why-to-kay

[why-to-kay]

The Equilibrium of Being Alone

Sunday. Night before therapy. My week off work. My anniversary month of where I descended to madness, slipped into the numbness, and wrought havoc upon mine own psyche. 

Loneliness is never the absence of human presence, it’s the absence of connection to the most important human: yourself. Yet without anyone here, how can one fill that void in them using another one’s soul? I suppose loneliness is both: absence of the self and others. 

Each day you wonder if you hide from yourself or the world around you. So painfully aware the sound, yet so hidden the source. But nothing makes sense. Your world is riddles and you sleep with yet more riddles presented to you in your slumbering mind. Is any of it fair? To be taken from your life, to be thrust into the unknown. How could anyone manage... how does anyone manage? I manage. 

I can hear it in the backroom, droning on. Walled inside with no door, how you would love to drown the sound of it. Yet it persists. In the background, in the space between conversations, in the times between interaction, inside the times where it’s dark outside and you feel it to be a reflection of within. You like the rain so much because it drowns that sound out. You like the wind so much because it howls away the pain. It howls right outside your door.

Loneliness is a sad child caught between a condition and the hope of a better life. Loneliness is taught to be heard, but not seen; speak when not spoken to; raise it’s voice when indoors, in a room, in yourself. To find friendship in him when he is so unruly is to give in. To find the comfort in knowing your own inevitable truth is to give in. To give in is to give up. 

The days blur until my eyes can’t adjust. The feelings... they blur too. Always blurry my mind. Memories so fucking hard to see, feelings entering but never staying. blur. It is all just blur. It makes you wonder how I can get to a point like this. But I’m not there yet. Oh sure, right now it hurts. Right now it hurts. But I will wake tomorrow, I will do my session, I will cry, I will feel, I will breakdown, and tonight will seem like another blur that I can file away in my mind. File under “temporary regression”. 

Perhaps next Sunday I will be a little more kind to myself. I owe him that much.

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Connecting to Reality

Dissociation. Dissociation. Disconnect. Alter. Change. Retreat. Withhold. Hide. Dissociation. To dissociate is to disconnect from reality as you know it and live inside yourself as a husk. Your memories: cloudy; your waking moments: uncomfortable; your reality: questioned. For almost a month, i have been coming to terms with my dissociative state. While it sounds very silly and almost impossible, it feels both very real to me and unreal. 

I apologise for the cryptic beginning but you must understand, there is no sense to be made by this feeling. At all times i feel that i am unable to connect to the world around me, and to a deeper level, my own feelings. All of us have our coping mechanisms, things that help us get over stress, anxiety, fear, sadness, pain, loss, hurt, separation, breakups, death, struggles, trauma and yet the brain can sometimes take it too far. Sometimes, it can just be too much too handle. Dissociation is one such time where the brain physically cannot process a trauma or event, so it chooses to distance itself from itself and the world around it. Life feels fake right now. I feel like i am gazing behind the eyes of a me who has no control over me. My memory is cloudy and i simply don’t feel anything as much as i did before.

But i still feel. I feel very scared that this might be permanent, i feel worried that i might die in the next moment, i feel overwhelmed if i let my thoughts take me for too long. To call it dissociation is a misnomer because it is not just disconnection, it is pure fear. 

The event that triggered it was a very real feeling of death. I passed out for less than 30 seconds due to hypotension and it sparked a deep fear that we all have to be exacerbated and consume me. My desire to live is very strong. So strong that i can’t comprehend dying, and so convincing myself i was dying when the blackness drew in made me come to terms with mortality very suddenly. 

Almost a month on and i am coping. It is far less horrible and uncomfortable than it was during the week of the incident, and it is even less bad than simply a week ago. But it’s still there. While my fear of death has subsided, i still fear that what i am in is not reality. I fear that this is a dream i’m stuck in while still being passed out. It sounds foolish and another part of me is screaming saying “this is real!”, but alas, dissociation makes me question it because it doesn’t feel real. 

But this post is no pity party. I know that in time it will get better. It actually already has been getting better. It’s funny because while you only ever live in the present, the brain loves to live in the past. I have flashbacks to memories and feelings triggered by menial things like music or messages or anything with sentimental value. These flashbacks are increasing in number which is good i suppose, i’m remembering who i was. 

