itsnotthatdeepc

[itsnotthatdeepc]

[itsnotthatdeepc]

[itsnotthatdeepc]

[itsnotthatdeepc]

February 12th: My house to Limerick (train and bus)

It's been a while since I last posted.

I haven't done too much but at the same time, my brain is sizzling like an overcooked stir fry with everything that's happened.

I find myself in something of a privileged predicament.

Completely out of the blue and after what had been an exhausting day- meetings always prompt an absence of sleep the night before so that adrenaline crash hits h a r d by the evenings- I noticed a message on my preferred dating app and saw that someone matched with me. 

For the heteronormative world we live in, that might not seem like much when incidence rates of matches can number up the hundreds.

But for a casual user like myself, who spends probably far too much time considering the fine details to swipe right on anyone with any degree of regularity, these are not the norm.

Imagine my surprise when, out of politeness more than anything else, I bit the bullet and replied and suddenly found myself launched into a conversational exchange that became so lengthy, I had to detour into my Google docs just to process the onslaught of new information and carefully plan my responses to make sure I didn't miss anything.

That rapidly developed into the well-known tipping point of any nascent relationship; the Instagram DM. I'm not a fan of sharing my account handle. Mostly because it's where my slightly-less-cringe poetry lives under a pseudonym for validation. But also because I'm quite particular about my engagement with social media and the infinite realm of memes and reels on Instagram are hardwired for the ensnarement of a dopamine-seeking brain like mine. There are plenty of other avenues for me to exercise my unparalleled capacity for inertia as it is.

Even more shocking- particularly to those that know me well- we had a phone call that spiralled into several hours of putting the world to rights that was delicately interspersed with subtle flirtation. Which has since become a semi-regular occurrence as we share mundane day-to-day tidbits and some deeper experiences in fairly equal measure over these past few weeks.

Here's the killer: for the last eighteen months, I've been in love with someone else.

Before I start to give the impression of being an inconsiderate arsehole, let me explain this a little.I managed to develop an inconvenient and oddly-intense crush on a friend. Who has additionally become one of my best friends. Classic disaster sapphic behaviour, I know. Too many of us have been there. And let's pile on the clichés while I'm at it; she's only ever expressed an interest in men.

So, that should be be that. Case closed. No further action required.

Except, despite my best efforts and circumstances lending themselves to gradually weaning me off my limerence, nothing is sticking.

This is by no means the first time I've dealt with feelings for someone. Or had that awkward rejection from a friend. Usually, my best method of escape is to eventually find something off-putting; a comment that is perhaps a fraction too sharp, for example. Or maybe a habit that grates on me. Anything at all that could shatter the rose-tinted glasses and allow me to settle back into the enjoyable warmth of a non-romantic connection without having to bare my soul like an over-attached idiot.

This time though, it's not sticking. I've had those offhand moments of feeling a disconnect between us. Seeing her flaws in glaring view. Borne witness to the messier parts of her personality that, on paper, could send any reasonable person running.

Despite all of it, the tap won't turn off and I'm just about hanging on to the edges, sliding ever-closer to drowning in it.

Instead of snapping out of that all-encompassing and slightly obsessive initial phase of a crush that recalibrates the relationship back to a more reasonable level, I've found that, rather than that signalling an end to my feelings, they've only solidified further into a background accessory. The kind that almost runs unnoticed, reclining until you manage to inadvertently check your surroundings out of the corner of your eye and then suddenly, you can't see anything else. 

The way that I haven't been able to shake these feelings worries me. 

Because if it isn't a crush, then there's only one other alternative and to the best of my knowledge, it's an unviable one.

It's funny in one way because I've never been a person to believe in that kind of thing anyway. It takes time for me to properly settle into my feelings with someone new and figure out what the dynamics of the relationship are, regardless of whether its platonic or romantic. As it is, it wasn't one of those ‘love at first sight’ situations. And actually, we hadn't spent very much time together in person thanks to research taking me abroad for several months.

Yet the day we met (and I certainly didn't expect anything at the time beyond a cursory exchange that remained as a footnote to that day), I could instinctively feel alarm bells ringing in my brain.

And I couldn't fathom it at all.

I can remember thinking to myself, as a bewildered dog-owner might react to their anxious dog barking at a stranger: ‘‘what the fuck is that reaction, where are you going with this? You haven't even looked at this person. You don't know them. Nothing has happened. Why are you doing this? Don't be silly.”

And now here we are.

