sooner dead than aphasic

everything is a coping mechanism and nothing is fun

sitting on a longer thing but need to get out this shorter thing before i become so totally distracted by it that the longer thing checks itself into draft purgatory. enjoy <3

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whenever i meet an artist i want to get to know better, i always make it a point to consume their art. i know what it's like to fold shards of your soul into your work, thoughtfully distilling yourself into an expression of authenticity that might be a more genuine reflection of you than even your embodied presence in the world. i pay attention to those who extend the same generosity to me. they get it, i think to myself. they see.

and i love to write! i do. i love the way synonyms are not actually synonyms, that each one possesses its own network of connotations and cultural connections and that being enamoured is very different from being enthralled is very different from being smitten, or charmed, or fascinated. i love the music of sentences, the satisfaction of precise phrasing — how the clauses cascade in your head, rollicking; how good writers know when to lean into the cadence and when to take a breath. a pause. a paragraph break, even.

Victoria, a week ago. the music is quite beautiful

only i don't know for sure that it's the writing that i love. i love to express myself, true — i love to be read and seen and heard. i am always seeking to hone my craft because it is important to me that my ideas come across, that i come across ... but i can't lose myself in it. i find in writing personal essays or poems or songs not the euphoria of the flow state, but the euphoria of exorcism: a wrenching-out, a purge.

i met a writer recently who lives up to the title. he writes (and reads) because it's fun; his idea of winding down after a long day involves pumping out a quick 1500 on a cursorily interesting prompt. he is quite possibly the most prolific person i've ever known. my 1500s are, by contrast, intensely laborious and sometimes months in the making. embroidered into the space between the lines of each blog post are truths so visceral that releasing them onto the page is a cognitive offloading of such magnitude that it changes forever the way i think and talk about myself. it is no exaggeration that i am my words. it is also no exaggeration that i write to live — there is deep-seated juvenile anxiety that has found an outlet in the honing of this craft, and in order to get it out of me, i must put it to music.

i think that enjoying something as an end in itself necessitates a bit of distance, a degree of sterility. i feel it in discrete flashes, still — i keep a computer science class around every term for the uncomplicated satisfaction of solving meaningless problems, even though joining that rat race scrapes the bottom of my list of preferable career trajectories. however, in holding my pursuits up to the light one by one, i realize there are scarcely any others that meet this criterion, that aren't profoundly embedded in some aspect of personal lack. i write because i need to be seen. i like psychology because it quells my fear of the unknown. i'm taking Existentialism because existence bewilders me. the person i sit beside in that class once told me that even in existential suffering he refuses to adopt beliefs for the sake of making himself feel better; he'd rather sit in his pain and the accompanying self-righteousness that comes with intellectual integrity. the abstract is his amusement park. in his view, philosophy is the sport of reason; adopting Kierkegaard's theism without rational justification is philosophical suicide.

maybe so! but i for one tire very quickly of metaphysics. i do not find it useful or especially interesting to take a solipsist's hammer to the world, and i would loathe to spend an evening salon coming up with rational justifications for the existence or nonexistence of God — if i could and if it helped, i'd be religious in a heartbeat. and as much as i love dearly the twisty and blooming capability of my brain, it is becoming apparent that this love is shaped very differently than others'.

i don't really have hobbies in the casual sense. everything i do is in service of one elaborate reality organization exercise. from the outside it would appear that there are many things i am passionate about, but the more these passions are examined, i find it more accurate to say that there are many things i am pacified by. i am at That Crossroads where i must decisively act upon whatever it is to which i would like to dedicate a significant chunk of my future, and i want this choice to be cleanly motivated: i don't want to use lack as motivation in the case that i am rendered purposeless when the void is otherwise filled (by the natural enlightenment of maturation and experience, etc.). by consequence then i am at a loss.

10/30/2023

i keep prodding at the thing in my chest responsible for innocent wonderment asking it to say something. it stares back, blinking, mute.