honestintensecontradiction-blog

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Well, my mind is still a swarming mess, but there’s been some progress and here’s it:

When I say I want to do, lalala, previous post, what I meant is simply this: to be a writer, or a philosopher, or a person who studies human life in any way, one must, to a very high degree, be an observer; one must look at the world around themselves, look at other people go by their lives, understand it, think on it, and then record it. These of course are also acts of doing; after the observing, the writing is an act of doing; of course they are doers, and quite courageous, because you need to have the strength to accept reality as it is - and it can be quite fucked up - and make sense of that, tackle it, live with it and understand the motives behind it, and then even find the words for it. 

The people who are being written about, however, are quite oblivious in comparison. They go about their lives and focus on the small every day things, living life one day at a time, not even having the time for bigger, broader contemplation. The thinkers willingly let go of this blissful distraction and focus on breaking life down, on looking life in the face and tackling it head on - you have to be brave, and quite masochistic, to want to take all this on.

The reason I want to switch from the writer to the protagonist is because it seems easier; getting stuck in the small things might mean losing larger perspective, but over all it seems much simpler, like there’s breathing space. I understand that my worldview might seem quite black and white at this point, but that’s not the case, I promise. I’m just desperately trying to break life down into tags and labels so I can navigate it without losing as much of my sanity. But I think being a thinker and being reflective are what I am by nature; it’s Who I am, and honestly, who I’ve always wanted to be. But I also know it shouldn’t be this hard and I’m just trying to make sense of it, in a way that I’ll understand.

I know extremes are always off and that balance is the ultimate answer, but I don’t actually know how to get there yet, and I haven’t found my language of it yet, so while I look for that, I’m going to work on finding my own voice, instead of just passively waiting, you know? I think that’s the point of this blog.

