ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole

[ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole]

Cats love me because I am secretly a bunch of fish in a man suit

I yearn for the sea

[ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole]

Relearning how to walk

I had posted this in another community, however, I am now gracing it to the world (of tumblr), congrats guys. I hope whoever reads this enjoys it as much as I enjoyed writing it :)

I'm currently dealing with the struggle of having to relearn to walk all over again. It felt very natural at first, I knew how to make all the moves, fall in line just like everyone else, it just took a lot of effort. Talking to people, reading their faces, making the right ones myself, it all worked just fine.

And sure, yeah, there were certain things I couldn't quite figure out, paths I couldn't quite get the hang of. How to maintain friendships, develop emotional intimacy, I don't think I really understand it now either. But at least I had the basics.

Now I cannot even walk, and I don't know where to go from here.

Left foot in front? Right goes where? Things aren't as simple as they once were, don't make as much sense. They never did, I just didn't question it. Why did I have to start questioning it?

So if I can't walk, but I still want to get places, how do I go about it?

The answer is really quite simple, my way. Social ques and what is 'right' don't really gel with me. I want to forge friendships my own way. Honestly and openly, wear my heart on my sleeve, finally be myself for once. I only want to be myself, if only once.

I am just so, so tired.

I will probably keep taking steps, moving forward, hopefully in my own way.

But I am scared that I won't end up where I want to be, I am scared such a place doesn't exist for someone like me.

I will keep moving forward though.

It is all I can do.

[ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole]

Let me rest now

To lie my weary head down

To stop stabbing my nails into my flesh

Every time I see my reflection too sharply

Too sharply in my actions

In my words

In myself

In the self that they see

Those whose view is carved into me

So deep now that I do not know what I am anymore

Am I still something worth saving?

Maybe not

I no longer really care to know

[ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole]

It takes a little rephrasing

So I got inspired to write this after randomly prompting myself with my thoughts this morning to reflect over some of the battles I've been waging within myself regarding behaviour and vices that I'd like to change. This is as much to get the thought out there as it is to see if it resonates with others, hopefully it does :)

There's usually something about ourselves that we're not particularly fond of. Something we'd like to change, something we'd like to get better at, something we'd like to push away.

And it's often a constant source of pain. That we can't overcome these things, can't make the change, can't do the thing, can't keep it up. Life washes away good intentions, a stream powering its way over us, uncaring of our wants and dreams, simply pushing us forward, into the good and the bad, for better or for worse.

Yet still we try, still we struggle. We push and we push, we do this because we want to change. But all too often, I feel that we go about this in ways that are as harmful to ourselves as they are helpful.

I'm reminded of Sisyphus, him and his boulder. I'm trying to use the internet less, trying to avoid losing hours and days to the endless cycle of internet dribble, that's easy to perch your brain over, and mindlessly feed.

I'm trying to get over addiction. The tendency to relapse, not even when it's hard, not even at breaking point. The tendency to turn to something self destructive simply because you'd rather turn to that than face the waves and waves of boredom that are washing over you, drowning out everything else in a sea of grey, anything to bring a little colour.

And I get this sense of Sisyphus, here with me, always with me. I'm there with him, pushing that boulder, pushing for change. And every time I turn to something 'easy' something 'wrong' I fall back down with him. So close, so close to change, so close to perfection.

Change is not perfection, change is not a fixed state.

We do not make the big turnarounds. We do not throw away the bottle, flush the pills, smash our phones. Escape into a perfect paradise of cleanliness and untainted purity.

We struggle, we writhe and squirm and force our way through the mud and the grime. We push forward, one step at a time.

When I relapse, when I go back to those old ways of thought, old ways of being, I think that I've fallen down, all the way down, square one. And that's the easy way out.

That's the old ways tugging at me, telling me it's okay to go back to the way things were. That it doesn't matter, I failed, come back, come back home.

This denies all the work I've done, the work I will continue to do.

You don't fall down, this would assert that the work you did never even existed, that you never covered any ground at all. You did, you can't take that back, can never go back.

I have this tendency to extremes. I want to be perfect or I want to be damned. It is the easy way out. It denies my humanity, my complexity, that I can at once have the capacity for kindness and cruelty, that I must continually choose which one I want to be. Every day, every hour, every minute, every second.

It's tiring, I know it is. I don't always like knowing that it's a continual effort. But it has tremendous capacity to give us hope.

We can't go back, the work we have done will remain in us forever, even if we actively work to undo it. Those steps taken will always stay with us, forwards or backwards.

That's how I'd like to view it now. I didn't fall down, I took a step back, back from what I want to be. Maybe it was one, maybe two, maybe a whole lot more than a few. But a step back from the path I want to take doesn't lead me away from it entirely. I can always find it again, I can always go back.

In a way this might make us seem like Sisyphus still, but there is a difference. His struggle is eternal, ours has an end.

I will continue to struggle, I will continue to step forward. Even if this path doesn't end with me I will do whatever I can to walk as much of it as possible.

