findingmyplacedotcom

[findingmyplacedotcom]

how life feels when you accept that you’re the problem

[findingmyplacedotcom]

Mg1 - 7:50pm 07/06/25

Dead to me

My spine still remembers the sound of that man yelling outside, footsteps, marching down the driveway like justice. footsteps on gravel, the sound of wolves pacing just out of sight.

They said I broke her. They said I bent her mind, shaped her into something unnatural. Groomed her, betrayed her, pulled her into darkness. It didn’t matter that I had held her up through her teenage first-world grievances. entwined her through every crack and rift of my life. I had listened and stayed. and been what I thought was a friend. but they were not interested in truth, They needed a villain. I was nearby. That was enough.

Disposable

She did not protect me. She did not say stop. She let them devour me, inch by inch, in the name of survival.

It spread like sickness. Her version of the story entered their ears and rewired their memories. She infected every person in reach turning them one by one with soft lies and sharp glances. They began to look at me like I was something rotting beneath their shoes. The contagion wasn’t in her words, it was in her certainty. And they believed her. Because certainty is loud. Louder than nuance. Louder than me. She let them devour me, inch by inch, She let them feast on me like carrion. Stripped me to bone in the name of survival. I watched my own reputation bleed out in the mouths of people I once trusted.

She is no longer living in the version of the world where we sit beside each other and laugh at the nothingness of afternoons. I don’t speak to her. I never really knew her.

[findingmyplacedotcom]

Sylvia Plath, from a letter featured in The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. 1: 1940-1956

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who's doper than this bitch??????? who's freer than meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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my strange pagan upbringing - 6:45pm 02/06/25

I visited my grandparent's tiny house down the hill again after a long long time. It has changed a lot, a saddening thing to see the house ageing with its residents, the trees surrounding dying off like a terrible, bleak omen

The house itself was a kind of shrine. Books are stacked to the roof like bricks in a cathedral. Gaelic and Latin dictionaries leaned against mythology anthologies. Dried leaves were pressed into encyclopaedias. Every son, daughter, granddaughter, and niece who have come out of that house are strange in a very specific way a type of feral intellect all these Writers, poets, painters, environmentalists, and philosophers. These people who cry about trees and name birds by sound, argue over etymology. All leaving bread crusts on windowsills for the fae and salt by the door just in case.

My grandmother had been raised in a nunnery. The kind where guilt is baked into the bread, woven into the cloth she wore. She brought with her a quiet Catholicism, not devout, not quite willing, but lingering like incense. She believed in saints and rain in equal measure. She scolded the crows like they were neighbours. She had a way of turning every room into a chapel not through holiness, but through her way of building community. Every ritual had weight. She kept a statue of the Virgin Mary in the kitchen window, next to the dish soap and the basil, watching over the kettle. In that house, Mary was the only person allowed in the kitchen while Rita is cooking

We were not religious, not really. But we were devout in our own way devoted to storms and stories, to strange rituals passed down like recipes with half the instructions missing. seeing the house again has reminded me of how my upbringing contrasts to those I've met in the real world

Most people I know grew up in shiny white carpeted houses with meal plans and politely ignored grief. Their families owned air fryers and worship the AFL, go to soccer training every week like its mass, no rain gods, no mirrors and wind chimes hanging in the garden to scare off the evil spirits, no complicated political stances on nettles.

Sometimes I wonder if it made me unfit for the world, to be brought up by such misfits. This upbringing that reveres fairies and scolds crows. I speak in metaphors they mistake for melodrama. I react to weather like it’s a person in the room. I feel things that don’t have names and carry grief that isn’t entirely mine. But then I think: maybe the world is what’s unfit. Maybe it’s just loud and fast and too easily impressed by certainty.

And though the trees are thinning and the rituals are quieter now, I don't speak all the languages that live in that house. The faith does remain. Not in any god with a name. But in tea that boils before the rain. In books that can never be thrown out. In the statue of Mary, still watching over.

[findingmyplacedotcom]

Show must go on - 7:37pm 01/06/25

- life is about the journey of self discovery

In my experience, self-discovery doesn’t feel like a journey. It feels like being given a script halfway through a play and told to improvise, the lights are up the audience is watching and I don't even know what character I am playing today. I didn’t choose to be alive, it was brought upon me and there doesn’t seem to be a director in charge here to lodge complaints with.

For me, one of the most defining aspects of self-discovery has been the exhausting performance that is human interaction and my attempts at it, therefore being forced through the biblical, world-ending deaths of friendships I thought would last forever.

the experience of self discovery for me has orbited around other people, somehow, while being so deeply cynical of humans, the world, and mildly allergic to connection. people are still very important to me and my development, As it turns out, I, as a human, really do need connection and interaction, That truth crept up on me slowly and against my will. Which is a shame, because I was really hoping to live alone in a cave and never explain my tone ever again. alas people remain the mirror I keep looking into; the audience I pretend not to notice, but always scan for reaction.