This isn’t the first time i’ve been in a dissociative state. My father died when i was 5 years old and it was a major trauma that triggered a 2 year long dissociative amnesia. That is to say, 2 years of my life are lost because my brain went into hyper survival mode and deleted all my memories during that time. It then happened again when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I don’t know the length that specific state lasted for but i think it was less than a year. Again, my memories of that time are completely wiped. This time though, it’s different. I am self aware enough and emotionally mature enough (compared to the me those examples) that i can consciously catch my brain trying to delete memories. That’s a bit misleading because it’s not like i’m saying to myself “okay delete yesterday but keep half of the day before”, it’s more like i keep saying to myself “oh shit i am dissociating, it’s okay though”. 

I remember the last month quite well. It’s foggy but so are all my memories right now. But it’s getting better. The thing to remember is that no matter what state you are in, no matter how bad you feel in the moment, it will always always always get better. We love to focus on the negative comparisons, but breaking out of that cycle benefits us so fucking much. A side effect of this dissociation was severe anxiety in the beginning. I physically couldn’t eat, sleep or think about anything but the fact that there was something wrong with me and i couldn’t articulate what. I used to wake up in the night with proper panic attacks thinking that my brain was trying to separate itself from my body, because that’s what it felt like. But guess what? It got easier. I don’t wake up with panic attacks anymore, i’ve accepted that this is just how i am right now but it will get fucking better. It will get better. It has been getting better already. I am a walking case study of myself to see that as time goes on and healthy ways of treating yourself continues, LIFE GETS BETTER. 

Next month i start a journey into therapy. That is where i will break out of this state. It’s not a hope, it’s not some aspiration, it’s what will happen. It might even happen before then. I can safely say to myself that if i had to go through this for 2 years again, that wouldn’t be too bad. It’d be uncomfortable and i might not remember anything that happened during, but it’s a small price to pay for living on and being alive. What this has taught me is that no matter what you do, do not treat yourself like a piece of shit. Do not invalidate yourself. Do not ignore your needs. This has been the most grounding thing that has ever happened to me and while it is very scary, the benefit is that i will never stop trying to improve. Feeling bad and living shit is just not sustainable. It just isn’t. Life gets better. 

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Fear holds you back

I would say there are 3 connections humans can form: physical, emotional and spiritual. While it can be argued that spiritual and emotional can be considered roughly the same thing, or even physical being a manifestation of emotional, there’s quite a clear dichotomy between them all. 

Throughout my posts, i’ve talked about connecting more to my emotions and my spiritual side. What i would class as spiritual is the refreshing feeling you get deep in you, almost like in your soul, when you do something that resonates deeply within you. In an atheist (like myself), i’d say nature is the easiest spiritual connection you can form. Experiencing nature and basking in it’s beauty literally feels “soul-healing”. For theists, nature and religion can be spiritually satisfying. 

But i haven’t spoken about physical much. Physical is so much more than just lust, attraction and sex (there’s also the more tame stuff like hugging, kissing, etc.). While all of us have experienced these three explicit ones at least once in our lives, it tends to be that experiencing them “poorly” is the norm and everything else has to be experienced well to be the norm. What i mean by this is that so many people are “satisfied” having shit sex and masking things they find attractive yet are not satisfied when they have a shit emotional connection or cannot ground themselves in the world around them. 

Perhaps because physical connections have such stigmas around them, be it promiscuous or prudish attitudes, it is okay to feel like having a poor physical connection is worth it as long as the rest is better. But that is endemic of a poor social attitude towards all three connections when they really should all be seen as equally valuable and attainable. 

I write this post because i’ve had somewhat of a revelation about sex. It’s an odd subject to talk about and is even odder when trying to converse with people about it who are also, counter-intuitively, happy to talk about deep feelings but not sex. My main point is that communication is the saviour of all these connections. It is the foundation of all of them and the encapsulation too. You can talk about your feelings to someone and then, with time, explain why you feel them too, thereby building upon those foundations you mutually create. With sex... it’s much harder but still definitely as important. 