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For some time now, my life has been on pause. And upon reflection - and there is such a thing as too much of it after which it starts to feel toxic instead of helpful - I realise that my life happens in random spouts. It happens intensely and clearly and then for long periods of time it pauses and then it resumes - or restarts, I’m not quite sure what I do.  But the more important thing is to figure out why I do this. It’s not just exhaustion, in fact not doing things is very exhausting, more in fact than being overworked because there isn’t even that sense of accomplishment and contentment at the end of the day. I think I’m waiting for the right time, the right circumstances, the right environment. But theoretically, I know that there is no right and that life is now and that we should be living every minute of it. But I still hesitate about starting right now, in the middle, with no direction and no clear aim. For instance, I appreciate art for art’s sake but I haven’t been able to free-flow like that yet.  So I started thinking about what it might be that’s stopping me, and what I’m waiting for; and more importantly, what it is in the past that has made me unpause and kick into actually living life. And while contemplating this, a very disturbing thought entered my mind; it’s easy to accept in the sense that, yes this makes sense, but not easy to accept in that, really? The thing I realised is that for most of my life now, I have only thought; yes, I have bouts of action and productivity, but mostly I have read and reflected and introspected; I have engaged in thought experiments and intellectual debates; I have endeavoured to understand the reason and effect of art and actions and words, upon individuals, societies and humanity. If I say so myself, over the years, I have developed quite sophisticated approaches and handled whirling confusions, when it comes to the place within the mind; I have tackled scary thoughts and big questions, and I can say with confidence that nothing about myself scares me and nothing about myself disgusts me; I am capable of looking at and understanding various perspectives, of engaging ideologies that I do not agree with, and even learning from them, and asking and understanding the biggest questions of life. I am not an all knowing genius but I have structures ways of dealing with information and confidence when navigating areas that are new to me - in fact, I thoroughly enjoy the start, when everything is new and you’re entering a new world, feeling your way around, trying to make sense of things until eventually you do. Learning is a thrilling process and I love it and I am never going to stop learning things. However, thus far in my life I thought that was enough; I saw myself as someone with either the soul of a philosopher, a scholar or a writer/poet; someone who only needs a mind and pen and paper; someone who looks outside and delves into the inside and finally expresses all their thoughts with eloquence and beauty. This is who I wanted to be and who I prepared to be. But I ignored the real world; I ignored the fact that the only ones whose words even reach me are the lucky few, while equally brilliant and hardworking but unlucky minds, the majority of them, are starving and unknown and die unappreciated. And all this scares me; unless I have a guarantee that I’ll be among the lucky few, I do not want to venture down this road, simply because I do not have the courage to be the rule rather than the exception; my passion isn’t strong enough to fight my fears of poverty and obscurity. I realised that while I will still continue learning things, and find new ways to express my thoughts, this does not have to be my real life job or career; the type of soul you identify yourself to have does not dictate the type of thing you should be doing with your life; it does not dictate anything; it’s changeable and change is healthy; the only thing it dictates is the sense of thrill you feel at identifying as something, at fitting into a community. The other thing I didn’t count on is changing; I expected growing, but I thought that meant branching out in terms of things I want to study but essentially being the same person. What I never accounted for is my basic personality changing; instead of being someone that primarily looks inside, I now want to look outside, at other people and life around us; instead of thinking, I now want to actually act and create; instead of looking back, I now want to look forward. See I considered myself primarily an observer, a thinker, and an analyser (Oxford commas are the best and important and I will fight you on this); but now I only consider that one part of my personality; I also want to act and create and bring about change, and not just with words but with my actions more broadly. This isn’t to say that words aren’t intensely powerful to bring about some of the biggest actions in human civilization, but that it’s not all I am anymore; I have more things attached to my personality, not all of them are focused this heavily on thought and instead call for action, and I want to express and be those parts of me too. To some extent, I realise that this reads like justification for cowardliness - because writing and thinking are actions - and to some degree it is, but I’d like to think that that’s the more critical part of my brain. And the more accepting part realizes that I’ve changed and that while I still want books and words to be a part of my life, I don’t want to devote my life exclusively to them, and that that’s okay. I think I