The ugliest, most useful kind of growth has come from sitting in the silence that was once filled with the noise of a relationship with another, You learn who you are when someone exits your stage and doesn’t come back, Nothing has revealed my character like the moments I’ve had to rebuild it on the spot.

self-discovery isn’t just shaped by abandonment. It’s revealed in the experience. I’ve found myself doing dishes in someone else’s kitchen at 1 a.m., sitting in the backseat of cars with music too loud to talk over, and waking up on couches that aren’t mine but feel like safety. scenes that arent in the spotlight, but side stage. Humans, for all their flaws, are the one thing that have made this unbearable performance of being alive occasionally beautiful. We’re not meant to come to be ourselves in isolation. We’re meant to be witnessed in the mess, we become ourselves by accident and improvised.

If life is the show, and self-discovery its plot, then it’s not a linear story. It’s jagged, unpredictable, often embarrassing, and always people-shaped. One missed cue, one opening-night disaster, one exit of a character and the entrance of another. I did not arrive as myself, and I am not who I will end as, I am still mid-scene and improvising as everyone is.

[findingmyplacedotcom]

Everything is overwhelming…. and still I persist

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I care, I'm desperate and that is embarrassing of me

Wednesday 28/05/25 11:14pm

the lonely, isolated feelings really do get worse at night like some sort of depressed werewolf, keeping it together until 2:34am and suddenly overcome with the need to be wanted. I’m ready to throw myself into the sea over someone who once asked if I’d seen Fight Club.

The overwhelming urge to do a Catherine Earnshaw and deliriously jump out a window in a linen-wrapped rage. I do crave attention in a Victorian manner, to be diagnosed with hysteria and wandering womb syndrome, be sent off to the seaside, convalesce in the countryside for a few months, sounds lovely, frankly. I will gladly lie in a sunlit chair with trembling hands and read tragic poetry until I perish from the terrible ailment of being misunderstood.

My modern loneliness has no romance. doesn’t even get lace or laudanum, a cotton night dress to cavort in I have no manor, no moors. only a rental with black mold and flickering lights which do nothing but mock me.

I’m “focusing on myself.” right now, which means I haven't been messaging people back. if they really love me they will send me an anquished handwritten to me mourning my absence y'know. Or at the very least I excpect a playlist that says “I saw this and thought of your very unique and specific psychological damage.”

But instead I’m watching the ceiling like it might blink first, doing all-nighters for the sunrise. Because if I make it to morning, I win. Not the war just the skirmish between me and the hour that eats people alive.

The Catherine Earnshaw impulse does fade by dawn. I put those dramatic thoughts back on the shelf next to my teenage journals, unmailed letters, and misunderstood poems by my 13 year old ghost.

i get up, i leave my manor of depravity and sorrow and I pretend to be a person once again.

[findingmyplacedotcom]

[ID: 3 green leaves with text stamped on them. They say "It's so hot and the sky's so blue", "I want people to know me", "but it's so hard to tell them". ]

[findingmyplacedotcom]

the youth yearn for community, my DISTAIN for the misuse of therapy language - Sunday 25/05/25 5:15pm

Capitalism thrives on that third space not existing and a lack of community; Which I have noticed budding in the younger generation. Community is inconvenient for systems built on profit.

Because community means people showing up for each other instead of swiping their cards, It means free meals shared in mismatched bowls, It means borrowed jumpers and shared prescriptions, It’s sleeping on someone’s couch when you don’t have the words for what’s wrong, It means soft places to land that no one profits from.

Capitalism hates softness, It hates slowness, and peaceful lives, It hates benches that invite loitering.

And so. it takes them away. It wants us tired and working, lying around at home. It survives off our loneliness and lack of community. I see young people on benches outside of shops, They gather in car parks and Macca’s booths and skate ramps and bus shelters and grassy strips behind industrial estates hardly being able to go outside without having to spend money, on the side of the road when there should be benches, fully grown bodies laying around on park playsets, walking back and forth across their childhood towns, which feel very small after doing this routine for so long.

I find that these young people I've met now parrot “you don’t owe anyone anything” like it’s scripture. that they heard from their friend's boyfriend's mum's therapist. And maybe, yes, in some cases, someone who’s been the emotional equivalent of Mother Mary. Someone who’s drained themselves dry for years, then maybe that advice is favourable, but I don't think that advice is quite directed at self-indulgent 18-year-olds. So, no. I disagree with the philosophy that you don't owe anyone anything. You do owe people something. You’re a person. Living among other people. You owe decency. You owe empathy. You owe not ghosting someone just because you’ve decided that protecting your energy means cutting off anyone who has had a bad couple of days or asked how you are twice in one week.

