< - x

2023

this page was created on march thirteenth
(much of its population only began starting july twenty-eighth)

january 14th

i'll get a feeling crawling in the back of my head like someone on the planet is thinking of
me in recognition of my surely-wickedness & this builds until finally i say some absurd phrase
quietly to myself like "funny baby" or "guy with bones in his skull" or "funny incineration
weird" as if this will "appease" the person thinking of me (& apparently observing
me), by being some kind of display of harmlessness or unpretension

january 18th

(was one of my worst days in a long time!)

4:39 am

in this post i describe a type of a sense of meltdown & mundane
crisis that i guess comes with living in my sort of little bubble

it is not often that my course material actually moves me to write something in an involved & sincere
way. so it is hard to articulate the feeling of weakness & defeat that overtook me when, maybe four
paragraphs into a post i was writing on a discussion board, my laptop bluescreened & obliterated it

this was very painful. it wasn't just a setback in the first real step i was taking academically this semester, it
was also the destruction of a piece of writing that i had put some heart into, mulling over the phrasing carefully

i was relatively able to handle it, waiting in a very antsy way for my laptop to reboot & my web browser to
reopen so that i could begin patching it all together again. until that moment came i was sitting in limbo

unfortunately, i found that my primary web browser has spontaneously contracted some kind of seemingly
unfixable problem. when i open it, it is just a black or white screen. when i mouse over where the url
bar should be, the cursor changes. but other than that i cannot see or interact with anything. i have
tried various fixes, "disabling gpu" or "clearing the shader cache," none of it is helping

it is this that put me on the verge of panic, made my face feel tingly, made me tremble a little. such a minor thing but one
that made me sincerely feel very small & alone, filled with a sense of there being too many moving parts in life that i don't
want to have just break. feeling very defeated, bearing a painful hit to what confidence i had about this approaching semester
of work. & filled with a sense of just wanting my friend to hold me in some magic bubble of prolonged economic security

i am typing this in a different browser. i guess it will serve me exactly the same for doing many of the things i do.
but i feel very dislocated & defeated all the same. my weird practice with google chrome browser tabs & bookmarks
was like a safety blanket, they were my memory of so much that i wanted to feel like i would remember to do

i wanted this to be my night where even if i didn't get much sleep i would still feel in control
staying up late & getting through a pleasing amount of my big long lecture videos. now i feel
like i'm missing a million to-do's i'll never get back, missing a dozen books i might never
remember to read, missing a dozen comforting procedures i'd sprinkle across my days

my hope is that this will at least orient me fiercely & painfully towards only what i actually remember to recover, which
will turn out to be the most core & vital & not owed to compulsive hoarding of hyperlinks & educational articles & titles

i make myself too fragile, reliant on the ornate arrangement of fragile electronic data. i am repenting
not living simply. i am stuck lying in bed with a hollow feeling in my chest. i want comfort

5:16 am

"God" is shoving me around hard, shoving me into the anxiety of approaching the end of college, shoving
me into the arms of the only miracle of a person in this city who i really love in my whole lifetime &
would love to just spend every day with not ceding another second to academic obligation, shoving me
now into the unexpectedly rattling assassination of my safety blanket of amassed Google Chrome tabs

everything is cracking & breaking up & twisting around

well... all things considered, there is faaar more that could conceivably be done to my life to make it feel that way.
i mean, i am still living off of a parent in this same apartment i've been in for a decade. & i even get to disperse
the existence of my worry out into the world through this website instead of having to clutch a pillow on my bed
completely alone with it. but... still, christ it feels like everything is beginning to crack & break up & twist around

5:29 am

i can only feel everything giving way to the underlying reality which living with a parent always permitted me to
selfishly shield myself from, which is that there's hardly ever that real safety. at best there is just vicarious safety,
safety donated by whoever is doing the work. someone is always doing the work, always being strung along a
convoluted alienated dance that confers to them permission to not lose everything. & after so much time i feel
like i'm gratefully finding someone i'd like to spend a lot of time feeling safe with, but only now, near that
juncture where it feels like i must question the remaining longevity of my donated safety, like i am going
to have to start doing the dances. & i can feel it in this tower of despiriting assignments bearing
down on me & i can feel it inversely in being kissed numerous times happily. the stakes
feel more real than ever but only in the most dread-inducing way

9:21 am

slept some. i feel dramatic about having had such a response to a little thing on my laptop. but i do still feel
a hollow feeling in my chest, it is sincere... it feels like the exact kind of computer issue i would have stress
dreams about sometimes, always realizing to my immense relief that i could simply undo it by waking
up. only here that is, of course, not an option. i am being forced to "let go" in a particular
way & have no choice but to learn to do so. training wheels, if anything

in less than an hour i will go to class & then begin trying to shovel at the dirt pile of my classwork
while processing both this issue & also, tangentially, the freshly resurfaced but ever-spectrally-lingering
reality that seemingly if the winds do not blow in a favorable direction then i may become the abstract
cause of the suicide of a person who i have liked & cared about for four years

2:26 pm

i've never felt this way generally, walking around the hallways outside my office just residually feeling this
sharp absence of security & like i could cry. it took so little to bend me out of shape. i need sleep very much.
when i am behind on sleep even very benign mundane realities can hurt, so something i actually
have reason to feel a bit rattled by in practical terms can really feel like too much

each moment that i am not watching this recorded lecture feels like i am about to be punished for mismanaging my
time, like it'll push the deficit just high enough that even if i finish it in time i'll have little chance of making some other
unrelated due date. i am very hungry but the residual anxiety is telling me i should not eat, nauseating me when i try