I am going to show some balls here (if you’ll excuse the shit pun) and say that i was afraid of sex at some point. In fact, before i had sex, i was terrified of it. I was mainly afraid of the communication, of the awkwardness, of all the negatives you could try to assign to it. It’s not like i wasn’t propositioned by girls before, but when we did get onto the subject and when it was very clear they wanted it with me, i refused. I don’t regret it though. For a person trying desperately to overcome a fear, confronting that fear with these specific girls would have ended poorly i reckon. 

And when the time came, and i slowly lost the fear, i found it to be obviously enjoyable but still daunting. In fact, i couldn’t actually reach orgasm the first time i had sex! Afterwards, it got easier and a bunch of other shit happened in my mind and my attitude but one thing never changed: i was afraid of that awkwardness. 

But i’m not writing this post to talk about my sex life. I’m writing it to highlight that sex and connection go hand-in-hand. The awkwardness of sex is created by fear of fucking up, fear of being weird about it, etc. But sex is one of those things where the journey is just as important as the destination. It is all about showing passion for one another in a way that is beautiful, attractive and primal (to some degree). There’s so many different ways you can have “good sex” that goes beyond the realm of simply trying a new position. Satisfaction of finishing is not the goal in my mind, it is devoutly enjoying the journey and looking into each others eyes, speaking to each other, smiling at each other, relishing in the moment together. Even laughing when something goes awry and being comfortable in that moment of pure physical vulnerability shows that you are doing something right. 

Sex isn’t everything, but it should never be overlooked. What i’ve said is just one small part in it all anyway, and i’ve only come to those conclusions after realising that there is (or was) fear in me. Fear always prevents you from making those proper connections. 

i’ve found there’s more of a balance now too, in that a good emotional connection transfers into an expression of “love” when having sex to then combine with the spiritual aspect of doing it surrounded by nature in a secluded, pretty spot. Again, that’s kind of a rough and crude example but i think it’s important to reiterate that constantly trying to work on your connections, be it in a relationship or friendships, is the height of importance. Plus sex isn’t the only expression of physical connection but that’s for another post really.  

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Impatient to be patient

See the worst thing about being in touch with your feelings is that you’re in touch with your feelings. There’s no blissful ignorance. There’s no dissociation even when dissocociated. Yes it’s counter-intuitive and oh so “faux deep”, but it’s true nonetheless.

You can’t help the way you feel. You just can’t. You can repress and deny and affirm to yourself “no I don’t feel this” all you want but you cannot help it. It’s the reason why some people keep going back to some abusive ex-partner, or why family members keep trying to make up despite being so toxic toward each other.

My point in saying all this is that feeling is painful and you just can’t switch it off. One of my biggest flaws that is incredibly difficult to change is that I feel too quickly; I am impatient. It’s a character trait that some could find annoying and obnoxious, and others could see it for what it really is: a desperate desire to live very quickly and gain validation quickly.

My impatience is infuriating to people, and I do apologise, but it yearns to have it all now and drives me to accomplish things that interest me in the shortest time possible. Yet it’s sincere. It’s never not sincere. It’s never not wanting to build a great beautiful bridge of trust over a timespan of a week. It wants to believe everyone is capable of being kind and connecting, it is naive of cynicism and it tries so hard to show the world that there is more.

Impatience stems from anxious attachment. It’s not a “quirk” or a positive. I would say it’s a neutral trait that requires control. I can come across as unsatisfied with the present, insatiable with current attention and feelings, and unable to appreciate the slow tenderness of beautiful things growing.

But truthfully and honestly, there is no word that describes me better than sincere. It is sincerity that makes me desperately want to know things about people, it’s sincerity that makes me want to form connections so quickly. Of course I apologise for the way I enact it, but I don’t apologise for trying to connect to everyone I feel are interesting and “deserving” (for want of a better word).

I am always testing the boundaries, always pushing slightly more, but again, it is honest sincerity that drives it. I just want to know. I have such a thirst for knowledge and secrets be it from personal stories, real-world facts, or intense discussions on subjects I am ignorant of.