feel a type of guilt for this change, and this feeling that I should be going back to doing only that, and it’s easy, since I’m so directionless otherwise, but I don’t want to force all that upon myself. Things stop being enjoyable if they’re not done more than the amount one wants, and I don’t want words to stop being enjoyable. And it’s this guilt, and fear, and directionless, that I have put my life on pause for. I am exploring a lot of different things, but it’s slow going and indefinite and there’s no clear answer on the horizon just yet, and so I’m waiting. But this isn’t the whole story. Because I could still be productive in other ways; I could still be exercising and eating healthy, I could still be cultivating my hobbies more, but I’m just not; I spend most of my time between Netflix and YouTube and all of it on my bed; which is naturally leading to bouts of depressive behaviour; I think in this particular case the depression is an affect rather than the cause, of being unproductive, but also of course it feeds back into it and the cycle continues. I realise that I need to break out of this cycle, and by the end of this month I’ll be living with my family and having that support is always helpful, so I’m going to allow myself this cycle a bit longer. But I still don’t understand why it starts. In part, the feeling of life in pause is just who I was as a person in the person, more thought oriented than action oriented; in part it’s that I’m prolonging it, waiting for the apparent right time - a weak excuse, one that I’m not ready to lift the curtain and peak behind, so, you know, family and support; and in part because of just the absolutely vast amount of options I have and confusion I am feeling - I am overwhelmed by choices of potential interesting lives I could live and paralyzed by indecision - but I am also making small and slow strides, exploring different worlds, figuring what does and doesn’t interest me, and for now this speed is just fine. However, I still don’t understand why it starts. When did I stop working on my hobbies in the first place? When did I first realise I’ve stopped and why didn’t I do anything about it then? For someone to whom introspection comes so easily, I realise as a form of self-defense against this very introspection, I have a phenomenal blocking power; there are all these things that I just decide I am going to forget, and then I am sure I will - also why no example comes to mind. I don’t want to change this, I believe this is my conscious deciding what it is and isn’t ready to handle, and I respect it enough to never push it; but I still don’t understand why I stopped; I mean, there are all these practical, logical reasons, but these are well-written excuses; I am quite good at fooling myself when I want to, I am in fact quite good at completely blinding myself to logic when I want to, and so a lot of times things only come through in retrospect. I think, and this is strictly just an early theory, that the reason I stop is two-fold: one, because there isn’t visible reward, or not enough positive reinforcement, or just plain laziness and procrastination; but these things don’t occur when I’m doing things I love and here I’m talking about having stopped doing the things I love. So two, because I have the irrational need to be great at it and I’m convinced I won’t be and so I don’t even bother starting; I essentially give up even before I start; because of fear and negative self-talk; and I think that is part of the reason I have so thought oriented too - if it’s all in my head, no one can see me fail. And when I try to do real things, and I feel inefficient in one thing, it’s easy to feel not so great about the other thing too; it’s easy to ask yourself why it even matters and that if there are all these other people who are much much better than you’ll ever be, why even bother, why even try, why ever face the humiliation of being the beginner. So life happens, and one of two pieces of your life are affected or hit, but in the mind its like a panicky storm, and like a domino all the pieces quickly fall all around you; you bend down to pick them up but its exhausting, each new piece takes more energy now than it did the first time, plus the pieces you put up keeping falling back down. Then your back starts hurting and so you huff and sit down amidst all this chaos to better manage it, but sitting is comfortable, so you lay down, stretch out, and now you can’t remember what it was like to walk; you don’t know where you would walk to anyway and so you don’t want to try. So on the one hand is this unquenchable thirst for knowledge and learning new things, and on the other is this precarious and fragile structure of dominoes that is your mind, I know that the only way to get back up is to start one piece at a time, and then before long I’ll be running again. But I have also learnt, very importantly, that you can read and learn about life and how to life it, you can hear every important person and tip and understand every deep truth of life, but finally, the real challenge is actually living it; putting one step forward after each previous one, and actually applying all that you know. And that, at least for now, is what I meant earlier; that while words have power, I have only received them in my mind; I have received information only in my mind, and I haven’t tried to live outside of my mind, I haven’t really had a whole lot of action in my life, mostly just thought; and I thought I wouldn’t want that, but now it seems I do. So I have to figure out what type of action (a big question) and then get about with it.