5:25 pm

lying in bed wishing my body would stop telling me not to eat at the same time that it attacks me with hunger
pangs. even a couple peanut butter crackers made me nauseous. it's making it hard to think now. surely i
could eat now, surely that paradoxical nausea wouldn't take me this far & still not let me eat

feeling a quiet burning inside of my face constantly. wanting to feel normal again. wanting to feel cheerful. wanting to know
how to stop feeling dislocated from such a sense of disruption. wishing i hadn't let my computer hold onto so much of my
short-term memory & then assigned that body of preserved memory such unconditional value, which i now can't go of

hoping a majority of it is sleep deprivation & that after i sleep i can feel more okay even if i'm not sure i'll be
able to feel okay about it overall. being unable to handle any sense of irreversible loss. wondering how long it
takes for any little irreversibility to fade. since naturally it won't go away, it just has to fade away from
inside me. hoping i will feel normal next time we are in the coffee shop, that it'll fade away

making myself stop retreading the same diagnostic & troubleshooting search engine results. feeling like i can't
remember what my own hobbies are without something to remind me. hoping it'll go away & that eventually
i'll just come to appreciate it as a "reset" where only the things that actually matter to me will come
back to mind. trying to ignore the feeling of not even knowing what all i'm forgetting

telling myself i need to orient towards processing my life in terms of what's right there in front of me & what
i can make of a day instead of hobbyist amassing of music & information & so on in a place of more abstraction

fearing all the books i may forget to read, thinking of every book that ever changed me & feeling
like i have so much changing to do, if i can just remember, if i can just focus. wanting to be full

starting to cry briefly thinking about being with my friend & particularly being at the nature
trail we only went to one time & know we have to ritualistically revisit when it's warm & green

imagining skipping to the other side of this sixteen week great wall of classwork that i now only fear & would like to
begin digging away at but cannot at all in my present state. wanting to just do all the work & make it all be gone so i can
be with my friend sometimes & it doesn't have to weigh on me. hoping none of it will be weighing on my mind next
time we are in the coffee shop. wondering if classes are worth it anymore. only two days in & this is how i feel...

i have not felt this actively bad in a long time, it's sharp & constant, i don't know what i'd do if it didn't go away,
i don't know if i would be able to function. i feel okay with my friend but once they leave me alone my face starts to
burn quietly again. i've never felt this kind of desire before to just retreat with someone, retreat into someone, hide,
forget all my hobbies, forget writing, forget music, ignore the pain of these forgettings & sleep forever in a sunbeam

it can't just be losing a bunch of browser tabs, it's just, the way it's cracked open my coping
mechanisms a bit. sometimes a certain arrangement of coping mechanisms can cause you to
embarrassedly appear to be having some kind of nervous episode over a web browser

i want to feel normal again

6:27 pm

over-intellectualizing my life leads to self-definition enacted in large part through some intellectually constructed
matrix of routines & indefinitely postponed cultural & informational objects. then when this goes kaput it punches
a hole in my sense of self & i feel like a very threatened quivering gelatinous thing. simple as...

much as i know that all i need right now is sleep, i've been stuck in this loop of walking back & forth
singing quietly with my voice cracking or shaking on certain lines. the red or tan light in my room
feels too hot, like it pairs with the slight burning in my face to make me feel like i'm in an
oven. i think cleaning & tidying up the room will be a prerequisite for getting to sleep

my room feels too dead, too familiar & quiet & still. maybe a momentary sense of over-habituation to
my friend's presence, with the life they introduce... in an unusual moment of, i guess wounding of
my self-conception, i just wish to feel the comforting tangling of mirror neurons

i think about how i will spend time with them & that will take my concern for whatever engagement with my dead
laptop & replace it with life. but then i also think of my classwork & fear the idea that its continuous pressure
could burden my enjoyment of my time with them if i don't keep up with it. & this restarts the general cycle
of worry... everything seems to depend on keeping up. i just have to take it one week at a time

i need my cozy thursday of focusing on work

10:54 pm

slept a little bit & am now inclined to qualify the last four posts as products of genuine madness brought
on by living a day on four hours of sleep, two peanut butter crackers, a bottle of coffee, less than a bottle
of water, & a few reluctant bites of oatmeal towards the end while hyperfixating on numerous stressors

january 22nd

my friend says they feel bad about each class they're in where they determine that it's not so practically necessary
to care about it. the reason it makes them feel bad is that the professor is earnestly trying to teach about a
thing they're passionate about. but my friend isn't really obligated to absorb any of the information

i agree with that feeling, & i think it speaks to a general discomfort that has accrued during my time in college

deadlines, & the speed at which i feel i can process information, & so on, it all kind of forces
me to cut corners & take on a cynical & utilitarian attitude towards all that i have to do

last semester i eventually ceased to read my "social problems" textbook each week & instead wrote
very skeletal chapter summaries that nonetheless earned me full points. i wasn't even necessarily
happy about this, because i thought a lot of topics covered in the book were interesting & a
bit enriching, but it just became too much in addition to the squeeze of everything else

the academic structure simultaneously puts me in contact with expressions of people's passions while
also imposing the rigidity that makes me take on such a cynical & detached tone towards it all

it seems like the only way to keep afloat is to take an approach founded on highly utilitarian
prioritization of due dates, & generally just the more mechanistic aspects of keeping my
grade afloat. particularly, it's about prioritizing these academic mechanics over the
accrual of knowledge, per se, & doing the best i can on exams in spite of that

the ethos could be described as diminishing my sense of being engaged in anything scholarly in its heart,
& more being presented with a challenge of satisfying conditions in the college's assignment software

it's about, for instance, turning off my recorded lectures once i've watched enough of them that i have
something to say in the relevant discussion board. because, now that the stock of grade points associated
with that lecture is depleted, it has no more mechanistic worth & is necessary to move on from

those three strictly measured hours now represent time that could be allocated to the bare essentials of
actually getting a piece of writing down into a document, or clicking the actual buttons necessary
to get an online quiz filled out, or reading some other document to its bare minimum

actual intellectual commitment, even to the extent necessary to simply read the entirety
of the texts i am assigned, can simply feel crushing & suffocating & impossible

the way every class has its own set of rhythms & obligations, independent of all the others, feels like a microcosm of
how if i got part-time jobs at a few different companies none of them would individually have reason to care about
my personal obligation to coordinate between all of them, so as to function in all of them satisfactorily. all they
care about is that it gets done, regardless of what goes on behind the scenes to make it happen

my academic life, taken in isolation, is teaching me to be
anything but inquisitive, passionate, or sincere! go figure

january 24th

since the very moment that classes resumed, i have scarcely felt like a living thing. just a thing that worries about
deadlines, feels truly incapable of putting sufficient action towards alleviating that worry, walks back & forth
trying to remember to eat, let alone read some endless document for one of my classes. a thing hardly willing
to sleep during hours that could conceivably be put towards the practical alleviation of my worry. there
are too many moving parts. i can't make them work right. hours drain away like nothing