I finally have someone who actively wants to pursue something romantic with me. And I really like her and have fun talking to her- during one call, I was laughing so hard that I almost triggered an asthma attack. 

Given my track record of catching feelings only after already developing enough of a relationship with the person in question, there's every possibility that, once we do meet in person and put that ever elusive element of physical chemistry to the test, I could very well have something real with her.

But what if that doesn't materialise?

What if this is my only chance at it? As it is, there's a distance of 1,347 kilometers between us, so options are limited at best anyway.

I don't know what's going to happen.

But having spent the last year-and-a-half in emotional purgatory over someone I can't have, there's one hopeful question that I'm not ignoring:

What if I don't need any more chances, after this?

What are the odds that she's the one to finally break me out of jail and pull me into something good. Something worth losing my mind over.

I'll leave it there for now and have a look at Skyscanner.

Things to do, people to see 

Slán go fóill,

C

[itsnotthatdeepc]

my little brother & i are having a scholarly debate about mornings

[itsnotthatdeepc]

Congrats fellow warrior, we made it beyond the 2pm slump ✊✊🥳🥳🥳 can't beat a Wednesday win

ESSAY SUBMITTED 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

[itsnotthatdeepc]

January 8th: My house to my car

As you've probably gathered, I've not had cause for moving in the last week. Mostly because living through snow, ice and -7 degree temperatures are not exactly conducive to travelling on Irish roads. Some of them are generously named roads for one thing, while the hill out of my driveway is still of an uncomfortable incline in ordinary conditions, let alone during its rare transformation into a ski slope.

I'm sitting here with the engine on, staving off the impact of the freezing temperatures for my Super Red Aygo. I think the colour name is a bit gimmicky but then again, I doubt anyone picked it with a view to marketing.

I've been thinking quite a lot about guilt recently. It's one of those emotions that comes with a lot of complexity. Guilt is something that can be placed on you by an external force- such as in a legal context, whereby a conviction operates under the judgement of guilt on the defendant, as supported by the evidence and third-party analysis of all relevant details.  But it is also self-conscious; it's a kind of reflective response, generated by a perception of wrongdoing in some way. 

Guilt, though it's typically negative, is important because it can be used as a means of course-correction. If you have done something wrong (or not done something expected of you), the emotional feedback would encourage you not to make the same mistake again. The intensity of that feedback probably varies highly from one person to the next, otherwise people would not have the same capacity for remorse or empathy. 

Shame and guilt are often used interchangeably, though there is a subtle distinction. Shame is the more general negativity towards your own shortcomings, while guilt tends to be more action-specific. I find myself juggling both at various points in day-to-day life, at an ever-increasing frequency of late. 

I'm minutely aware of other people's perceptions of me. Of how social interactions can come with a fluidity and instinctive awareness to others, but to me, it often requires exhaustive effort. Every iota of body language, the miniscule gestures and expressions are rapidly catalogued, almost subconsciously at this stage of my life, running on high alert for any sign of having caused offence or issuance of slight, unbeknownst to myself. 

The reason for this is because I live with lengthy and detailed memories of being misinterpreted and misunderstood for the things I've said and done over the years. As an adult and having finally become aware that many of these incidents- though not all - can be explained away by a difference of brain chemistry, it does little to reduce the decades of guilt and shame that I have carried like black marks on my character until now.

For the vast majority of my life, I've internalised these emotions, turning myself into a reticent, cautious and fearful shadow of the bold and lively character that I've had recounted to me by the people who've known me as a young child; like a foreign entity entirely. I constantly wait for something to go wrong; to be chastised or hurt, to reinforce this whirlpool of negativity that can drag me down so easily. But having let it lay claim to me for so long, it's become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point. It's almost as though something is wrong whenever I find things go well. Because historically, that's not been the case, so why should it change? Why should I trust someone's kindness or their faith in me, when I don't have that capacity for myself? 

Don't worry, this isn't a cry for help or a therapy session. I'm just working things out here to try and make sense of how this has impacted me. But I discovered something- two things, really- that have given me some food for thought. Both are connected to my family and, as I, like lots of people, can have some tricky dynamics to deal with in a familial context, they've probably done more to help me take stock than any of my late-night spiralling ever has.

This one, in particular, has given me a lot to think about.

As the black sheep of the sibling pair when it comes to our relationships with our extended family, I often found myself wondering why it was that both of us couldn't be treated equally. My sibling is the more gregarious of us; would happily fill my hours of silence and still have breath for more of the same the following day.

