’ll remember that it is words with which I involve myself; artists whom I aspire to, but am careful not to envy. And the illusory space I hope to find myself in with the fiction I write.

Pause. Quietude.

I am not different from most. I am neither special nor spectacular. I just am.

As I expose myself to new experiences, walk new paths, and condition new habits, I’ll hope to disempower older, useless ones. I will follow the conception of thought as it shifts and shapes into some matter that words, careless ones, will fail to capture.

We won’t always have the right words to express what’s inhabiting the mind through entries, captions or prayers.