motivationaloswald

[motivationaloswald]

French 75

I used to walk into rooms thinking about how I walked. I wanted to move with so much purpose, to interject so much living into every morsel of sound and idea. I craved meaning so deeply. 

For years I thought I could learn enough, think enough, breathe enough, that I could solve not every problem but answer whatever maze I wished, which mostly was this entire dream i lived by for years. I would think, obsessively, of my death bed, old - I knew I'd get old, and realize I became the greatest, most-lived version of myself as possible. I would die knowing I did it all. 

Growing up, I was confused how others didn't feel this compulsive need to chase something so abstract it rewired their bodies like chemistry, like fireworks.

I could see it at moments in people, could trace the degree of need that existed within them by their eyes, could meet strangers and know if they felt that loneliness, that loneliness for connection. 

It never went out of my brain. That was the truth. It was a full throttle center forward on perfection, balancing beams of abstraction that were so infinite piled together they looked like grains of wood. 

I could drive myself to anxiety and madness with these thoughts, but still I searched. 

I used to walk into rooms and talk to every person and beg them for their life story. I used to get high and swipe through my contact list asking strangers why we weren't closer. 

I'd take risks. Do insane things, then regret five years I felt no excitement. I read so many books, wrote so many lists, wondered so much it seemed I could not hear anything new that I had not already considered. I failed so many times, tried even less than that. And I kissed so many strangers, watched them have sex in front of me and pondered whether I should feel something. 

I stared at the dead, was a tour-guide, begged to go to to the Artic, and tried so hard to fall in love.

I have done the (bad) "math" of how unlikely it would be to find someone/love and I have cried every day longer than months than most. 

Today I sat with a girl and her gay friend I might have been actually close with once, and we talked about what we wanted. 

I thought of the 75 page word document I had planned for my life and now I think of the time I talked to God that revealed itself as the universe which explained itself in a drawing about how I was limited by my fear of absolute pain, and I considered what I wanted, told them about manifesting, wished both of them so much luck and struggled for an answer. I came home, thinking, realized through everything, through it all, I would give it all up to have a quiet life, to own a bath mat at my sink, maybe a fish in a bowl, something that felt clean. 

For so long I thought that was a failure, but now...here, with the pain that sits hollowed in my heart I just want the wanting to end, to not hold so tightly to my dreams, not crave meaning so deep it drowns me in its percussion. 

I loved him, and when it went away, it all changed. I don't write the same. I think it would be nice to have a surround sound, and dental insurance. To be proud of my credit score, to have a car that doesn't squeak in slow motion. 

I no longer need the love from strangers, or books on the secret to psychology and success. I just want to sit in silence. I wonder why.

[motivationaloswald]

From All That Evil Can Feel

Really Fucking Sad

I don't know how to say it–

I've never been afraid.

Not the way other people are, not the way they understand. 

I've looked at dead bodies, I've slept with men, I've pondered every existential meaning. I've begged for love, while playing it so cool – you could set an ice cube on it.

I've felt such sadness, you could lose your mind in waiting for it to get better.

I have tried and I have ended things without second thought.

So much I have learned: like, there has been nothing for me to push my claws into, nothing fully concrete to hold on to.

I loved my ex so much. On some level, I knew he didn't deserve it. On some level, he didn't go the mental distance with me.

It wasn't a problem, but it made me confused. How can you not feel as entranced as me, that we need to figure things out together…so why do you clearly not want to?

I have dated…tired…plotted…Failed…so heavily you wouldn't know it by my smile. 

There's both an ease, and a heaviness, and a silent rock that hits me when I run.

For so long, I wanted love. I do almost everything to find it.

I thought I could clay it into existence with the right hand, the right material. I was willing to give up on the dream.

I had searched for it my whole life.

My whole life I felt lonely. I felt what others live under the sun in 

I waited to get it. I needed it so much because I never felt it. I felt alone.

From my very beginning. From the moments I learned to speak I felt such horror.

So when my old relationship died, I had hope– the kind you don't find unless you live under a lifetime of waiting, patience.

I remember sitting on a park bench, under the Irvine-like-street lamps, thinking “Atleast– I had Seth”. My best friend. Probably the only person who ever got me.

I haven't talked to him since. It's been almost three months.

 It's not the time that's significant, it's that I'm almost certain he's gone. 

He has a girlfriend.

What is crazy, I'm not even upset– I don't even miss him. I'm just grateful he's happy. Grateful he found someone he half as more, than I loved Mark. I know he does.

So I cry at night, because I fear it's gone. I can't even miss it– I don't. I just feel the weight of hope replaced by this need; the need for the distraction from what I hoped most for

The thing was, I was never realistic, always-always-always held out hope, and now it's slipped, almost gone. Almost in the back of my throat.

