on moving on and being a writer. (obnoxiously self-aware nihilism masquerading as wisdom pt. 1) [did I mention I am a writer?]
Ta eis heuton (but actually I want you to read it, and love it, and make me feel better about myself. I also just want to air my grievences because I actually do want to move on with my life)
When I am at a loss and I am too ashamed to ask somebody wiser where to go, I wonder what the characters of my writing would think about giving up, tucking tail, burrowing down in some dark corner far from home. Safe at last. Free from dodging arrows of blame and shame….
Oh dear…
I’m rhyming in the first paragraph.
That’s never good.
I start rhyming when I have gotten to a level unreachable by solace. When melancholy has bitten down, drawn red, and left me to drip dry. And all I can think to do is write. I start thinking I have things to say and a way to say it that nobody else does. A sour mix of ego and self-loathing that I try to scrawl my way out of in my little expensive leather notebook by sounding vulnerable, or at least clever. I might as well pull out the cigarette and unspecified brown liquor just to complete the image(I quit smoking last year, if you smoke you are a weak person. I plan to start again next month). A self-deprecating, self-aware writer, yes, we need more of those. Eyes lit by dim lights, hands moving quickly late into the night when nobody can bother, even the inner critic. That bastard. Anyway, back to the vulnerabilty (that is what we are all paying with our attention for here).
Selfish writer selling shellfish by the seashore. I thought this was clever. If you hate it, I understand. Wasn’t I writing something about characters? I think this was gonna be an essay about how creative writing can set you free or some shit. That’s boring. It does. Moving on.
I been trying to love myself (and anybody else) after love gone awry. The type of love that got left in the fridge and soured. It was hoping to be savored, instead it just went bad. And I am NOTORIOUS for leaving bad things in the fridge. Ask my friends. When I was finally brave enough to empty it out and reclaim some space, the whole kitchen became a hazmat situation. The whole house. The whole block. The whole god-damn city. I had to leave it all. I couldn’t not. Every curb reeked no matter how many clothespins I stuck on my nose, no matter how many mantras and positive affirmations, no matter how many sensory support groups I went to. It still stunk. Always did now that I think back on it, but there was just enough poppies, sunflowers, and dahlias waved around to cover it up. Perrenials always die back in autumn.
I tucked and ran. I’m not sure people would believe me if I said it was the braver thing to do. I am still not sure I believe it (but it does feel better). All kinds of normal things become brave when you are confronted with somebody elses chaos, when their obsessive madness (and some of your own) starts to show through. Sitting in the coffee shop becomes brave. Not closing the blinds during the day becomes brave. Not having a panic attack when I see a small white car driving down my street becomes brave. Not checking your cameras everday becomes brave, because even if you do see them driving by it won’t matter because the restraining order didn’t stop them from coming to your house over and over and over again. Having a day where you do something menial becomes brave. Well I got brave enough to leave after they started attending the school I worked at. I moved on, I let my life fall further apart, sift out. I gather the gold flakes and take them with me before the flood takes it all. The rest was just rocks I was happy to kick (although there were some shiny ones in there that I still keep crying about).
I never knew I had it in me, to fall apart so completely. I still don’t know. I had changed gears before, moved towns, said my goodbyes, but always after some unattained goal announced itself from the recesses of my soul, some glittering hope I just had to strike out on my own for. The valiant, heroic journey of my life, my purpose, my work, my, my, my, my. It all seems silly now. It is more than silly, it is foolish, naive, even in bad character. I should say something here about no regrets, but I have them, I am also better for them. But this last regret, this sour love, I try to get on the postive with, that it somehow initiated me, or pushed me off toward greater things. But it truly did the opposite, it made me small. It made me so unimportant, victimized, writhing and pitiful. A vile caricature of myself. And still somehow I am finding it a medicine, a medicine that bared some animal truth, ripped it open like a ripe carcass. This lust for smallness has been attended to by many of my failures in life, all working to get me a taste of whatever is at the bottom.
