kill1bill1

[kill1bill1]

Today I woke up before the sun and I spent my time reading in the dark, reading anything I can. Old journal entries, reviews of my favourite books, essays written by girls I've never met, and I think about how badly I need a hobby that doesn't involve consuming words.

I'm thinking about this quote from Eileen: “Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.”

I think about these words a lot, they echo around my mind in mornings like these when I’m able to watch the sneakiness of light growing behind my window blinds, the way it eventually spills into my bedroom like overflowing molten gold. My blankets are tangled in the shape of me, my book is strewn about haphazardly from falling asleep reading. I like looking at the cracks in the spine and the fold in the pages, signs of my existence tainted on something tangible, something that will outlive me. Every morning, I look forward to making coffee. I like this bitter elixir, I like rituals, I like the certainty of tomorrow's coffee. I understand now of the sweetness of mundane life if only I choose to pay attention, and I wish that I can always be this mindful every day of the things I have and the things I do.

So, this is how I have been spending my days. I drink iced black coffee, I eat words, I peel mandarins, I play solitaire and I scribble on my journal until the tip of my pen wears down and my handwriting is a cryptic alien code that only I can decipher. I'm writing a lot because I'm trying my best not to get too caught up in my own head. I’ve learned that sensitivity is a good thing. I care for people deeply and I experience joy with overwhelming intensity, but then again I experience sadness and shame with the same level of intensity, and sometimes it's too heavy and I don't want to shoulder it. With writing everything I’m feeling, I can observe these feelings as a neutral outsider. I like to pick apart my emotions and compartmentalize them, I’m an archivist in the library of my own psyche. I’m obsessed with understanding myself better by intellectualizing my feelings, raw and unprocessed, like dissecting an alien specimen, taking out an organ and slowly turning it around to see it clearly under the light.

I’m not perfect at this, but when I sense the brewing of a negative feeling and this familiar twist in my gut, I will try to fight for control over my emotions so that it won’t continue to nib at me. The first step is to confess what it exactly is that I’m feeling and the next is to categorize it into one of two groups: primary emotions (the raw emotions felt in direct response to something that just happened) or secondary emotions (the emotions that are felt about another emotion). This is what you should know: emotions are a funny thing. Primary emotions cannot be felt for more than 90 seconds at a time. Notice that they are nothing, so detach and let yourself feel it out. If it's a secondary emotion, you can notice that too. This is an opportunity to write and write and understand.

I realize now that my anxieties and secondary emotions are mainly due to confusion, and keeping this all locked up inside my skull will just lead me to spiral. I'm trying this thing where if I feel confused about something, I will write about it blindly with no clear end goal. It doesn't matter to me what it is I'm saying in the moment, sometimes I can't even see anything but the blur of my hands moving, the violet ink of my pen. So long as I empty out my thoughts onto something external and separate from my body, the truth starts to take form to me like a person emerging from a landscape of mist.

I took a cognitive science class and something that I think about often is the Extended Mind hypothesis and the question of where exactly the mind ends and the world begins. While it may be easy to say that the boundary of the mind is the skull, this hypothesis raises that our mind is not confined solely to the brain but that it actually transcends beyond the human body and reaches out into the world through making use of external tools to perform better, cognitively. It’s like doing math without a pen and paper, where our mind’s capacity is limited and juggling symbols in the blackness makes us prone to mistakes. So we use this tool that exists outside of our body to offload information, and in doing so, this tool intertwines with and becomes part of our mental processes. That must mean that the tools we use are also part of our minds. I like this idea because it means that my journal is a part of my mind, almost an extension of me like a connected limb. I use it as a tool to help me navigate confusion over feelings of shame and anger and guilt, and I also like to copy fragments of information I’ve gathered from books and articles, unloading them like furniture in a storage unit. The comforting thing about it is that I can always go back to it and be reminded of things that I would have otherwise forgotten, all those important pieces of information I swore I wouldn’t forget but end up getting lost in the labyrinth of my mind. It’s as if some of my thinking is stored in this journal, taking the form of words and scribbles. It brings me solace to know that when I’m dead, a part of my mind will continue to live on in this earth.

[kill1bill1]

There is so much sky here, all violent blue and heavy on my heart. I’m laying on the grass and I rest my eyes, and all I focus on is sound. I hear the birds singing their sweet songs as they chase each other through the air. I hear their melody getting swept up by the cool breeze that rustles through the leaves, tickles my cheeks, whispers in my hair. I hear the gentle song of the nearby stream, the flutter of wings, the dance of flowers, and I swear I could hear the distant little footsteps of a thousand marching ants. Most of all, I hear the breathing of the meadow, alive and everywhere. I want to lay here forever, to feel the green curling around my limbs and pull me back into the earth. I would like it, I think.

[kill1bill1]

Nobody will ever truly understand you completely and if you dont work to understand yourself you will not achieve the things you were meant to achieve.