I don't feel sad, anymore, I cry, but I don't feel sad. I know I must set my sights lower, something else. I'm confused. How can I feel so nothing? 

Why when I cry does my face prick with pins and needles? That I feel nothing, that nothing matters, all of it is gone without shape–

So much so I'm pretending to study for the air force, like a cad, like me, can even do that.

I don't know.

I know this.

The grief never ends, I can't even feel it. I am beyond so much pain, I don't understand why it has come to this. I know my brain can't accept it.

I just wish there was an answer. Something meaningful enough for me to feel, not the books, not the emptiness I have to wade into meaning with my current one– because my sister tells me it's all I can be happy with, and I think she would know.

But because the last possibility? Had a small of penis and obesity it left me empty, feeling nothing. The mind yearns where the body breaks. And I'm broken beyond repair. Beyond all. Beyond hope and time and condolence. 

Beyond all the hope I paved to build to feel better, as an adult.

There's no grief left. Only money, status, education, myself. Really. It's fitting. It's what the devil felt, what he chose, from the ashes of the Bible. What he felt.

I get it, the smallest, human shivers of where I stand.

I get the ladder of evil.

How it extends from me onward

The thing is

I don't have any interest in it.

Beyond every shallow hope that keeps me hoping it with distraction –

Is this 

I don't mind

Sitting here, in the dark

Because at least it is a place of quiet 

No one tells you that about peace 

That in all of the pain

When you sit in it

When you have climbed every well

That with your broken heart, atleast there is still you

Atleast you have found one true thing that exists 

You, sitting, in the dark, knowing an eternity sits out among you and no one will love you

They can't see you, but at least you can collect your thoughts 

The quiet dark is your friend

Because you're no longer afraid of the dark

[motivationaloswald]

Deep Sadness

The difference between compassion and passion

Do you want to know me? I will tell you. I'm listening to the song Lost Cause by Beck. It's a song I wouldn't have connected to a year ago but which I feel as a knife now. The truth is … the truth is I cry most days now, at night. I don't feel sadness anymore- and yet my face goes numb, in the night. It's like … nothing means anything anymore, to me. But I prefer being sad, I think, to be sad is to feel anything. And that's hard for me now. Do you know the song  I am the changer? I put it on, on occasion. It was the song Mark told me he realized he was in love with me, walking his dog. I remember I thought he came to me when I had given up on life. On the street. Now my face vibrates in the dark. I can feel it like the weeknd song – it's like I can't feel my face except I can only feel my face. My mouth puckers up it gets so small and my eyes weep with tears. I can't breathe through my nose. That's okay I never did. Can I tell you the truth? I started thinking about killing my self. The thought crops up. I remember being in stats class, at night. Walking to the bathroom, starring at the mirror, 18, just thinking I should kill myself. I should kill myself. But really, it doesn't matter to me, anymore. Nothing does. I read books. I study Mandarin. Today “the guy I liked” talked about the stubble on my vagina and later I thought about how that was all he said… he's all the same, right? You see, I really loved Mark. I never told anyone why. It was the moment I wouldn't leave my house. Wouldn't see people I mean. Just stay inside and do ab workouts. I remember him calling me, our long pauses– and my inability to tell anyone the truth and then him hugging me. It came from that place of being alone. So now I'm alone. I am. While the world goes on, and my sister has twins, and my best friend falls in love … and the truth is I wouldn't wish any different for any of them even if it meant I ended up worse than all of them. The truth is I've made so many mistakes. I have. I think about them sometimes– I imagine Bellamy’s head cracked open on her pillow, bleeding. That sensation. The loss of life. The loss of blood. Circulating like a soda can. Loss. It comes in waves, I think, to me it feels like a backpack. Feels like a weight sitting deep inside me. I don't really mind. The truth im good at being sad. Good at being lost. My brother in law asked if I healed everything would I be less crazy? But crazy is the only thing that makes me feel alive. That's a cliche to other people, it isn't to me. I have to hyper inject myself into every moment to feel something. Actually that reminds me tomorrow I need to buy a gnome from the dollar store to put on my grandfather's grave. I'm writing it so I won't forget. 

So being choked by an old man right? I should talk about it, I guess. The truth is im one cigarette away from really not caring. There's not a lot of pride left, in me. Inside I mean. I feel like I lost the only thing I cared about, sometimes. He felt like home. I know that now. I think people think I'm okay because I seem so blasè. But, I'm not. I just do a lot of random stuff. I'm taking my friend to a sex Addict's meeting and I'm sewing clothes onto pants (grandmother's) and Im going to cafes to drink lattes and wonder why I spend seven dollars everyday and why I hate the idea of work. Hate the idea of being a psychiatrist. (I got books). I'm gonna study. Do it anyway. I don't even care I just want money for nothing. Does that make sense? Is any of this not boring?

