It’s uncomfortable how little I’ve felt like engaging with my writing projects, particularly in light of knowing it’s important that I do. My self‐styled break from my blog was mostly a cover story. Even now, with the ability to craft any retroactive explanation, the best I can come up with is the desire to keep at it… evaporated.
I know I get stuck in my own head—a particularly precarious statement—when it comes to creativity. It’s better for me not to think, not to plan. But I forget all the same. I sit down and try to think my way back into my work, try to assemble it all together, consider each piece and its placement. My ears ring instead. There are no thoughts. And then I remember—I remember…
This isn’t a thinking engagement.
Our minds create the weight that pulls things to us.
Or in the form of a quesiton:
Is it possible to have time without gravity?
These are little notes I would leave for myself. There used to be hundreds of them, maybe over a thousand of them. They’re mostly all gone now, transcribed into my computer so I can search through them for unifying themes and words—but I never do, because the only unifying theme is of mental chaos, by‐products of old psychosis. A few of them still exist as small pieces of scrap paper sitting on my desk. Though motivational in their intent, their sight is often a source of discomfort: the last remnants of an exhausted and recovering mind.
Balance is not always static.
Balance is never static, nor is it ever achieved. To cultivate balance is to acknowledge and invite the nature of change. Balance becomes a continuous journey. Its representation as a destination is an illusion, any rendition of its arrival cause for immediate suspicion—there is nothing without motion.
I gave my breakfast ears the other day.
There’s a bite out of one, because my breakfast is a brawler, and that brawler is a part of me.
Remember the feeling from your dream.
This note was under a pile of fading receipts. Written one morning months ago, it was a reminder for me to stay connected to a feeling from a waning state of consciousnesses. Now all it does is invite me to a place I’ve monetarily forgotten how to return to.
Since animals are able to dream, they're also able to have nightmares.
It became difficult for me to casually eat meat after this note. The scale and comfort with which humanity’s worst nightmares are imposed upon the waking lives of animals raised for mass consumption defies logic. It is an exercise devoid of respect or compassion, a forfeiture of grace and honour.
I am aware my brawler breakfast used chicken eggs for eyes before I dressed it up with gluten‐free ears, gave it a backstory, and then ate it. In terms of coming face to face with their own behaviour, I tend to notice humans enjoy their moral contradictions served sunny side up. It’s a tough ingredient to avoid as it’s almost always on the menu.
One of the things I tell myself is that it’s better to write while in a particular headspace, and that if I could take the detachment I experience from my human‐shaped identity and produce something other than dysphoric observation and condemnation, perhaps I’d get more work done.
It's either going work, or it won't—so now what?
This is paranalysis—a sort of mental paralysis where evaluative criteria trigger looping thoughts instead of action. Limitless mental time, resource, and expense are devoted to deciding how something will or will not work. The same formula is then applied to the potential consequences, or lack thereof. It’s a double‐down on doubt. Thoughts expand, but they don’t go anywhere. Nothing happens.
There is one more note—a couple, actually. But are they, actually, a couple? They’re linked now, but they weren’t before. That’s what a couple is. It’s not two of something, as I’ve thought for my entire life, it’s just a something. A couple is a connection—not a quantity.
I seek to reconnect to something that was once a part of my culture but now feels lost.
I remember things being different. I experience the present moving into the future and know what’s happening isn’t quite correct. I feel the absence of that something every time I’m requested to look at advertisements for curved phones or neon food, when I’m asked to care about who is wearing what coloured pants and which car they are driving. I used to play along because it seemed like a game. It’s not fun anymore now that I know it is.
Why do we remember the past but not the future? The future is remembered all the time—as hopes, as fears, and as dreams.
Wishes are memories you don't have yet.
I’m wishing I would remember more of them. One day I do.