i feel like i am living, or at least able to live, only while i am spending time with the nice person i know. i can
always permit myself for that time to not so much think about it all. but when they leave it all crowds around me
again. i should not let them be my only locus of living. i am averse to fostering any sense of budding dependence.
i have found it sufficiently onerous at times to feel needed by others that i could not stand to impose it on anyone else

i've long thought myself fundamentally incapable of really feeling that i need anyone else. & i don't know that that
belief has been especially shaken, but i'm not sure i would like if it came to pass that i'd been wrong the whole time

i am very torn about the validity of a sense of "need" having any place in a relationship, as opposed to "want."
i don't know what it means, or to what extent the two can coexist. "need" has a kind of drama to it, a romance,
a bond, a kind of undeniable measure of a connection. but maybe it doesn't belong in reality. "want" seems
better, more wholesome, more true, & it is what i have been aligning myself with consciously

maybe this is a very elementary thing, as if i have been living in a cave, & upon
exiting it i say, "'need' could conceivably be valid in some way," & the civilized
world says "what?!?! are you insane?!?!" & is right to react as such

if my friend disappeared, would i find that i needed them? would days that would have previously been
tolerable feel very empty now that i feel like i have had a taste of such a degree of tangible connection?

i think i may have developed ocd that found an excuse to enfold its own existence within the territory
of thought that it itself had authority over, causing in me a vicious avoidance of considering it as
a possibility & thus a failure to consider any of its other aspects under the explanatory light of its
presence. might have actually not done that too though, possible that thats not a thing that happened

january 25th

i have to be nice & optimistic instead of merely identifying quietly with kindness &
optimism while displaying nothing but total burnout on actually expressing those things

i worry because i have a tendency to regard real & effective expressions of kindness
& optimism as acts of creativity, which i think depends on inspiration, which i think
of as a fleeting gift afforded at times by random forces that i can't really control

so i worry that, if i simply don't happen to feel inspired, then i can't be meaningfully nice or optimistic despite
all the intent i may have, & that if i try without inspiration then i might just recite nauseating platitudes

january 31st

four fifths of the times i see a tweet my id says "if i typed this i woukd be a fucking acid waterfall out of my skull, when
i think about the dust i actually love it's clear this entire realm is so fucked that holding it in the mind to consider it
is damage & there's no criticism to apply that will ever hold consolation, which is to say it represents just danger, not
culture or discourse, using a computer just contains the non-negotiable potential of getting drive-by stuck with knives, i'd
accuse a lot of people of lacking even the groundworjk to conceptualize how ashamed of themselves they actually need
to be, everything almost looks remotely tolerable until i stop & think of what i actually love & this contextualizes
what a whirling sickness it is to gaze at even the preliminary precepts of what constitutes worth discussing in the
online stuff places" in the span of one tenth of a second which is why i just don't look at tweets instead of
pretending they're an inexorable cultural institution that has to be confronted & reckoned with

february 9th

i'm starting to feel more afraid about my future than i ever have in my life. my thoughts feel as if they resemble
someone facing death. i would like to do page work in a library for the rest of my life. just somewhere quiet.
where i don't have to hear pop music. or better to be outside entirely, i would like to work at a greenhouse

i am thinking about every moment i've spent in this bedroom with every practical reason in the world to feel tranquil,
but some mental pitfall or dissociative fugue held me back. or i just didn't try hard enough, didn't clear my mind

i'm thinking about all the causticity in the mid-2010s that i didn't have to express, all the gentility i could
have expressed in its place every day, & every day since, if anyone had shown me how. could i have already
known how back then? did i just not act on it? i can't tell. all i can see in my memory is an automaton

i am afraid that one day some economic daily cycle won't let me hear the birds anymore. my efforts to
clear my head & feel the tranquility of the birds will become multiplied by the scarcity of my ability
to hear them in the first place. i will feel embarrassed for every moment that i didn't love them

i am afraid of the fact that right now i have to merely type it all into this box & then feel the air of this
apartment, which is presently a calm & soft-colored home that i should try to feel tranquil in now, before
someone comes home & artificially populates it with the sounds of car accidents, permeating the air,
i can't shut them out. i should feel tranquil while i can but the air feels immobile & pressing
& oppressive. i feel an invisible screen in my eyes separating me from my dachshund

or, to perhaps sum up the last post, i am experiencing precisely what i suppose happens if one is graciously taken care
of for twenty-four years but in this accustoms to "being taken care of" as their total... ontological baseline, on an
intuitive & emotional level, even if intellectually they understand what it really takes to live & to support anyone.
a baseline on which they've constructed whatever meaning they could, & then at some point they naturally
come to feel that surely they must be approaching a reckoning about this arrangement of life

i am afraid of drifting away from my friend. i am afraid that i will move past the surprise & relief
& "high" of finding someone i relate to & that it will become precisely by that ability to relate to
them that i become accustomed, overfamiliar, & lose sight of how unique & important they are

i am afraid of the thought that i do not know what love is & that i can know only infatuation, attachment, or novelty.
i am afraid of the thought that i can only experience much of life in a flattened, intellectual capacity. i am afraid of the
thought that i am accustomed to some intense pall of dissociation, such that i can no longer recognize it, can only fear
blindly that it may be there. i am afraid of the thought that whatever might produce lifelong bonds between any two
people might only produce in me a transient fascination with the mere idea of it producing lifelong bonds between us

i am afraid of the thought that i do not really know how to relate to anyone else,
that i am solipsistic, that i can only react when stimulated, that it will never be my
inclination to reach out, that i will always be numb to reciprocity, to give-&-take

my greatest fear of all, for a long time, has been a general fear of essential ruination, of being
corrupted in some objective capacity, of objectively lacking something in me that would be
needed to be complete, or to live a full life, or to understand love, or what-have-you

this would be a quality, or an understanding, or a structure, in my mind - these all being psychiatric constructs,
blurry & indistinct. but still able to bear the sense of being more or less objectively present or absent. at least,
that's how i conceive of it. & my fear is of having been deprived of some experience or body of experience,
such that something objectively did not take shape, & that this constitutes some type of corruption