This post is so targeted at all the people I feel I piss off with my attitude. I realise most will never see this, but I gotta explain myself, I gotta be honest. I cannot stress the hell it was of keeping myself to myself all these years. To hide one’s feelings from oneself, to disguise it all, to push people away... it’s hell. So I overcompensate a little or a lot now but it’s far far far better than what I was. For the first time, I feel comfortable in myself.

There may be times where I hate what I feel, where I wish for the days of blissful ignorance and repression, but feeling bad is far better than not feeling at all.

I don’t know what inspired me to justify myself this much. I mean, it almost sounds like classic defensive Nunya but it’s really more of an acceptance. I want to go through things fast, but I also love the slow after-stage where I get to bask in everything I’ve worked on.

It sounds odd but, let me give an example: when I first learnt guitar, I spent hours and hours and hours rushing to learn everything I could and destroying my fingers in the process. I would get so frustrated that I couldn’t learn any faster and that I was just shit. But after a long time, after all those good days where I thought I was a god and those bad days where I thought I should quit, I am mediocre now. But I enjoy playing. I enjoy the slow building of my skill now. I truly do. There are things in my life that I’ve accepted I can’t rush and I can apply my inpatient attitude at. Those things I would say have the highest quality, value and meaning to me. I love playing guitar. I love slowly building my knowledge on subjects I had a burning desire to learn all about. Perhaps now I’m describing something we all feel to some degree, the initial passion and then the slow work afterwards.

This might be one of the most raw posts I’ve ever written because it’s a document of a nice, big ol’ thought process. What I like most about myself is my newfound willingness to connect and empathise with everyone and what I dislike most about myself is my newfound desperation to connect and empathise with everyone.

The future is always bright, nonetheless. Optimism will never leave.

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I’m really looking forward to the next time i receive a nice long hug because i know the second i get embraced, the floodgates will lift and i will CRY. Cry and cry and just let it all fucking out of me. 

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Only Human

I love listening to peoples stories, their troubles, their life. It’s almost becoming an obsession to try and get random people that i know or meet to open up about how they feel. I think years of repressing my own emotions has made me slightly over compensate in this regard. Maybe that’s just my own exaggeration though, due to the fact i am comparing a closed off version of myself to a now more open one. 

I like it partly because it makes me feel needed and partly because it evokes so much feeling in me. We could be strangers or we could be friends, but there is a level of trust there that makes you want to share your feelings without fear of judgement. It used to be i’d only empathise with people who i really knew and cared about, and even then it wasn’t empathy so much as just caring about them. 

Each day i find myself empathising with shit i never thought i would ever care about. There is a difference between caring and empathy: one is to have feelings for someone and one is to try to feel what someone else feels. Sometimes, i slip back into old habits of not giving a damn and just saying any old shit regardless of how it makes the other feel. A lot of the time i do try to think of the other person first before saying anything. Even then, i sometimes completely misgauge how i think the other person’s reaction might be. Funnily I can’t decide as to whether i’m still just learning or i’m being “only human”.

Counter-intuitively, fear of judgement is what i feel when thinking about posting this. In fact, i fear it right now more than any other time i’ve written a post. The reason to that i think lies within what’s easiest for humans to do: complain. It is very easy to spout all the negatives, it is very hard to focus on just some of the positives. Most of my posts on here are negative which is no coincidence. It is easier to say “this and this are bad and fuck it all” than “i love to go to the beach on a warm summer’s eve and gaze at the setting sun”. Even typing that feels weird. 

But to be better is to rid yourself of fear. I love talking with passion, i love listening to people be honest, i love to cheer myself up by playing guitar. Again, typing all that feels very very uncomfortable. Perhaps i’ve conditioned myself into believing that telling the world what you like/love will only hurt you or alienate you. Yet breaking out of cycles means being uncomfortable, but it is only temporary. 

I will endeavour to try to make more posts like these, where i reflect on the good things, the things i like and love. They may be few and far between but even if i just do it one out of a hundred posts, it’s a sign of genuine progress that can be built upon. 

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Romantic vs Cynic

I know that the more i talk to you, the more it’s going to hurt me. I know that there is a big dam filled with shit, pain and hurt and it’s all very very close to bursting open. All the hard truths are gonna come out, stuff i don’t want to hear but inevitably will, and yet there’s going to be no saving grace. So many times when i see a reply, i assume empathy, i assume sympathy, i assume support. But i don’t get that anymore. 

