Finally something that isn't part of a series you know I won't finish…
Since I last posted, I’ve had my head down building things and meeting you in the real world, like I said I would. I’m still doing those things, and I’d rather be more curated and less disheveled—less sticky and gross from the hard days—but it’s come back to my attention that this exists.1
I caught up with my friend E recently who also writes. I told her, “I don’t want to be doing this anymore”, which isn’t entirely true. I think I was simply confused in the moment. I’ve been writing rather fervently, just very privately as well—my journal sees most of my scattered ramblings that no longer reach you, nor my therapist who I’ve only seen once so far this year.
I just didn’t know where to take this anymore. After doing something for a while, what used to be fluid simply congeals and petrifies into a very fixed object. Inanimate things unfortunately beget boredom in me2. When it isn’t the boredom, I get it in my head that this can’t be anything else but that particular something, so the pendulum swings and I’m overcome with anxious thoughts, trapped in a maze of my unwritten rules.
That thing that happens… it’s a type of death isn’t it? A type that creeps up on you. To realize one day you made your home at the fork in the road. But come a time, we must move forward. This is me moving forward.
Another thing in particular has been stopping me from picking up where I left off. These past few months I’ve been feeling some recurring burden of having to prove myself.
These seemingly disparate threads have that thing going through them all3. Maybe it's why I feel this vague sense of being inauthentic with others lately. It's not that I'm putting a face and being plastic, it's that I'm constantly, consciously augmenting parts of myself in different ways to meet people and their expectations and where they are, only to realize after the fact that it is exhausting! I'm not that malleable, and I can't be.
I started The Introspectre cause I wanted to express freely, whether to a willing ear or none at all. In doing so, I could express absolutely.
This is me moving forward in that sense as well—shedding my skin and emerging as a self without restraint, without augmentation. A moving forward that isn’t just a cautious one foot after the other, but bold paces, saying, I’m me and I’m here, and damn it, I deserve the space I take.4
What that looks like exactly… well, even after all that, I still don’t know where to be taking this, so we’ll just have to see.
I hope that as we move forward that you’ll keep hanging your coat at the door and coming in for tea. The weather has become predictable, but it’s still turbulent.
Something for your knapsack as you head out: a linear yet interconnected playlist of… me.
Thanks, A.
Or rather, they elude me, or won’t give anything back.
This was that “emotional constipation” I was talking about, I.
Something I realize I’m still in the process of learning since that turn for the worse last year. I wonder when I’ll reach that inflection point at which I truly become confident in simply being.