it is the idea of being fundamentally incomplete in my capacity as a psychological object,
which was acted on, which had to be acted on by life in a certain way to be complete. but now,
incomplete, as a subject i would have to forever live as the incompleteness of that object

in the mid-2010s this fundamental fear was sufficiently prominent & entrenched that i vocally & very consciously
did not regard myself as human. my feeling & opinion was that i wanted greatly to be human but was less than
human, only human physically. a thing which hypothetically could have been human but lacked something
which qualified everyone else as human. i also believed i was incapable of feeling emotion

in the current day i have on occasion typed things that people have expressed love or support for. but this all was the
prelude. i am not whole, & whatever i may write today does not represent a continuity of self that one could trace back.
i was anything but eighteen years old speaking for confidence or love. to some extent i sometimes feel that my current
phase of life, when it is happy & in balance, still fundamentally represents some kind of rehabilitation from what
came before, rather than just occurring in itself. when i am sad i feel like an extension of the past,
marked by it, not whole but compensating. & in various ways i still feel afraid

february 10th

majoring in sociology paired with taking a majority of online classes has been an enormous
mistake & i think i am going to have some kind of mental breakdown in the next twelve weeks if
i don't very consciously take on a much greater degree of apathy about my academic performance

there was already a point on january nineteenth where i completely did away with all fear by realizing i really don't have
to care that much, for various reasons. but my care has creeped back in, mostly because a deadline is just a thing that
manages a fear-based psychological hold on me regardless of how much its associated grade points will really matter
in the end. i do not know how to extricate it from holding this power. it is not like i even hold so much respect
for the higher educational system, but something in me still affords my deadlines such gravity

the work associated with the sociology major requires far more information intake than ever before, & i can never ever count
on myself having a stable rate of disciplined information intake. it seems to hinge on far too many variables that are hard to
pin down. my thoughts are too hard to rein in. sometimes for no reason at all i feel barely present. reading or listening
to anything may feel inconceivable. i cannot count on any particular day being one that involves any work
getting done. this has sort of deprived me of feeling an ounce of security on any day of any week

this pairs extremely poorly with online classes because they are amorphous & abstract. they can mentally hang around me all
the time, imposing themselves. they do not naturally sculpt out a proportion of the week that i should find myself thinking
about them, they do not establish a kind of equilibrium of attention. they can lay claim to whatever segment of
my time i assign them to, & this causes it to feel like their shadow is hanging over all potential times

at first i thought i could get into a groove of satisfying all my weekly requirements as quickly as i could &
then not worrying for the remainder of each week. but this has proven totally infeasible. i am starting to not
feel like i am in daily or weekly cycles at all, just a sixteen-week continuum of psychological burden

there has not really been a single hour of a single day since january seventeenth that i have felt like Alex rather than
Alex the student. there is an absolutely constant sense of there being a grindstone that i should be having my nose
to, but in most cases that grindstone is a pdf file or three hours of recorded lectures, where i cannot count ahead
of time that my fluctuating focus will actually permit me to keep my nose there. i have felt for about four
weeks like i am constantly on the verge of being punished & this is already where it has led

february 11th

i try to shield myself from any sense of writing these posts for an audience anymore, but regardless i feel a strong
sense of certainty that i write them for two adjacent audiences, one being people who can understand & relate to at
least some of it, perhaps a lot of it, the other being people who think they relate to some of it while being too
stupid to gather from the overall picture painted by the actual content of the posts that i probably resent
them & resent the idea of them thinking they actually understand what i'm talking about

february 12th

when i feel grim & like i am unrepentantly inclined to bring a grim aura to the blog, i feel my face, i feel my jaw.
i don't mean that i reach up with my hand & touch them, or that i feel a sensation focused on my head... i feel like
my jaw, i feel like my jaw not as it looks in a mirror but as it feels for my jaw to be my jaw from the perspective
of me, from behind my face. my being is my cheekbones & my jaw? i don't know. it's hard to describe. i think
i might unconsciously picture myself appearing differently, but not as i'd like to appear. i feel like
the flatness of my expression & i feel like the jaw carrying out that flatness

february 15th

i think the horrible disintegrative mid-2010s aura is well-captured by the act of reading about
the case of Genie (feral child) on wikipedia & proceeding to bear some vague, floaty degree of
identification with her situation. & this is patently over-dramatic, immature, & probably
outright disrespectful, your living situation is plainly not so extreme in the slightest

but you are a dumb teenager, so it happens anyway, along vague lines of analogy about your also spending most of your
time curled in one spot in one room, not very capable of conversing with the people around you, materially looked after
but socially deprived, not thinking about the future, bent only on keeping your head occupied until you die, & without
concern for how exactly this escapism might sustain itself economically for so long. sustenance is at least a given

in relative defense of your situation though, you can at least move, & are spoken to, & can exit the apartment & go
on walks, & most of all you have the internet as a highly dynamic cultural, intellectual, & social inlet, positive or
negative as this may be at different times. & in the end you end up pretty articulate, in writing at the very
least. everything is not remotely so depriving as to literally not even permit language acquisition

it's worth noting that that act of identification can itself probably be chalked up to these particular mercies
of the situation, which is to say, being very socially deprived on a tangible level but having access to the
internet & trying to make sense of yourself & the world around you partly through its array of cultural
& historical information & artifacts, under the condition of being an isolated teenager lacking
much of any system of values, whose brain is still mushy & coming together

you are trying to identify some patchwork of things you can more or less see yourself in - none of which you ever really
see yourself in, but you are trying to negotiate which things can be seen as randomly drifting close enough conceptually
to whatever "you" are that you might settle for them as nodes of identification. you are trying to negotiate the
limit, the boundary for how close a thing has to drift before you are willing to settle for it

for a time there is also some degree to which all this browsing & reading & intake displays a macabre bent, within
which the article falls. years later you cannot really articulate why it felt so natural to read about genocides, human
experimentation, radiation sickness, murders, natural disasters, plagues, mass destruction, child abuse, & so on.
maybe some natural bent towards extremity which, depending on life circumstances, didn't have to take on
a negative form. but under your circumstances it sort of did, as the open amassment of information on
the internet gave that bent a strong negative disposition, as there was no boundary to prevent it