So naturally, navigating those dynamics comes more easily to her. She knows the things to say, though I don't think it's harsh to say she hasn't quite mastered when to say them yet. Whereas I'll respond if someone interacts with me. But, given there have been occasions where I've been asked the same question four times in a single conversation- having already supplied the answer three times in succession and watched as the other person walked away from me mid-speech- I don't feel entirely comfortable airing my opinions or making jokes with the same enthusiasm, knowing it'll likely be met with a similar reception.

Our interactions are an exercise in showing cause, but nothing more, much as it pains me to admit. And that has been the means of cultivating a chasm between me and my relations; the kind that is not quite so vast for my sibling.

As it turns out, there was a phone conversation the other day of the usual nature between my sibling and our aunt. I was off in my own universe, reading on my phone as per usual. Then, no sooner had she hung up the phone then she started to complain about her to us all. Worrying about whether she'll bequeath her house to her, as her favourite. She went on about how she'd done all of these things for her, spent time with her and helped her with things without being asked or invited.

More like a gilt child than golden, as it turns out.

It's been roughly four days and I'm still stunned. I mean, honestly, I'm not so naive as to think that more people don't operate like this out in the world. But I was- I am so startled to think that having lived with someone nearly all my life, I've never felt so alien to them. To have one face to suit their own manipulations, while the other rests casually beneath it, is unfathomable to me. For all that I'm someone who's had to mask to cope with dealing with people, at my core, I'm honest in those dealings. However awkward and unpracticed my responses, I still have that underlying assumption that people say what they mean to me, and I aim to show them that same courtesy in how I engage with them. 

My mother laughed at me for my reaction to it all, as I grappled at straws to find a way of understanding it all.

“Why would she think that's okay?!”, I asked. “How can someone just use someone like that to suit themselves and be so insincere?”

This was her reply to me: “I don't know, I think she's stone wrong if she thinks running around after her is going to do it, ‘cause it won't. But I suppose, you're a good person that you don't think that way.”

I'm not for one minute going to tar my sibling with black paint all because whatever illusions I had about her character were shattered- there's probably another layer that I've missed along the line somewhere that she's not seen fit to share with any of us.

But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself agreeing. 

Whatever other flaws and faults I have, at a bare minimum, it's completely abhorrent to me to treat someone like that.

 And if that makes me a good person, well perhaps it's time I gave another boot to some of the guilt and shame I've been carrying around like a house on my back.

Slán go fóill

C~

[itsnotthatdeepc]

[itsnotthatdeepc]

being an adult is so weird

You ever have those days where you’re like ‘there is technically no one but yourself stopping you from randomly moving to a different country. or spending nearly three hundred bucks on a reproduction of a medieval tapestry. or learning the accordion’

and the other part of your brain is like ‘there’s also no one but yourself stopping you from doing the dishes. gotta do those first’

[itsnotthatdeepc]

“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

[itsnotthatdeepc]

January 1st 2025: Castlebar to Ennis via Galway (bus)

Quarter-century of living is coming around the corner and despite what everyone says, I'm more acutely aware of how fractional time is.

Essentially, all going well, I'm a third of the way through of what statistical averages suggest I have in the bank of good health for my lifespan, so I finally have to get the boot under my arse and start looking after myself better. This is the point where I don't have the cushion of playing off youthful resilience while I play poker with my own physical and mental state.

So, even though I don't like to make lengthy lists of resolutions- habit-forming and habit-breaking are the bane of life for someone with executive dysfunction- I am going to at least set aside a few good sense ideas that I can bounce back to whenever I start feeling the carpet pulling underneath my feet.

Consistency: whatever I do this year, whether it be objectively constructive or destructive, I should at least try to maintain it at a similar level for the sake of stability. Naturally, I don't want this to be a way of encouraging harmful behaviours but I don't believe I'll ever truly break from the pattern of indulging them if I don't reach a stage where I don't demonise myself for falling into them. Patchwork skills profiles and falling into extremes of achievement or disappointment are intense enough to disrupt large swathes of my time. I don't want to spend next December looking back at gaps in my memory or stagnant weeks of barely surviving. Even if I reach that stage, I want to be able able keep making the incremental efforts to move from survival to actually living.