We’re not meant to be closed systems.

We’re meant to bump into each other, spill drinks, overstay dinners, sleep on your friend's floor, cry on trains, drink and smoke in each other's backyards having the messy non-sober conversations, miss your bus, pass someone a blanket without being asked. Find yourself doing dishes in someone else's kitchen in the aftermath of a house party. That’s not being CODEPENDENT or 'gaslighting'. You shouldn't expect praise and a reward. That’s being alive. That’s being part of something. That is the community you are craving deep down

[findingmyplacedotcom]

Thursday 4:03am 01/05/25 - Tumblr is my journal tonight

My room smells faintly like cigarettes again. I don’t smoke. I never have. But the smell is everywhere lately in old jackets, the air coming through my window, on people I get too attached to, in the air after someone’s walked past and left something behind. It lingers in a way that feels personal.

Sometimes I think I want to smoke just to be near that feeling. It reminds me of half-finished conversations, people I've met, cold air, someone’s laugh echoing in an alleyway. The kind of nights that feel like they could have meant something. The smell doesn’t make me think of addiction or danger; it makes me think of proximity. Of closeness. Of being wanted, or at least seen.

I’m nineteen in the waiting room between versions of myself. I tried to be someone I wasn't last year with a friend I thought I could trust and it ended in disaster, it was biblical. A complete collapse. The kind of friendship-ending that leaves a crater, not a scar. One moment, we were inseparable. The next, I was collateral damage in a story I didn’t even get to narrate. No one prepares you for the grief of being misunderstood by someone who swore they got you. and so in these months before uni i will reinvent myself again, and again if i have to

This time, not to be liked. But to be truly myself again. get rid of this fake person I created. Even if it’s messy. Even if I contradict myself every week. Even if I sometimes miss the version of me that fit better into someone else’s world.

I keep imagining someone next to me. Not anyone specific. Just the idea of them. Warm. Breathing. Existing beside me in life, It’s strange how intense the need can be, not even for love, just for presence. Someone who fits into the silence without needing to fill it. Someone who smells like cigarettes and someone else's shampoo and new beginnings.

I haven’t found all of my people yet. The ones who make you forget to overthink, the ones who dance without irony and text you just because they thought of you in line at Coles. I want that so badly it makes my chest hurt. But all I have right now is the version of myself that goes home early, that smiles too politely, that listens more than she speaks. I do all nighters just to feel that ecstacy of the sun coming up

It will be messy, awkward, and real. I’ll still carry the memory of last year like a ghost in my pocket, and I’ll still flinch when someone’s kindness feels too easy, like I forgot the last time I trusted too fast.

But I won’t be small again.

And I’ll still be chasing that nostalgic cigarette smell I am so attracted and attached to, wherever it leads me.

[findingmyplacedotcom]

me as a writer

[findingmyplacedotcom]

i found the meaning of life on a bathroom wall

Train station. cubical three. no ted talk, no angsty coming of age movie in sight just graffiti on the door that doesn't lock unless you lift it with your foot and pray, fluorescent lighting that would make anyone question all their life choices, particularly sunscreen related ones. the profound thoughts on the door written in angry sharpie "you have to leave this place to live" amusingly existential for bathroom graffiti, a sacred artform usually reserved for phone numbers and declerations of love for brad, lauchie, and chad.

this one did stick with me though as it is what I have been hearing my entire life, and whoever wrote this wisdom had clearly escaped. or at least made it as far as the next postcode before getting smacked with cold hard reality and a mykie fine.

my parents call my town, and the whole peninsula really, a "black hole" in which you cannot leave for long, like a gravitational pull all the way back to old people town. they did leave, a few times in their twenties, always getting pulled back with life lessons like don't live with roommates and don't trust real estate agents who say "quirky" he wont get rid of the cockroaches. everyone comes back eventually, my parents came back for the last time when I was born pulling me in. people leave with backpacks and ambition and return with debt and babies

i am nineteen i have not lived yet. i do not drive it feels like a commitment instead I haunt train stations and bus stops, I loiter and watch the departures like horoscopes I imagine I am a missed announcement away from being interesting. while loitering I am back in that bathroom broken door and offensive lighting and all, above the hand dryer it was written "a black hole" the universe finds my angst amusing.

i have not left yet. i am orbiting the black hole is pulling me in, my mother doesn't want me to leave, I am still loitering and I have not lived yet.

Toilet graffiti is the purest form of art, no edits, no filters, just images of someone's meltdown or epiphany before the autoflush kicks in, and so, next time I find myself in that bathroom, I will respond, a status update of sorts, "thinking about it".