possibly there was a sense that all these grim topics represented a vicious "reality" in contrast to the
unrealities which otherwise permeated around you. the end-all reality, though, was still that you were
just an isolated teenager, not living anything close to any of these horrors, & even if the events
these articles covered could be said to constitute harsher "realities" than the absurdity around
you, you were not really experientially equipped to process the weight of it all to its full
capacity. you're supposed to integrate all of this knowledge with going straight from it
back to playing some video game? in gobbling up all this information you kind
of inadvertently reduced it all to the tidy & sterile webpages that it sat on

i feel too sad for someone who received a vase of roses & a letter & handmade sugar-coated cookies with orange & earl grey for valentine's day. i am afraid.
everything feels like it is going to come to an end soon. i am terrified that whatever economic cycles i find myself in may not let me hear the birds anymore.
it's already sort of happening. i spent seven hours in a little windowless room trying to choke down endless insufferable sociological theories faster than
my poor central nervous system will allow. because i am so nervous about falling behind. i've spent these several years comfortable in my room with the
birds there outside but failing to just let myself feel satisfied with that while i still could. so much time trying to reassure myself that the world has
some gentle character interlaced into it even if i can't always see it. but what if the world just stops being gentle to me by any measure & it's
just sterile lit rooms forever & keeping myself neurochemically afloat with a sun lamp like a dying thing on life support, what then

& i am also scared that my loneliness is essential, objective, impossible to alleviate, that it is like a shard
of disease buried in me & regardless of who i find it will change shape to accommodate their presence & persist

i feel gloomy & sagging & nervous & on-edge & grey. i feel mercenary. when i am around M i do not know what to say to them anymore, i feel like i
have nothing to say to anyone, i feel like i do not have the character & life that i had even just back in october. i feel incapable of banter. i don't feel
like myself. i feel like there's no time for fun anymore. i'm starting to question when exactly it becomes naive to expect fun, when exactly the world
starts to impose itself in that way. is there always an escape? am i just wrong about the world eventually stepping in & taking away real reasons
to persist? does it not actually do that, or does it & everything will simply end soon. i am starting to lose track of what i am doing
anything for. i do not want to lose what light there is & i do not want to feel like i wasted all of my time

i think i spend more time feeling afraid lately than i ever have in my life. parts of my life have
been marked by ennui, depression, boredom, dread, sadness, frustration, all of that, but never much
abrasive fear like something is gathering in the air above me to eventually close in & destroy me

i am afraid. my time feels so short even though nothing is bearing down on me in a really immediate way. i spent so
much of my life not loving anything & now i think i love some things, i think i at least love the birds & warm
grass, & i want more time to simply love things to make up for all the time i didn't bother or know to

i feel as if a time is going to come past which i will never find safe harbor again & past
which i will have to kill parts of myself to survive. i'm afraid of having to kill parts
of myself in the process of stomaching whatever i might have to stomach

i feel like there is so much inside me & i don't know which sentences to choose out
of it all & write down. i feel almost like there is no one outside me anyway,
or that those who are there feel so insanely abstract & distant

everyone feels like another faceless, independent, single, private human being scattered across the surface
of this planet. it feels hard to imagine social bonds really holding anyone together, for anyone to truly
have some sense of... canonicity. things feel tenuous, it feels like the norm for people to fade away

thoughts being haunted by the thought of two people holding each other
until it's time for one or both of them to go to a bad sad building again

i wish greatly to feel again like a room can be beautiful, is beautiful always, like the objects around
me have an elegance & gentle character & mercy, like the light & the tones & shades of color are
simply good, inherently, without reason or justification. i've felt it before. i identify with it

but for the moment it's like i can't stand the way that this room is only itself moment after moment, & that it doesn't
tell me anything, & that as long as i have my eyes open its same stagnant silent image flows into them constantly

so very many times over these years i have envisioned people speaking to me protectively, & while
this was always pleasing it was also always detached from the reality that i felt no sense of
risk or danger about my life, that i felt quite secure, even bored. now i feel quite unsafe
& i'm not sure how much those visions can do to help cope with that

february 18th

walking the apartment slowly back & forth thinking about the idea of my head being too full such that
i can't really see anything around me because it's all painted over with conceptual associations with
whatever i look at, so that my physical surroundings just act as a rebus for a plane of ideas
behind my eyes. or maybe the apartment is just over-familiar, has nothing to say to me?

thinking again about many of my freedoms that i am accustomed & how they might sort
of wither away whenever i have to transition to financial independence. but also
i am not entirely sure what i want to do with that freedom in the first place...

i have so many obscure albums i would like to sift through but it all entails just sitting in one spot for so
long. my thoughts aren't quiet enough for me to just lose myself in sounds anymore, they often end up
fading into the background. i have a lot that i would like to read but it just seems to never happen,
i fail to rein myself in from the pacing, or the ruminating on what i might write here

to have freedom & know it is starting to become fleeting but still feel unsure of what to do
with it feels abysmal, disenchanted, unimaginative... i feel like an animal whose instincts
have all withered in captivity. i feel like there are people who would kill for my present
stores of free time & do much better things with it, even beautiful things

february 27th

my love wants to have a picnic later this week. i wish i... could feel how sweet i know that to be. i don't know that i can feel very
much. i'm not entirely sure what i feel about anything at all. i wish fear wasn't the thing i seem to feel with the most strength
lately. i want to believe that this will go away, that i will feel good things when they are there. i wish i always had something
to say instead of hiding everything by default so efficiently that i don't even notice all the candidate sentences flitting through
my head. i wish staring at calm trees didn't come with the fear of being taken away from them, & i wish it didn't have a glaze of
blankness that i feel like i am trying to pierce through so that the world will become real around me. don't i love the trees?
i don't just merely identify with love for trees, do i? does sweetness have anything to do with my being if i can't feel its
rare & treasured manifestation? i don't just merely identify with sweetness, do i? why would i identify with things
i can't feel? if i can't feel them, how would i view them as things worth identifying with in the first place?