Active living, not passive: A skill I have only in recent years begun to appreciate is the intensity at which I can hyperfocus. Enough that I can dissociate entirely from my environment and solely take in information from whatever I put my focus in. Although that state isn't triggered with any great regularity, that sense of detachment and dissociation is something I've become a lot more conscious of in the last few months. I've somehow reduced myself to a background observer of my own life; allowing other external circumstances and other people's choices and decisions dictate my life because it conserves my mental energy. It has its uses, certainly; using that coping mechanism has definitely been a factor in reducing the frequency of my migraine episodes. But the downside is that by doing so, I've almost unlearned how to do things for myself, to bear responsibility for my life and how I utilise my time. Too many days have been left in a paralytic state of dormancy; no sense of progression or regression, which completely throws my temporal awareness off balance in the moments when it becomes necessary to attune myself to societal obligations. 

Know the limits: 2024 was a year of stretching all the limits I had, whether they were deadlines, comfort levels, physical exertion or opportunities, to their maximum capacities. This isn't sustainable long-term. Instead, knowing what a hard limit is and internalising the consequences of hitting the wall is something I could badly do with working on. In another sense, it's also something I need to explore in other areas of my life; being able to decide what's a reasonable amount of leeway to give myself if I fall short of expectations or better judging when I have given too much of myself in a situation is something I have been improving at, but there's still a long way to go.

Be kind to myself: This is not the same as being nice to myself- that would mean letting myself chicken out of doing important stuff, which favours absolutely no one. I've spent so much of my life on this earth repressing aspects of myself, molding like a chameleon to fit the contexts and situations I find myself in. While on the surface, that allows for smoother interactions, the reality is that I have lost so much of my sense of self that I have a fragmentary collage of facets in place of a solid identity. I mold to suit expectations set by others, while chastising myself for not meeting them when I don't actually set them for myself. I say things that I think others would say, while not sharing my own opinions and feelings without a modicum of self-censorship. Writing has done a lot for releasing some aspects of myself that I keep locked away, but I could do well to have more good faith in people on a whole. Everyone wants to be understood as themselves on a level and I am coming to realise that you can only be encouraged by others being brave enough to share themselves truthfully with people.

Motivating life goals: since I was a child, I have always had an internal belief of “If I try hard enough, why shouldn't I be able to accomplish the goals that I set for myself.” There have been times where this innate determination has been sorely tested in various ways but ultimately, I have more or less been very successful. Barring my PhD- which I sincerely hope I can have completed next year- I have accomplished those internal, little-spoken of but dearly sought-after achievements that I expected to achieve within my lifetime. At the ripe old age of 24, I've made it further than my brain has ever considered planning for. Which says many things for my efficiency but is somewhat neglectful of how I look to live my life into later adulthood. I think it could be beneficial to settle on a new set of developmental milestones and career trajectories that I can follow. I have been very lucky in the opportunities and experiences that have come my way so far, but I can only avail of them if I can prepare myself for them. Now is a good time to think about the next decade of my life and what I can do to balance security with independence in a way that allows me to settle comfortably.

Relationships: As I get older, I have come to really value the people I choose to spend time with. I have some very important friendships and post-undergrad, I'm actually very proud of how I've been able to cultivate new and meaningful friendships. Having spent so much of my later childhood and adolescent years holding people at a distance and trying to avoid falling to surface-level situational friendships, be it due to geographical proximity or for the sake of not being alone, it feels immensely gratifying to know that having held out for nothing less than people whose principles I share and trusting that I will meet the people that I need to meet was worth it. Despite the social challenges and my own insecurities, I can indeed form meaningful relationships that have proven to be a lifeline in the darker moments of my life. I love them all more than I can probably express in any language and having finally understood the importance of interpersonal relationships, I hope to continue growing them and perhaps work on repairing those that are challenged or damaged. Life really is so much shorter than people credit it with and if we've made it to this moment in time, no matter where we are in life, then we owe it to ourselves to take advantage of it as best we can, no matter how you measure your best or how that measurement can change from one day to the next.

I don't know how often I'm going to write this blog. My travels are likely to be of a lesser distance and frequency, as my academic obligations start to stack up, but I have found that with transportation, generally a contradiction of travelling somewhere while conversely remaining stationary, I often find myself thinking over various situations; considering alternative interpretations of past events or positing variations of possible future ones. It can be a stimulating exercise and I think it could serve me- and perhaps somebody else- to be able to categorise and compile these thoughts somewhere from time to time. Even if it's just to remove the burden on my mind on occasion. After all, I don't do well with habits. But I do have a penchant for overthinking, so perhaps this can be a starting point for working on that consistency. 

Slán go fóill agus athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh 🎆

C ~