[honestintensecontradiction-blog]

Resonance made, upon the White

And so the angel fell into the fire. Wings and all, she got tired of her beauty. She started resenting the solitude she had treasured. She forgot the meaning of contentment. Happiness she never had. And to the devil she turned, shredding her contentment to a million allegories. The fire was dark, its prospect lonely. She knew it wouldn’t have appealed to her before. She didn’t bother wondering what had changed. She would have before. So she took the first step. Hades was delicious; the adobe red and shining and happy. Pain haunted her every night. She drowned it with laughter resonating on the empty walls. She realised that her sweet giggle had turned into a manic laugh. She wanted to get louder. She let the black colour her face. She bared her halo’s teeth. Her clothes still had the faint death of a past memory upon them. Deeper into the fire she went. She ignored the loss on the way; the scatter of dying feathers. She looked up and all around, dark mountains of a reddish black. She reached the summit and looked down upon the holy world. 

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Loneliness changes you. It makes you desperate in a quiet way; you don’t even realise it, but in the smallest, subtlest, most unconscious, maybe even empowering, ways, you’re looking for attention; and more importantly, for validation.  Loneliness is a sea and you think you’re on the sand; alarmingly close to being swallowed in, sure, but still on land; you think your feet are wet, but that you’re still firmly rooted on the ground, that you can turn around, dry up and go back to the new day at any time you wish. But loneliness is also harrowing; so why would you choose to let that sea caress your feet? Why go anywhere near it in the first place? Maybe you’ve been pushed there, forced there by life; but why stay there? Why not just turn your back and walk away from it? Because when you try to do that, you realise that the shore was an illusion you created; like an alternate, imaginary universe or something, where you’re still in control. The shore is a fiction, and if you open your eyes you realise that really, you’re in the middle of the sea; everywhere, all around you, you see the horizon, but no matter how much you try, you never reach anywhere. You’re drowning, and you’re fighting; every time you think you’re taking a step away from that giant mass, you’ve really just fought very hard to find your way back to the surface, still flailing around in the middle of nowhere. All around you there’s only water, no sign of land or life. You decide to stop trying, because you’re all out of energy, but the loneliness doesn’t even have the decency to swallow you whole; it doesn’t want to give you the relief of not feeling anymore. It wants to talk to you and be friends with you; and so it shares itself with you. It keeps you afloat, in the middle of nowhere; every once in a while, when you’re walking home or going to the washroom or cooking, a wave of loneliness sweeps over you; in that moment you feel a harrowing despair. You know this is something you should be fighting with all your might if you are to survive; you know it’s a glimpse into that nothingness, in the middle. The longer you stay in the middle, the stronger your relationship gets with loneliness, and the more openly it starts to show itself; the random waves crash around your chest more often, lifting the illusion of the shore, and for a split second, forcing you to see yourself in the middle of giant nothingness, and then quickly snapping the picture of the shore back in front of your eyes. You forget, instantly, because you need to. The image goes away, the panic goes away, but the fear and helplessness you felt, linger; the thought that that is something you never want to come face to face with every again, lingers. When the illusion comes back down, like a fake background in a theater, you bend down to hold it down with all your might. You don’t remember what it is you are shielding yourself from, but you can feel the terror and urgency in your hands, the tense stance of every muscle in your body, and you know, you just know, that it’s vital to keep this cloth picture down, to never let it lift again, because you never want to see whatever was behind it again.  You’re in the middle of that sea, with no direction and no indication of ending, and no human being can ever fully face that; I don’t think we’re meant to.

Loneliness changes us in ways we don’t even know, because we aren’t fully aware of what is happening, we aren’t even fully aware of our state of loneliness; we can’t be; we shouldn’t be.  It makes itself a habit. It’s very accommodating and it wants you to stay in there forever; so slowly it starts to feed itself to you, till you become part of it. You start to feel strange around people, the most honest conversations start to seem unnecessary; the most intimate exchanges seem emotionless. You start to distance yourself from everyone because being close to anyone would make that sea unhappy, and how can you be so disrespectful to the sea, it has after all kept you afloat and fed you, given you somewhere to be and taken care of you, made you the center of its attention; you have to remember all that. You don’t actually have to remember all that, you are all that.

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It makes me deeply angry when I see loneliness and isolation being romanticized, especially as the fountain of all creativity. Being alone, depressed, dysfunctional, or whatever else, does not lead to art. Depression is hopelessness; its a lack of action because you believe that nothing leads to anything and so why even try. Isolation is skin-peeling terrifying; it stops you in your tracks, halts you and holds you, doesn’t allow for any type of movement or action. There are not positive things, not things that allow one to create anything. They grip you and freeze you in your tracks, you can do nothing and feel nothing. To create anything, you need energy, you need movement and action. Creation is not possible when you’re stunted by fear and trapped in the cage of helplessness; Stop romanticizing it.  Yes, going through all this makes you strong; but that’s because you have to be. You can be a strong person even without having dealt with mental health issues. You can be a great artist without dealing with any of that.  Art comes from perspective, and the need to create art comes from the need to connect; these things will simply not happen if you’re in the middle of that sea with nothingness all around you.

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A tumblr bot just liked on of my posts ( I mean I only have two, so the drawing). And if this isn’t dark humour at its finest I don’t know what is. I literally created this blog to keep track of myself, and encourage myself to create more art. I believe that art, of any type, is one of the most honest ways for people to connect, which is so important now, when technology is filling our selves with manufactured abstracts and isolating us but also distracting us from that isolation with its constant flow of content. It’s to take a step back from all this that I want to focus more on art, and to focus on art is why I created this blog. And my first post on the blog, my first like for this blog, is by a bot. We’ve come full circle and I’m being validated by the very thing I am trying to distance. (This is the type of thing that could totally be a punchline on a show like BoJack Horseman or The Simpsons or something OMG)