february 28th

i smile out the window of a car in spring weather. i go home
& i can stand warm in my backyard. these things are good

but they don't feel the same now, for this reason: while it's always been abundantly clear
that i've been sitting in the jaws of a system that simply hasn't decided to start closing
them on me yet, i am only now really starting to acknowledge & feel how that is the case

these moments no longer have that sense of unconditionality that they once always had without exception,
that unconditionality which was never inherent but always an effect of being economically protected

i spent so long curled in that unconditionality, feeling like the fight i had to fight was subjective,
internal - the necessity to smother my mental problems so that i could let myself feel the peace
of the good things around me, & the peace of the good & comfortable way i was living

now, as subjective problems still linger, it feels like objective threats are going to
join them before too long - undeniable systemic realities threatening to bear down on
me. i wish i could go back & have more time. of course i would take years more of all
those difficult but still objectively safe internal struggles, if i could feel safe again

it feels like all the bliss of life, which i have been trying so
hard to keep my eyes consistently open to, will remain there.
but it will all become clouded by forces beyond my control

all those spans of time that i do manage to keep my eyes open will also have to align
with the times when i am actually permitted to aim them towards the light, the birds,
the sun. the difficulty of everything will compound, the screws will tighten

to be fair, i am not even in danger yet. i still have a while.
i've even raked in a pretty unexpected amount of money from the
government & have a summer ahead of me that may be quite happy

but i still have this constant sense of a foreshortened future. every moment of peace or levity, the sun on my face,
can feel like it is at the expense of some responsibility i should be tending to, else i may be punished in some way.
everything is marked by the underlying threat of punishment which feels like it will become the tone of things going
forward. right now the punishment would just be a dent in my gpa, but in the future it may be loss of home

it didn't really really feel this way until this semester. & that it already
to some extent feels this way conveys a potent sense that things are ending

i can't know what the future looks like & i am so afraid of ending up sealed in a room that precludes any meaningful
presence of the sun & birds. i am afraid that every peaceful moment outside will unavoidably contain the same tension
of a school recess - that sense of having a leash temporarily slackened, even while i am "on my own time." i imagine
some future where i have thirty minutes each morning to get my thirty minutes of sun exposure, & i feel the ticking
clock on the back of my neck the entire time, & it suppresses my pleasure, makes it something nervous instead

somewhat tangentially: it gives me an odd feeling how every time i live a moment of genuine peace
as i smile out the window of a car in spring weather, that moment lives on in my memory, & i will
always have it to look back on, & as a memory it will always have the unconditionality of
a memory. & everything i ever daydream will always have the unconditionality of fantasy

i have always carried with me an extensive catalog of memories & things which never happened which have always felt like
the tantalizing city lights lighting up the horizon on the other side of a vast, impossible expanse. i wish my life had given
me a better psychological framework for understanding my own experiences & i wish my life had let me better
understand love. & i wonder to what extent i could be called responsible for either of these insufficiencies

i feel very sorry for wasting all the time i had. i feel sorry for not reaching out to people of
of reaching out to them in inept ways. & i wish i could i could say that even now i am sure
of how exactly to stop wasting time, or of what exactly would qualify as time not wasted

march 6th

M brought me daffodils. we had a picnic. hummus wraps & blueberry cobbler, all made by them. i will
confess to having supplied the blanket that my dad sleeps under. it was just the best one, it's pretty.
i shouldn't have done it. i didn't tell M. we shook all the debris from it. i hope he won't notice

my phone was nearly dead, but it lasted just long enough to let us hear all of haruomi hosono's philharmony as we
walked to the particular place off in the woods away from the trail, near some tire swings. i started the album in
the car only because the first song is called picnic & has him saying "picnic" a lot & nothing else. M liked that

i found that i enjoyed listening to that particular album at the nature
trail, though. i remembered how much i associate the two with each other

i enjoyed the feeling of leading M through indistinguishable woodland, them blind but i knowing
precisely where i was, where i was going, where it was in relation to me, & what i was looking for

i enjoyed lying on the blanket & staring up at the still-bare branches. one tree in particular i liked to look at
because its branches seemed to have a very "grasping upward in unison" shape, maybe a trick of perspective. when
accustomed to my upside-down perspective, they looked like a branching, hanging thing, whose swaying was less
from the wind & more in a dangling way. the splitting & narrowing of the branches gave an impression of
depth, like they were receding further away rather than becoming smaller. & the grey sky behind
gave an impression that it was disappearing downward into a layer of mist

we saw a woodpecker. it was at the top of a tree in the distance, directly in front of me, framed
by some high-up branches that criss-crossed to make a roughly triangular or trapezoidal shape
around it. we watched it peck. it's not so often that you can watch them in that way, i feel

i confess to having felt a mild sense of dread at times. even going on a picnic makes me feel a bit of dread, question if it's
"real" or if we haven't just accepted that a "picnic" is a peaceful construct & enacted it like a routine, rather than feeling
out life & deciding for ourselves with full dynamism & relativity what we really like... if we aren't trying to mask some
underlying emptiness that might break through & flood out at any second... maybe if it were framed as "going out into
the woods & having lunch," in more dynamic terms rather than being given a name, then i'd think of it this way less?

what if a picnic is a very real & sweet thing, & i was not doing justice with how un-present i was...? but what is real?
real feels like the quality of experiences that other people have. the experiences that i have only feel like ideas,
like potentialities that happen to become material but still stand in relation to all other potentialities

it's... when i was chauffeured from place to place as a child, like an object, it was as if every situation &
place i found myself in was objectively happening, because it was all that could happen. in the bigger
picture, every situation might have been the end result of total caprice. but i felt none of that

now it's scary that i have to do things. not because i'm responsible for them, or have to motivate myself,
but rather because... well... it's hard to describe. just think of it in opposition to what i just said, i guess.
it's... harder to assign meaning to things, in a way. i have to directly feel the absolute caprice of
my firsthand agency, the way i could conceivably do anything, on any day, at any time

i have to be the one who decides a picnic or a drive or a walk will happen, & the event seems
to spring from nothingness, from nothing beyond my subsequent practice that makes it real

it's like i feel the variance of the places i go to less than i feel the
consistency of the general system of modifying my position in space

it's like i feel the variance of the gifts i'm given & the food i eat less than i feel the
consistency of the general system of decorating contexts with juxtapositions of objects

