september 12th, 2021

i have read numerous things equating love with survival. i don't feel like trying to enumerate, quote, or paraphrase them
right now. but i have to wonder how this framing relates to the total lack of expectation placed on me to survive... i mean,
it is my two family members' love, it would seem, that exempts me from having to seek employment to survive, but again:
this still has the effect of exempting me from having to survive. which, if it's true that love is so tied to survival, seems like
a terrible loss... but then, would going out on my own be to my benefit, or just spitting in the face of a privilege that no one
should walk away from? it would seem that i'm living in a way that ideally everyone would, maybe... it feels relevant to
this line of thought that my dog doesn't need me. i'm not even expected to physically pour the dog food into her bowl

& then how does all of that relate to the idea that the survival that my family is doing on my behalf is inescapably
imposed but not even necessary in the grand scheme of things? with how society is producing enough resources
to free people from having to survive, but artificially recreating the necessity to survive with money? such
that going out on my own would just be agreeing to arbitrarily throw myself into that, i guess?

october 7th, 2021

i am given a home, i am accepted for who i am, my needs are tended to, & i am left to myself, with nothing expected in
return. & this doesn't make me feel warm, it doesn't make me smile, it doesn't make me feel anything. that makes me feel
inhuman. i feel forced by my limited perspective to take everything for granted, to see all fortune as as inevitable as
the misfortune, something else to coast by as if on a theme park ride. if the emotion isn't there, it just seems like an
absurd ritual to simply intellectualize all of my gratitude. this is why i want to be deprived for the sake of feeling
able to appreciate anything, why i want my past to retroactively involve tragedy just so i can be in the process of
renewed recovery from it. i have no stakes, i need no one, i need nothing. there is no solace to be found in anyone
or anything because solace is not needed. i want to feel connected to a narrative - not a silly spectacular narrative
but any of the narratives that people's lives seem to actually follow. tragedy-&-recovery, & so on. i guess
it can potentially be this aimlessness, & then the exit from this aimlessness

october 26th, 2021

i feel like i take absolutely everything for granted. i want to stop, but i'm not sure i know how to not take even
a single thing for granted. i can't remember the last time i felt visceral gratitude rather than trying to remember
to express it ritualistically. it's like my expectations for what reality is conform skintight to exactly what is in
front me the instant that anything happens, whether it's good or bad. it's not that i think "of course someone
would be so kind to me," it's just... reality is constantly establishing itself to me. i don't count on anything
happening, but once a circumstance is settled as part of reality, it feels like it was inevitable...
the more i think about it, the more it feels like a feeling that i can break down

february 17th, 2022

i have a fear of not loving people... &/or a fear of thinking i love people, & indicating
that i do, while thinking i am telling the truth, before later concluding that i lied

i have a fear of... taking everything for granted, as if my expectations of reality conform precisely
to what reality presents to me moment to moment, so that nothing can ever really stick out...

i can think in my head the sentence, "none of the good things in my life have to be so. they are all very specific
& exceptional fortunes within the endless possibilities that could have reached me." but it doesn't especially put a
smile on my face... i don't know how to make it breach into emotional processing rather than just rational processing

maybe i have never experienced a loss sufficient to make me really feel the absence of something in contrast to
its presence... or, if i have, maybe i have dissociated myself from it... maybe i dissociate myself from things

i think this was very prominent in 2017, with those two people... i did tell them over & over & over that i loved them,
when really, i don't think i did... i think i was mostly clinging to their presences. that's why i put my beanie & scarf on
the headrest of the seat i had always sat in in the van, before they left, as a kind gesture of still being there... then kind of
had a meltdown within a week or two, over how stressful i found all the proceeding interactions between me & them...

i tend to catch myself not smiling at one thing, & start getting sort of nervous. generally in life i would like... to feel more

it's not one consistent thing that i fail to smile at, but any random one thing... maybe i receive a gift, & i regard it in
a curious or interested but sort of flat manner, & then i get scared of the idea that i could just objectively lack the
scaffolding in my head on which i would... construct & hang & have the sentiment around that kind of thing...
but then, whatever i've gotten, there's surely no way i could ever discard it, so there is something...

i'm not sure... i hopped excitedly when my brother handed me a letter from my friend, but now it is
what i am kind of focusing these anxieties on... maybe i am just overthinking, or in a weird mood...

i do like the letter. i think this is the kind of confused paradox i always end up at if i... i don't
know i am just coming to feel very confused, i have no grounding. i don't know if i am trying
to confront a real emotional phenomenon or overgeneralizing an ephemeral state, or if...

well, i care about my friend, & if i care about my friend then i picture myself rereading his letter & smiling, & that image feels
right. but i have to consider that i can't impose such a specific experiential expectation on myself, & that i can read the letter
with a more general sense of interest & valuation of what it is, whether that stems from an ephemeral or general condition

unless not smiling at something really does have to mean something? upon considering that, i get scared that, upon analysis, i might
find that few things really make me feel anything, & i'd have to confront that, & it would be an intensely scary & disarming reality
to confront... having to tell someone i have no feeling about whatever they could say or do, being forced to report this as an
objective condition inside me that totally dismantles large parts of my personal subjective engagement like socializing, etc...

it's very drastic but something that'd be very hard to empirically verify or deny
too, though, so it's never something one would want to commit to "confronting"

but... all that said, laughing & being normal in calls & stuff is not "not feeling anything from anything." so
i think i am stuck in ephemeral overthinking, which is stemming from... still being residually very afraid
of one day discovering some kind of fatal flaw in myself that would hinder me from being complete...

i think i've just worked myself into a very weird sense of disorientation

i feel like i've had the same conversation before... where i start misidentifying & misreporting my own feelings as
absent, & then the other person takes this as a more cogent & confident assertion than i maybe really mean it as,
like something i'm not... afraid of. then i greatly want to walk everything back, & i feel upset at myself
for having threatened that kind of scary tragic retroactive nullification of something...

i identify myself as the potential failure point in anything i may be involved with - being in the first-person, i'm the only thing
i can analyze on that basis with such a degree of confidence & familiarity. i begin to entertain that i might not even be fit for
piloting a subjective frame of reference around, that my social capacities might collapse entirely, realizing my potential
as the failure point, something like dying subjectively but not objectively, spontaneously losing all form inside

there is comfort in the seeming objectivity of others' actions, even if i know that for them it all comes from
the same confused subjectivity as my actions - with my subjectivity offering no comfort by comparison

i want to know on the authority of something outside myself that i actually like my friend

i want to be empathized with, as someone deathly afraid that they feel nothing, but the expression of that
fear forces the other to dually grapple with the disturbing potential that i really don't feel anything,
since they have no counter evidence: they can only rely on my testimony & i am anxiously saying
something a bit bleak. i pray they have the wisdom to read between the lines & refute it