The truth was that my bigness was a good show, a show that paid well, made me feel wanted, intelligent, valuable. I was doing “good” work after all. I was helping people, I was giving them clarity, and supporting their personal growth. I had spent years studying. I tried my best to treat people right. I was critical and tried to back my claims up, and as such I was well respected. It is true that I had already planned to leave it all behind just a few months after starting – this foray into becoming something like a life coach or reader (whatever it was I can’t do anything but gag at it now) – but I stuck around, rationlizing that I would “expand the field,” make it something worth my time, not the “bullshit” it started to seem after I got past all the flickering and fawning lights. It took a few people extracting my words out of me for profit and false love to realize I need to grow a spine and stand up for something for once. I need to say NO, let others be hurt, even if it made me a hypocrit, even if it made me a villian. I would rather be somebody’s failure and fade into obscurity than give up my self-respect like that again. Letting others treat me as if they own me, as if they can coerce me to do their bidding, and I giving them the leash. I started to turn away from bullshit, not coddle it, hoping it will change it’s mind. Unsurprisingly, some people got upset about it. Upset that I drew a line in the sand. I disengaged, letting others spend their time and lives as they will. I stopped trying to save everybody from bullshit, I stopped trying to have an opinion expressed in an instagram carousel and I stopped trying to get others to stop treating me badly, I just left.
There was just so much bullshit to leave. The saddest part was I can’t separate the people from the bullshit, even though often times the people are good. I am still trying to figure that out. Because there were some good people, people I cared about. But I just don’t think we could ever see eye to eye again.
I felt like I used to be useful. Pointing out what was interesting, pointing here and there, and talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. I just wanted to be useful. I fought to be useful. Maybe that is why it was harder to leave it all behind, because it was really leaving behind my usefulness. I am useful to very few people these days, and somehow I am a better for it.
Surprisingly(to me at least), what I had filled my head with for over a decade was easy to forget, especially when I stopped selling my vulnerabilty and word through it. I truly haven’t thought about Human Design, personal development work, mythwork, shadowwork, depthwork, menswork, mywork, or any other work™ for months now. And I do not miss it at all. I can try to be humble to my teachers and say it was “formative” for me, and maybe it was, but I like to imagine it wasn’t, I like to imagine I stole something from those experiences, instead of them stealing something from me. A mercurial figure who dodged a bullet with the gold in hand, not a sad man who got trapped by obsessive interests, hubris, attention, audience capture, and the seeking of financial security. A man who spent more time loving ideas, and trying to save people or be useful to people, than living values that could possibly lead people to hate him.
I feel more inclined to the stoics these days, letting reason lead the way, letting the animal of my body(the one Mary loved so much) be animal and lived through. But I don’t let it run the show, that animal is also the one who hides in trees for hours because of a bad wind, the one who won’t eat anything before the sun rises, the one who traces footsteps going nowhere just to be sure they actually lead nowhere. Reason has served me better. Reason is in the body just as much as the mind (do you believe that sentence? Why? I have absolutely nothing to back it up, but I could bullshit you about it if you want.)
I actually have no idea what reason is, but I imagine that I am drawn to something like the Logos, something like truth, something like authenticity, something like integrity, through it, and writing about it now just weakens it and makes me feel like a dum dum. So I will stop.
When you love somebody enough, you start to internalize them; their voice, their logic, their delusion, their hurt. They become a creature hanging on your shoulder. If you are lucky or wise(mostly lucky) you put them there on purpose. Most of us aren’t lucky, and we got a bunch of beasts still lurking around, whispering in our ears, bearing us down. We can try to be their opposite, the headstrong warrior, the powerful main character of our story who defied the odds, and put it to the man. But what happens if we just let ourselves get smashed, become nothing, useless, feeble, a wretch of wretchs. Everything the creatures tell us to be. I wager that at the bottom of wretched nothing are two things, beauty and death. Both will bring you somewhere. Death is the easy way. Beauty requires some stubbornness, some will to stay still. Still in a forest of void where you endleslly hunt, wait, want, and lose over and over again, until the sighting of that which you hunt brings you to tears and you lower your aim, letting it live exactly as it is. The void repeats until you learn to let all life live, exactly as it is.
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Wasn’t that great? I’ll never know if you thought it was, because I turned comments and hearts off. Please don’t tell me what you thought some other way, I am trying to be elusive and mysterious. I tell myself I don’t care what anybody else thinks, but of-fucking-course I do. I will probably send this to some friends, and hope they don’t hate it. I write with this obnoxiously self-aware, nihilistic tone just to get it out of my system, nothing else seems to come out on the page these days. I am just too much of a bug to be anything but squashed. So I’ll squash it all out. Might be a month, or a year, but it doesn’t matter this substack is my digital twin’s, and we’re no longer conjoined. If you fall for it, we ain’t friends.
Ta eis heuton: one day I will write because it’s all the daemon asks of me, not because the bug still needs to be squashed. I will keep writing, even if it is to just feed the trashcan.