(curious, though: the picnic was really largely M's idea & doing... but i still feel
this way. it's like it's commutative, in a way. it's like it... feels like it was "our"
idea, or my acquiescence, & that's enough to make everything feel so adrift)

march 7th

an essential quality of using tumblr is a repeated awareness that receiving the tepid, detached approval
of the wrong person can feel infinitely more degrading than any outright verbal attack ever could

i don't feel like i am eating lunch because i am hungry, i feel like i am eating it so that
i can be biochemically capable of understanding the recorded lectures that i have to watch

i feel no boundary between myself & my classwork, or between the food court hundreds of feet away & my office
computer, or between my french fries & my term paper, or the u.s. department of education, or the global labor market

i feel like one segment of a biological-nutritional-technological-academic-economic process, & each
of these labels is only for convenience, with the process as a whole actually being indivisible.
so i am not even a segment, really - just a patch of it that one could single out & call
a segment. one segment - me - just happens to be conscious & typing this

one could just as well say... that the lectures are eating
the food, using me as an instrument to make it be eaten

it feels like this overall process is what has existential primacy, that it's the "protagonist," an
unconscious protagonist. my being conscious doesn't make me central to anything. none of it
could happen without me - there's no classwork without a student - but it is not about me at all

everything feels inevitable. it's not, really - i could drop out, i could do all sorts of things.
but this feeling of inevitability, & all the rest, is how my classwork is making me feel

march 8th

i'll stop makingthe posts

i don't know. i'm in kind of a fugue this morning, in direct response to that prior message. underlying that fugue has been
a kind of gratitude for the person's decisive willingness to reach out & try to "jolt" me. nothing else was going to jolt me

it's not like i hurt or discomfit anyone, i don't think, but i am embedded in a comfortable rut that is horrible to
myself. i rarely receive contestation & i am not sufficiently critical of myself to bring myself anywhere truly new

i solipsistically insulate myself from my inability (or simple lack of willingness) to stop & ask anyone
what their name is, or how their day is going. i have invested much in this insulation. i have attempted
to construct my self in the negative space that is left behind once that action, & every potential
moment in life that can proceed from any given practice of it, is excised

i am, as always, defined by things i don't want to think about or braveries i don't want to enact - disinclinations that i set in
stone, come to regard as unquestionable realities, so that i can live in a manner thoroughly defined by the biased absence
of all those lines of consideration or action, existing cozily in the belief that this is the only way things could be

i have spent all morning trying to interrogate why i retreat, picking at the knot of excuses.
i have either been doing that or trying to just not think - not in a way where i am trying to
avoid introspection but rather trying to destroy my incessant over-intellectualization & tendency
of getting lost in unwieldy, overarching contexts surrounding whatever situation i am actually living

i cannot tell if i am disinterested in understanding anyone or if i am suffused with a kind of deeply
ingrained hesitance & fear which manifests at the surface level of my conscious as a lack of interest

a part of me which craves an easy way out wishes
i could be lobotomized so that i could not
overthink my own desire to be friendly

i largely neglect to try anything new or to try to discover unfamiliar passions, i instead opt to feel
distress about some kind of objectively dispassionate character of the world, something i can project
outwards & focus on obsessively, lean on in its unchanging objectivity which ensures its consistency
as something to focus on, rather than turning inward to focus more on discovering what i love

i am not sure if i understand anything at all about myself. i cannot tell what it actually
is that i seek in relating to other human beings. i am largely afraid of people. i tend
to be afraid of learning about them because i fear that when i conversationally pick
at anything too much it comes apart, or at least risks coming off as critical

i am also afraid of the idea of entangling with people socially before causing them emotional
harm by way of my emptiness, which i imagine as something that should have precluded our
connection but which i ignored & masked, so as to tell myself that that emptiness wasn't
there & that my social connection was really happening, that it really "counted"

i am susceptible to doing things on the basis of thought-terminating cliches, tautological acceptance
that they are good - to think, "it is good that i am in a relationship" or "it is good that i have made
a friend" on the basis that it is good to be in a relationship or to have made a friend, without
ever personally interrogating the meaning of either of these things or how they should feel

naturally this can lead to a feeling of blankness but i expect blankness from everything, i think it's "just how things
feel" & that to be routinely excited by things is just some romantic dream. but really i have insulated myself from
all the brave frankness & dynamism which, if i just permitted myself to express it, could actually bring me the
excitement & fulfillment that comes from a creative & sociable approach to whatever situation i am in

in that self-imposed deprivation of that excitement i forget to expect more than blankness, i adjust
my expectations to a very emotionally flat reality, i accept that existence just has a dullness
that i have to come to terms with. but i think it all comes down to me not doing anything

if another person displays a more essential capacity for finding joy in things, they are sort of automatically reduced to the
image of a person doing something & finding joy in it, as though it were an objective process. in reality it is informed by
all their firsthand subjective experience & methods of processing their life, but none of this announces itself, & so
if it is not explored through dialogue with them then it presents itself as a kind of cause & effect image

it is these images that i have developed a desperation to conform myself to, doing things which i can imagine
making others happy & mistaking my subsequent ambivalence for the fulfillment that, if i actually felt
it, would be unmistakable & clearly impossible to substitute with misinterpreted ambivalence

i want to believe that this is all a condition stemming from the way i internally conduct myself
& that by disentangling that conduct i would solve it. sometimes i fear - it's one of my biggest
fears, really - that i was just born with some kind of aimless detached ambivalent cognition
or that i acquired it so early on that it would be nearly impossible to unlearn

march 9th

if i met a new person &, during all my time around them, consistently kept kindness at the front of
my mind (even if to an extent that was inevitably imperfect), this might create for them a kind of false
impression of someone who sprang into existence so predisposed to it. sure, they might have a general
awareness of the way people change & are only taken as what they currently are. but they would
have no reason to specifically suspect me of ever having been awful in any particular way

this is at odds with, say, about four years ago, when i would express such uncompromising, all-
encompassing, authoritative, nihilistic pessimism with such blithe & uncompromising certainty

i know that the past doesn't define me, but it can be hard to feel that. it's hard to feel like it doesn't at least inform
me, like it doesn't characterize any present or future kindness as a transition, an about-face, or a compensation... & it
can be any of these three things without that necessarily meaning anything. but the knowledge will always be there
for me to come back & dwell on if i am not in a good place. those... immutable historical qualities of
my kindness or lack thereof will be preserved in me & it's my charge to not focus on them