Because I know that every inch I move forward is an inch towards happiness. Not just because I'm closer to my goal, but because the act of moving towards it itself makes me a better person, makes me a better person in a way that I cannot so easily undo.

Don't despair if you take a step back.

The path is still there.

Waiting for you.

[ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole]

Fucking love Mob Psycho

I was prompted to think about this by a post I saw recently, and I just want to gush about how much I fucking love Mob Psycho, namely the underlying message that I feel lies at the heart of the series, and really all of One's writing in general, albeit I feel that it's done best in Mob Psycho.

If everyone was not special, could you be who you want to be? it's the opening lyrics of the first season's ost, and it's also kind of the overall message of the whole anime. As an entire species, I feel that we are bogged down by the notion of 'special'.

What exactly does it mean to be special? Really I feel it boils down to anything that you can use to justify saying you're better than other people, that they're lesser than you, that you're 'special'.

We judge this by many and any metrics, at all ages, throughout history. Can you run really fast? Are you good with people? Were you just born different? This kind of mindset bleeds into the stories we tell, really I think of Harry Potter being my example of this, Harry is literally 'the chosen one' He's better than everyone, and it's not because of anything he earns, he's just born that way.

Mob Psycho is at its heart, all about rejecting this idea.

It started in One Punch man, criticising the idea of the superhero power fantasy, the idea that they are better than us, that special powers make you more deserving of authority or status. Mob Psycho takes this a step further. Would special powers make you happy?

The powers aren't the important part, it's how they define you in relation to others. We want to be the ones that are looked up to, we want to be the ones that are revered, we want to be special.

And Mob could be called special, he's blessed with a talent in something that far outshines what anyone else could hope to compete with. But he doesn't let that define him.

In any other piece of media this would be a flaw, Mob should embrace his powers, he should understand that he is better than others, that he shouldn't waste his time on fitness, that he should gain his confidence from his powers. What makes Mob Psycho so special is how this isn't the case.

Mob doesn't take happiness from his powers. He recognises that although he may outshine others in this area, that doesn't make him better than anyone overall, that he shouldn't stop trying to grow because of them, that it is important that he doesn't rely on them.

We all have our own unique individual strengths, but it is undeniable that for anything we may be good at, there may be someone else who seems hopelessly better than us at it. Mob Psycho exists to remind us that this doesn't make them better than us, nor does it bar them from growth.

This mindset fundamentally clashes against the ways in which we are taught to view the world. We are meant to see leaders and celebrities, athletes and heroes, meant to think that they have something that we don't, that this makes them better than us, that means they know better than us. Mob Psycho seeks to remind us that they are only better than us in some ways, that they are only luckier, only more blessed, that they are not exempt from growth or flaw, that they are not different from us.

There is nothing that makes someone special, nothing that makes someone better than anyone else. For some, this may seem like a defeatist ideology to take, they need to draw their happiness from feeling as though they could be above others.

Mob Psycho shows a worldview where we are all struggling together, we are in competition with no one, there is only ourselves, our fight to improve ourselves however we can, and the ways that this fight can help us help others.

I fucking love Mob Psycho, and I hope to see many more pieces of media like it.

[ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole]

Gardens of the mind

The world flows through my eyes and into my own. Myriad gardens of growth, blossoming flowers of colours too numerous for me to count, competing with each other to see the light, always reaching, not always grasping.

Gnarled roots criss-cross the floor. Old vines, dug into the skin of the trees that tower over the lesser things, that watch and watch and watch. That take in what they wish to, that take in what they don’t. The poisons that eat away at them, that turn the leaves sour, that sicken the air.

The sunlight shining in through my inner eye. The watchful guiding hands that stretch down from it, that tend lovingly to the things it knows so well, even if they prick the fingers, spill blood onto the floor. The things that soothe those cuts, beauty that blooms even in the darkest of places, the darkest of times.

So much hidden away within me, so much that may never spill out into the world. May never be seen by eyes other than my own. Maybe for the best. 

What would they think? The other prying eyes, the gardens that grow out of my sight. How would my own survive? Out there in the harsh wilderness of the world. Where they may be nurtured and held by a thousand other hands. Where they may be just as likely be torn apart and trampled on.

I don’t want my growth to remain just within myself.

It may hurt. It may sting and I may sob, grieve those parts of me that could not find their place out there. That were turned away, that were turned on me. It may hurt for as long as I am willing to share.

I will not stop.

I will take the pain and the pleasure as they come.

I will continue to plant my seeds wherever I can. I will carry on.

May they grow and bloom long after I am gone.

[ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole]

hi, are you comfortable with people dming you?

It's a first but yeah I'm cool with it, thanks for asking :)

[ambiguouslyambivalentarsehole]

This is a bit of a long one, especially for a first post. But as someone who's trying to be more active as a writer, and push my boundaries, I wanted to share my work somewhere publicly that I'd feel somewhat comfortable doing so. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :)

There’s a concept in Buddhism, you’ve probably heard of it, but it might not be something that you’ve actually heard of, at least not the way I’m going to explain it, it’s called Karma.