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I have been, for some time now, trying to figure out what it is that I want to do in life. I thought I had it all figured it out, but really I’d just latched on to this dream I’d had when I was about sixteen, and I never stopped to question or rethink it in anyway; I never really had the courage, or presence of mind maybe, to rethink or revisit that vision at all; to ask myself if that was still what I wanted. And now, seven years later, I have to face that question again. And no, that’s not what I still want to do; I have no idea what I do. So after years of blindness and distractions, here are the things I have figured out in the past three and a half months: - I am an astoundingly indecisive person; mostly I think that stems from a lack of faith in myself; and a little bit of the grass-is-always-greener-on-the-other-side complex (also I overuse semi-colons to death; also my metaphors are quite cliche and weak - working on that) - This indecision is, in part, a result of who I am as a person as well; I don’t ever want to be just one thing or type, I want to find a way to amalgamate the different pieces of my person into one functional, coherent, whole. If asked to choose between this or that, my answer will, more often than not, be either both or neither; I either want a little of both or nothing to do with it, but it’s very rarely that I’ll have a clear choice - this isn’t something I want to change, but figure out how to imbibe, because I do believe finding balance is important to a good, peaceful life (sort of explains my blog name, doesn’t it?) - I’ve stopped reading books; mostly I think just as a result of the world we live in and all the distractions it presents; also a little because of the people I’ve surrounded myself with, most who, for the most part, don’t read; I’d first become properly invested in reading when I was surrounded by people that are much more vicarious readers that I was - so I need those people in my life again - My family, while wanting the best for me, has a very different world view that I do; eg. they say that something like drawing/art can be taken up seriously at a later stage in my life whilst in my youth I should focus on earning money - and I believe that there are some things within you, in your hands and your heart, that make art come through; and you need to capture and cultivate that or it’ll be lost, and that money can be earned at any time; this consistent environmental input also obviously contributes in large part to my confusion (also because I have seen them struggle for money and seem them be comfortable and enjoy life with it, and I don’t want to be naive and oblivious and take their hard work for granted, but I also don’t want to sell my soul to money) - I’ve wanted to have a blog for years now, and I even tried but I always ended up deleting it in its entirety, because for a long time I believed that I had nothing interesting to say, and I didn’t want to come off sounding silly or worse; education and independence have given me the confidence to realise that I am who I am and the things I think and life I live are as valid as anyone else’s - I’ve also realised that one’s personality decides the type of work and work environment one should choose, but the field depends entirely on external influences, be it books, role models, family, friends, so on - If asked about my biggest, most impossible dreams, the first things that come to my mind aren’t even related to work - they concern having a loving partner, cherished friends, and a good family life; not to say that my dream is to a house-wife, simply that I have been starved for affection and intimacy my entire life and I don’t want to let that damage me or make me bitter but I also have a deep craving to share true, sincere love with the people in my life. eg. I’m 23 and I’ve never had a relationship, or even a date; only one friend who truly, sincerely knows me and that I’m entirely honest with and she’s on a different continent. So yes, I crave love and hugs and hand-holding; so much in fact that I felt the need to write about it even when making a post related to the work I want to find - I also keep questioning what it is I should be doing, and I want a purpose and a goal, but no one thing comes to mind; its like that episode of Doctor Who where he can’t accurately see the future because the person is genuinely undecided and so it keeps changing every second. It’s like that with me as well. And because of this severe lack of self-direction, I feel weak-willed and scared because of how impressionable I am at this time; every new person I meet who seems to have even a small goal becomes amazing and instead of learning from them and seeing what motivates them, I try to blindly follow their goals! Literally, in a short span of time, I’ve considered publishing, management consulting, investment banking, psychology, graphic design, trading, interior design, sales, accounting, creative pursuits like film, art and writing, library or museum work, marketing and coding. I’ve completely lost sight of my self. I’m not sure what actually brings me joy, and what’s interesting because it brings someone else joy and they present a happy, fulfilling picture of it.

As I’m writing I’ve realised that one of the things that I am certainly excellent at, and that I thoroughly enjoy, is analysing literature; sort of a given since that’s what I’ve studied. And maybe, after writing my thoughts down a lot, and coming back to it much later, I’ll be able to analyse and find hidden inside the answers; because we always say that analysing an art is a self-portrait in a way, so if not my writing, then my analysing will tell me what I cant hear right now! I’m actually excited about this. Just earlier today I was wondering why I’ve started this blog and what the point of it all is, but already, here we are; it’s not as much about the writing as it is about the analysing; that’s my favourite part and that’s what, at least for now I think, will help me figure things out a little. 

More later, but for now, yay!

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