i feel like someone who had to leave town & start a new life elsewhere. i don't want any & all general kindness
to represent an operation of recovery rather than nature. i don't want to carry it in my memory. i don't want to
always know what's behind a veil in time that no one new can see through. i want to be kind without feeling
like the inversion of a past iteration of myself. i want to feel like a kind self as arisen in a vacuum,
distinct from the past. i can't stop comparing myself to something hypothetically better

it feels like... while there is no limit to how kind i could let myself be, & that is optimistic, the past is
also already there & it connotes some preexisting personal lack that kindness will always be expressed
against, like in essence it can only be in contrast, inessential, done always against unkindness,
rather than done only for itself, for the well-established & familiar joy of it

it is a greed, a greed to not just settle for the infinite potential of the present but
rather to futilely demand of reality for me to have been better too, to have been in
a place to have been better, to have something i can look back on for... authentication

march 14th

moving out, by blithe field

there was no delay between the moment when i lied down with earbuds in & felt intensely drawn in & soothed by this song, & the
moment when i began to think of what i was experiencing as the idea of experiencing it, or the story of experiencing it, or in
terms of how it could be captured, crystallized, shared, described. i don't know how to turn it off. i don't know how to
experience anything as myself rather than as a part of myself split off to represent "them," "the outside," "the narration."
i tend to feel alone a lot of the time, yet at the same time i tend to never feel alone, but it's in this bad way, where
everything is automatically its own conceptual mirror image, everything is potentially social, exterior. i feel eyes on
me all the time. not in a literal paranoid sense, of course... i don't know how to turn it off. even when i imagine
myself lying in bed, listening to this, feeling situated in my own life & not thinking about this stuff, it's... like
i'm still picturing the idea of someone doing that & from there i hope to embody that idea. i don't know what to do

march 18th

have to stop letting other people's undirected expressions of levity feel like implicit accusations of my being deficient in it

i worry that the chance

of any type of experience i could have collapsing in my head from the experience itself
to the mere idea of that experience, which can be invoked by experiencing it (but
this invocation bears no distinction from the mere idea it corresponds to)

inexorably approaches one hundred percent & will always reach it, on some uncertain
day, at some uncertain time. i question if i can experience being in the woods firsthand
anymore or if has already been swallowed in that way. it feels like water rising around me

march 19th

it'd almost be kind of gratifying if i completely & utterly lost my mind in a way that i broadcasted extremely
visibly through tumblr & thereby demonstrated the complete worthlessness of having an audience of several
thousand generally disinterested people. primarily it'd be extremely miserable & sad though so
i'll settle on it as something that shouldn't happen, not something that should!

march 20th

i can barely feel the fact that i exist & on some level i believe that that makes me worth despising for my
willingness to not appreciate the gift of my own existence, & to instead let myself be entrenched in
dissociative & over-complicated thought patterns that are, at the end of the day, voluntary

i feel like i have unequivocally ceased to be much of a good person, if there was indeed some interval in the past several
years where i could have been said to have genuinely lapsed into being one. it feels like some kind of threshold of
inevitable progressive entropy in my person has been crossed. i feel like all i can employ against it is intangible
mantras like "i should be one again," which find no connection to any tangible stakes or potential practice

i feel too uncreative even to improvise the unrealistically comforting things that i would imagine idealized
figures saying to me, lately it's difficult to keep it all from circling in on the same cliches of reassurance

i feel sorry but on a level above that i feel like i should feel bad for even still feeling sorry because
it's past the expiration date of still being reasonable to dwell on so i really really have to just
force myself to stop caring or else the loop of cyclical reasoning for guilt won't ever break

march 22nd

i can't imagine much of a worse fate than messing up badly enough
that a nice person makes an exception to their niceness for me

march 25th

i feel like no one understands what i mean when i say that my every experience seems to immediately collapse
into the mere idea of itself & become something that can largely only be contemplated rather than lived. it's
disturbing to liken something to water rising around me & feel like no one even knows what i'm talking about

march 27th

i don't know anything. i wish i knew what it is like to be me but i can't be anyone else for comparison. i don't know if it is like anything to be me. i wish
i knew. i don't know if i can feel anyone i'm with. i think every social occurrence feels like an isolated event that i spectate. i don't know how i can ever
stop feeling alone if i can't feel anyone around me. i don't know why i let people kiss me if i'm not sure that i' a person. i don't know if a graveness is
currently surrounding me mentally or if i'm just choosing to conjure & observe it. i don't know which of my thoughts i have a choice to think or not. i don't
know whether changing thought patterns is hard or easy. i don't know if a person's life can possess some kind of character at a certain time (like graveness,
or faltering, or failing), or if we just project judgments on strictly physical events devoid of any qualities. i walk down a hallway thinking "i think i'm
going to die" over & over for no reason then conclude that i might be putting myself in a bad mood by thinking that & wonder why i even thought
it. maybe i like badness. or i like goodness. i'm not sure if i like or hate goodness or badness. i would not voluntarily do anything cruel or bad
though. i decide to think something other than "i think i'm going to die" & am very unsure of what to think in place of it. i stare out a window
& think "it feels like i am in a period of mental difficulties but that might just be a narrative i'm unconsciously constructing & placing myself
in. i would feel better if i rejected the narrative." if it is just a narrative & i can reject it then i have to let myself reject the narrative.
i don't know if rejecting it would be hard or easy. if it is just a narrative then i am ashamed of taking it on, ashamed of prostrating
my entire headspace to whatever petty catharsis i must get from feeling like i'm having mental difficulties

there might be nothing wrong with me whatsoever except that i internalized the conception of myself as a product of neglect (or something
like that) & i think & act like i imagine myself to be as such a thing, or maybe something is wrong, if there was anything i could for
sure say is wrong it'd be the general deficiency of any meaningful social "staging ground" to determine if anything is wrong, i know
when my friend was visiting weeks ago i felt dynamic & normal but i also know that right now i don't feel like either of those
things, unless i just can feel like them by trying to. i don't know what thoughts i have a choice to think or not