Now what many people might think of when they hear this word is some insufferable person, confidently asserting the notion that if you do good deeds then the Universe will reward you, and if you do bad deeds you’ll be punished. This is not what Karma means in a Buddhist context.

In a Buddhist context, Karma refers to the ways that our intentions, and our actions of both body speech and thought form who we are. One analogy that I particularly like is the one that our mind may be thought of as a field: All that we are is the things that are growing in that field, some are so big that they are fundamental parts of us, some are so small that we might not even notice them. And it is through what parts we give attention, what parts we feed, that we nurture the things that remain and grow within us, and likewise, through the parts we ignore, that we starve, that wither and die, that are no longer a part of us. Karma is less about how our actions might bring us good or bad fortune, and more about how our actions shape who we are, and through that, shape how we experience life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about life lately, namely the one that I live. I live in the world, as many of us do. I also live not in the world, as many of us do, I live in the internet. The internet is everywhere nowadays, many people now don’t know a time without it. It is as much the landscape upon which we live as the one where we wake and work and eat and sleep. What kind of a landscape are we living on? How is it affecting who we are?

I’d like to come back to the point I made earlier, about what things we feed and what things we starve. We generally don’t get much of a choice about our environment: where we were born into, what families, what class, what race. But we do get to decide what kind of internet we live in, in fact, the internet is really good at conforming to what we tell it we want. And so I’d like to pose the question to whoever is reading this: What on the internet are you feeding, and what are you starving?

I pose this question in the light of the current physical world we live in. The world that seems to be increasingly descending into fascism and hate, the world that seems to many to be doomed, the world where the ruling class look down on us as we fight amongst each other, too tired to look up. We all have our own reactions to this world we live in, one thing that I would like to touch on is that we all share one thing in common: We know that shit’s fucked, and we want to do something to fix it.

Many of us want to fight for real structural change, to do whatever we can to take power away from the ruling class, and into the hands of the people. For this to happen, it would generally be best for the people to be united on this topic. We generally are not.

Politics politics politics

If I have to hear that word again I might just scream. So many ways of doing things, so many names, so many ways to complicate something that I think is really quite simple. Either you want everyone to live well, or you want some people to live well. Well I for one want everyone to live well.

But how do we do this? More and more people are willing to turn to methods that promise them wellbeing, only at the small cost of the harm of others. Xenophobia, misogyny, racism, all of these things really come down to this one way or another. Things aren’t well, they can be, you’ll be okay, fuck those other guys.

Can we convince everyone that we can all live well? Together and in harmony? Many people will tell you this is unrealistic, these people need to dream bigger, but I can understand what they’re saying.

In times where most of us are struggling just to survive, these things can seem impossible, but there have been so many throughout history that would have felt just the same. We made it through them, we can make it through this.

But how?

Well for that, I’ll finally come back to the question I posed oh so many words ago: What on the internet are you feeding, and what are you starving?

In Buddhism, the idea of right effort refers to the act of abandoning qualities that are harmful or unhelpful to us, and cultivating ones that are devoid of harm, that can help us.

We often think that to combat bad things, we must fight them, face them head on, read the bad headline, watch the annoying video, see the dumb take, oh my god did you SEE what Donald Trump said??? And before you know it all you’re seeing and thinking of is all the things that are going wrong and you don’t have any energy for what is right.

When you fight something, you stay near it, wrapped up in it, it’s almost impossible to avoid it influencing you. It can be best to simply ignore it. But it’s not enough to ignore, we must cultivate.

What kind of internet landscape do you cultivate? When you go on the web, what kind of things do you see?

We should endeavour to be welcomed onto the web by the things that are going well, the ways humanity is progressing in the right direction, the things that are taking us there. We should endeavour to see the people who are working to spread unity, spreading compassion and care, fighting to implement positive change. When we seek these things, eventually they’ll come to us, and when they do, so too will the people and communities that come with them.

And as we build up these communities, grow them, make them stronger, spread them out onto the internet as far and as wide as possible, so too will their presence grow.

And maybe, as those who are mired and hate and division, for whatever reasons those may be, they may come across some trace of this, of what has been built and is growing. And they may like it, or it may at least show them that something else exists, some other way of living.

In the world we’re living in, there are so many spaces for people to destroy themselves, to grow the things that are harmful and unhelpful. And if we want to combat that we should fight as hard as possible to make it just as easy to find spaces to heal in, to grow for the better, to find a different way of living.

The end goal is unification, the end goal is for the oppressed to rise up together, to fight for the common goal of everyone’s right to a good and happy life. And now more than ever we have the tools to do so. The internet is an incredibly powerful weapon against the oppressors. Already so many are using it right, already we are moving in the right direction.

I have hope that we can continue to do so.

This piece has been inspired by my faith, my own journey as a person, and by a desperate need for community, and the ways that the internet has helped me feel just a little less lonely :)