[motivationaloswald]

The Cleaning Myth

The Cleaning Myth by Diana Frank

I remember when I was eighteen and I was smitten by a man seven years my senior. I used to go over to his house to work on stats homework and he would gripe about his mental and physical illness. I remember he would then have me help him do the dishes. He called himself OCD and I remember how he never asked me about myself, or listen to any of my music as he only preferred music without words which he called idm - intelligent dance music. But most of all I remember when he would get mad if I used the wrong scrub brush for his plans and dishes, that I would have to take my jeans off to sit in his bed. 

I suppose I have a unique history with cleaning. Growing up my parents were hoarders - often to an odd degree. My mom would collect derelict wooden furniture that crowded our walkways, my father vintage cars that often would halt ceaselessly on the freeway under the hot summer skies, car parts littering our kitchen table.

I remember when I was seven my neighbor a few years older than I pointed to the black mold on our ceilings. From then on I would blink back waterless tears as the bleach vapors dropped into my eyes while I scrubbed away, a child’s mission of my own. And I was nine when I started fumigating my room from fleas and apiders, vacuuming up empty bottles of powder hoping to choke every last bloodsucker, and sixth grade when I was pulling them off me in class before explosively lashing out at my mother hours later and then immediately bursting into tears. 

One memorable incident was in highschool. I often got up at the crack of dawn and that day was no different. I awoke early to pour myself coffee. I was the first one up. Vaguely, I wondered with zero curiosity who had dropped a bag of rice under my webbed socks? When I turned on the pale kitchen light I saw thousands of maggots under my toes in the stilted morning air. The truth was I never wore socks to bed but my friend had given them to me the night before. I was so grateful in that moment for her and those sovks. There was so many maggots on the floor crawling over themselves and me I couldn't even sweep them up as they rolled over my pan wriggling furiously while I retched into my panicked hands. 

That moment stood out to me. First with a daughter’s dismay I wondered if vacuuming would wake up my family? But I decided in that defining moment again at seventeen, I needed to be done picking up after my parent's mistakes so I left my army of maggots and instead got ready for school. 

The truth was I had so many instances like that that they etched into my memory with an almost certain humored fondness, as most trauma does.

I would reminisce being home alone and watching the shit rise from the tub and toilet like a septic ghost spilling in burping gurgles. A violent kraken my only ten towels keeping at bay, it's watery edges creeping into the forty year old stinking carpet my parents refused to replace; or fighting off several raccoons so I could pour our childhood dog his nightly kibble. Through all of it I maintained a certainly odd, but palatable sense of humor: I worked in a mortuary; I flipped through photos of crime scenes as a teen to desensitize myself from the ugliness of life as a hobby, and when I became older I even accepted my parents' abuse charitably as neglect– the sad remnants of narcissist grandparents who sprung their own albeit clean - but violent atrocities upon them with equal but separate, vengeance. When my siblings and I got older we even started calling the rain guttered cracked pool we used to lovingly swim in, “the swamp” and added a turtle along with the city’s mandated “mosquito fish” to accompany the twenty footed growing weeded palms spurting from it's very center like a lonely little island.

So I guess you could say I was surprised to realize that despite my carefully rested feminist plans to carve out the opposite of my early beginnings, that I would waltz almost simultaneously into another form of often overlooked abuse – the imposed nature of cleaning, and how partners can weaponize neatness as a perverse form of control, something that is equally as insidious as mess and something  I don't feel is talked about enough. 

You know when you grow up in extremes you tend to flip to the other side hoping it will save you. Point in blank I remember I used to pride myself on attracting men who were the opposite of my father – “clean freaks” yet inwardly struggled with my own hoarding. I was naturally organized and I had a pendant for collecting art. I used to tape old magazines and maps to my walls. Cut out their faces and paint the mouth blank wide abyss of black scrawl, write quotes. The eyes scratched out. My pain was palpable. I felt proud to have found my ex – another self proclaimed “anal retentive”. When he begged me to move in I rebuffed him and he spent months working on me. When COVID hit we moved in and redecorated. My ex would often talk of my mess and in desperation I would swing overly minimalist, allowing myself to take up less than half the drawer space he has given me. With time the space grew. He was anal, I was vaguely messy– not so much hopeless as much as distracted. I needed a reminder I told him. So I asked for help to keep our space clean, he said no. Simultaneously, I wondered at times, why his place never felt like my place, or our place, why I never felt like I was truly home? And then in a final moment he laid down the law, a wistful sort of red herring – a wind chilled warning short of doom “if I did not change…”. So to make a short story, I did. Everything went back to the way it was. Left out became nothing. Our place became spotless. It became his dream. We said we did it together. 