I get a short and cutting reply that just hurts more than anything else. I realise i bring it on myself, i realise at any point i could stop and i realise that i am owed nothing. Nothing at all. But it still hurts. And that is the thing i cannot i really just cannot fucking get over. I can’t say anything really, again, i’m owed nothing, so instead i turn to here to vent my thoughts and whatnot but doing this can’t help either. 

The obvious question is “why not just stop?”, but i can’t. I am so foolish to keep trying, to keep expecting a different result but i can’t stop trying. I’m not obsessed nor addicted, it’s nothing like that. It’s because i know for a fact (for a goddamn fact that no one in the universe that can convince me otherwise of) that there is something behind all the mental guards, all the shields, behind the cutting replies, over the pits of ignoring and beyond the trenches of misunderstanding, that there is something so pure and beautiful that i would like to see again. 

Two years ago, i didn’t know there was that something. I talked to you then with a blissful ignorance (and a few minor worries that things wouldn’t pan out). I talk to you now and... It’s painful to see the contrast sometimes. Back then, I tried my hardest to overcome those various guards you shield your emotions and thoughts with and somehow, i succeeded. But nothing remains the same. I had 0 guarantees then that my efforts would even slightly work out for me. I have surprisingly less than 0 guarantees (that’s right, guarantees for the opposite) that my efforts will work out for me. And yet, the fool tries. 

I can’t even define what my efforts are or what it even is. I can’t. Idk?? I keep talking, keep hoping for a tiny breakthrough, keep being me, but it’s so fucking hard. The hardest part is the need for reassurance oh man. A constant tick in my head when conversing saying “get validation for this, get approval for that, did they notice you did this, etc.”. The thing is, normally i’d use that all as an excuse to shit on myself. Now it all comes out as frustration or sadness. 

Right now, i really do feel insignificant, in the exact definition of the word. And reading back through all of this, i’d much rather not post it, it sounds very whiny.  

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bee real, my senior thesis

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It’s been a while since i last posted anything proper here. Sensibly, you’d presume my life has been pretty dull if i haven’t felt the need to come on here and rant or whatever, but it’s been quite the opposite. 

The thing is, i just don’t know what to say. Everything i’m feeling right now would be just expressed in the form of me whining and it’s extremely annoying. What i’ve realised over the last month is that i’m anxious. Anxiously attached, anxious at life, anxious at literally anything going wrong. Perhaps all those are fine and everyone feels but the first one, oh man, it makes me so so frustrated. Imagine having this need in you for validation and reassurance and when it’s not met, you want to do anything you can to get that validation and reassurance. Recently i was very surprised about the stuff i say when i feel that need. 

At any point i just want to explain everything at once and be done with it, except i can’t. Either the words don’t come out right, they don’t come at all, or the other person really doesn’t care. Already i feel this post was a bit of a mistake. 

Alas it isn’t all bad in my life. I have great friends, i’m doing a lot more and things tend to feel better too. I suppose i’ve come to a confusing point whereby i’m surrounded by possibility but a lot of it is out of my control. This is a kinda shitty post to be honest but i think i just have to get something out. I fear that there’s a lot i’d like to say but can’t because i don’t even understand it myself yet. I can’t even come up with my usual witty titles :/

[why-to-kay]

Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have - But I Have It // Lana Del Rey

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Attachment Theory

I advise everyone on earth to read this article because it explains so much about relantionships and what type of person you are in them.

To make the first step, I’m pretty damn sure I’m anxious-attached.

https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-challenges-of-anxious-avoidant-relationships/

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I find myself fondly recalling a time where I was known as “shmoopy bop”.

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Animation backgrounds by Paul Julian (1914-1995).

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Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), the world’s first computer programmer.

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I have a bootleg of the original rough mix tapes for the Animals album and in this particular song, the end solo is missing. I decided to add my own, hope you like it :)

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A Lord-of-the-Rings-themed card my ex got me. I’m not crying uncontrollably right now.... I promise! I know I said I wouldn’t post anymore but when I found this I just had to.

Anyone reading this post now can understand how hard it is for me to let go after being treated with such lovely things like that.