Getting itchy. Gotta leave the house in 3 minutes. Read Memorial in 3 days, flew (blah) and so I'm entirely split into 3. Recently I appreciate: sleeping in cool bedrooms, fiction, full (cotton) underwear meaning not thongs, sparkling water, photography, babies, talking walks in the city and observing city life, library browsing. Wind is blowing change and my three minutes are up.
Itchy Monday morning eyes, the impossibility of it all. Broke a plate, kick things off at 10 only, could/will mornings get easier? List of things to get for the studio: tea-towels coffee, coffee-container
When can you see yourself clearly? This week I've been confronting a lot of myself, especially the stories of who I am that in action dissolve into the contrary. One part is really about how little I actually value my skills or labour, how the decisions I make are often based on the fact that I'm just not good enough at something. I begin and quickly I convince myself the way I'm doing it is lesser, cull. I convinced myself that with the privilege I have, I can afford to work for free, that all experience matters. But it's all tangled up in shame and lack of self-confidence. I trick myself, I implode my dreams, and continue narrowing down the space I take up in the world. I'm starting my life for the third fucking time. I burn all bridges behind me, I chop off fingers, tongues and poke my eyes out thinking I'm just being fair and that others matter but shit it's really a mechanism that helps me stay my paralysed self. I feel socially inapt. I've been noticing it more and more since we have a studio and it's so natural for eda to walk up to people, to have small chats, and I'm just uncomfortable because it's all short conversation that I don't know how to do. So I shut myself off and think 'these guys are not like me.' It's like I made a mechanism out of not-belonging that keeps in place this small sense of worth I have but why? What am I afraid of? Hurting others? Admitting to a mistake? Or is it about the status of abnormality, the wanting to be different? Or is it the primal disappointment, fuck is it about the parents? I really hope it's not that but it does check out. I cross most humanity out because my folks couldn't treat me like an interesting human or I just have a hard time getting along with them and that just projects onto everyone else - it's impossible to know me (or s I think) because I'm the middle kid who always slipped away, was always out of focus. This is such a loop, I'm gonna need some help to get out of this. I think asking for help is a good place to start. I'm so deep in my own shit, filled with regret to the brim. I'm head is like a scanner of all the what ifs and should haves and it's been scanning for days and all I feel is this deep disappointment, like, I will not believe any words of consolidation because all I see is that I stifled myself all the way through and it's just one of those moments where I want a diagnosis for something which is a terrible thing to think about but I have that I can perform full-functioning so well, wear this mask while actually I'm just really really scared.
I think I'm not calling my parents because I'm ashamed of not doing good, delivering good news, not excelling with a pay check and the ultimate freedom of being able to buy myself shit. At times I wish I could move on from them, let them be part of a past, like a friend you break up with or simply fade away. I hate the power they have over me, the person they bring out whenever I'm with them. 'That's not me' I try to say to myself but there I am again.
(weeks of avoiding the word, of avoiding expression)