At the time I thought I had discovered something new. Shiny. I thought I was happy - likewise my sister’s own relationship mirroring my very own, (her partner equally obsessively interested in all things clean). Little did I know my life would all come crashing down, and quickly too.

It started innocently enough. For a friend’s mental blues– (her own car seat littered with water bottles and takeout), the girls and I headed to Hawaii to work on a farm. On an incidental tangent I was shocked to find both of my friend's didn't bring a toothbrush which they brushed off (haha) while I worried about how their teeth would get properly cleaned, and when i returned home I saw “our” place was a mess. The very place I had changed for had reverted back into the vague slobbery of easy mistakes, grime, and the clutter he had so quickly deplored in me. It turns out it wasn't an interest in cleanliness my partner had, it was a disatisfaction for all things Me. He didn't care about mess as much as he cared about my mess. He couldn't express his frustrations about our relationship but he could complaim about the dishes. I just didn't see the difference. I remembered then his seeming inability to help me while I adjusted and equally I understood the years of my childhood I had spent scrubbing rot, pulling tree-weeds, organizing thousands of socks once a blue moon, and just generally organizing the endless inexplicable clutter with a bitter sense of ennui you will be hard pressed to find in three children no doubt the result of infinite weekends sacrificed to the cleaning gods as my parents sipped iced tea on the computer pointing to lint on the floor of their 40 year old carpet – my father's words “I shouldnt have to… i pay the house payment” ringing in everyone's ears. Years later it would be my aging mother with a bad back begging for a maid, my entreprenur father – refusing to pay, clean, consider, or help her.

When my ex and I broke up he didn't miss me. The years we had spent together fell away. His parents remarked it was odd how quickly he seemed okay with our departure and in six months he found a new girl. She was his coworker. I again grappled with the grief of such loss working through moving multiple times, each with it removing the heaping piles of clothes and belongings from my life. I started to sell them. Turns out no one wanted them. I struggled stoicly in poverty. Avoided debtors and worried my car would get towed. I felt adrift. I moved in with my sister – because I didn't pay rent I would clean their house, my brother in law’s approval eminent. When on one incident I didn't offer to make my pregnant sister a coffee, rather instead offering her from my own cup, she threw a fit. I apologized without guilt. Her husband later ordering me to clean every night with a crisp morning thank you. I wondered if it was all in my head. Was I ungrateful or was I in fact turning into a cheap imitation of a dime store Cinderella? I had suddenly started paying rent. Everyone had always remarked on my brother in law’s organizational skills. It was legendary and I had in fact once seen him in exasperation order my sister to reorganize the fridge to his liking, his standards,my sister non comply-o-h. With time I cleaned more. I scrubbed deeper. I found meaning not in cleaning but organization, and gratitude through owning less. My sister on the other hand continued to snap at me for minor things like wearing the sweatshirt I had given her from our grandmother and slowly stealing my favorite ring. With newfound poverty I noticed when the maids stole my gold jewelry and misplaced other pieces to throw me off the track. I thought of the old man I had met in serrendiption a year prior when I had once imagined I was in a wildly perfect relationship that bordered on blissful marriage. He explained to me why he believed Bill Murray to be weird and why everyone who read Occam's Razor got rid of their possessions and instead traveled the whole world. It seemed a year later, more desperate than ever, I was right on track. 

With time, I lost interest in all possessions. Maybe it was the crying spells and the running and the emptiness of wondering if I could ever fall in love again? I would stay up and think about my life under the dark, setting ten minutes timers for my nightly naps so I could clean the kitchen and family room to perfection. I noticed something equally unusual, despite their gratitude my sister and her husband didn't clean. They thanked me but they left out shoes and things like perfectly closed chip bags on the couch slumped as the pillows. My own sister the worst offender. I wondered why people so obsessed either directly or with denial with cleaning and aesthetics and home decor were so in denial about their space? I thought of Jordan Peterson telling a nation to clean their room and wondered if it was good advice. But I decided later was it counter intuitive. Cleaning is in fact a false form of control, equally as imposing mess on others. American Materialism of course heightening the stakes. I found one should not focus on cleaning, one should focus on what can be cleaned least and still work in their life. Minimalism was my answer because gratitude worked better than happiness. We of course own so much. It holds us back - and worse we use it to hold other's at bay. Think of the child with a thousand toys strewn across the floor. It is the parent who buys them to avoid playing with their kin. We do not need stuff, and we do not need control. Minimal care an aside obvious. But I didn't write this to tell you, you should sell all your possessions and travel the world with me, I wrote it so that whoever reads it knows that controlling others is the real abuse even if it looks mostly acceptable to the outside world.