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This year has been long and difficult - one extended sit-in forced to reconcile with myself. Though I wouldn’t change it for nothing, this year of constructive stress, I spent the majority of it stuck in feeling I needed other people to understand me. I have felt as if I were split open and bleeding; they know too much of me, the wrong parts of me, making incorrect assumptions. Or worse, correct ones and I don’t know who I am. I don’t know which parts of me to fix or to rather tolerate a blanket acceptance of all the traits and habits that make me who I am, even the ones I feel make me intolerable.
I have come to a reconciliation on this but maybe only due to the sun returning and flowers blooming. Stumbled upon this video, it’s good if ur curious. I think a lot of people can relate to desperately wanting, clawing for a romantic relationship. More specifically, we look for someone who understands, someone who fills the aloneness. I do not know if such a thing is possible; always, there is space between this person and the next. Even in an embracing intimate seclusion with another, there are gaps and crevasses unreachable, unspeakable, nothing with which to tend to these deep gorges of separation. What to do about this? So much of myself I do not understand.
Apr 24, 2024
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I found this in my notes up from April before I met a partner of mine and was overwhelmed with a constant feeling of loneliness. He later cheated on me at the start of the month, and I felt nothing,
I was released to be alone. Now that December is coming to an end, the joy of space has worn off and left a lonesome taste in my mouth. He is the most recent picture of intimacy I can claw too. I dislike him and don’t want him, I’m not sure I ever did. But god do I miss sleeping next to him, I miss his representation of warmth, not him. Anyway this little diary passage reminded me how well I know myself and how the same feelings and thoughts will continuously re imagine themself and manifest into life.
19 April 2024
“We aren’t meant to be solitary creatures
We are made to hold one another
Our arms fit perfectly around people for a reason
And every night I go with only my bed to keep me warm
Part of my soul breaks under the discomfort
The absence of someone is the presence of my loneliness
The space becomes filled with reflections of myself
And I must stare back at my ghosts who haunt me with the silhouette of lovers who did not want me”
Dec 30, 2024
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You have to force yourself to tackle the hard thing, whatever that means to you. Because the more difficult thing, it’s probably the right thing, or the thing your life needs. I think for me, the hard thing was to submerge myself into genuine solitude. And I’m not talking about like, My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Leaving Las Vegas type solitude… And I am definitely not talking about anything related to the type of seclusion that came with quarantine. The objective here isn’t to isolate yourself to the point of total deterioration or to reject the people who love you. It’s about stomaching the feelings of loneliness that come with deep personal reflection. It’s about enduring the self-imposed boredom that comes with getting to know yourself without any external influence. It’s not about being physically alone (though it is a part of it), it’s just about finding ways to be alone with yourself and who you are, the good and the bad, and really admitting to the bad. And then, what was at first so uncomfortable and sort of embarrassing to undertake will eventually become easy-normal. Everything outside of your solitude becomes so peripheral it’s hard to remember when you existed right in the center of it all. And some people, the ones who really do buy into their socio-infallibility, will probably, yeah, consider you some misanthropic outcast! But, what my friend and I like to joke about as being misanthropy is actually just self-awareness and conviction, and belief in the improvability of everything that is or can be wrong with oneself or others... The world feels constantly disappointing, and people are disappointing, and you’re disappointing, and I am definitely disappointing… But all of that can be improved upon and then improved even more, and more and more… But you can’t improve anything about yourself until you know what it is that needs improving. And even then, knowing is only the first step, knowing doesn’t mean anything if you don’t do something about it. So if any of this applies to you, maybe think about it, do something about it. Leave, find solitude, change what needs to be changed, even if it’s really, really, hard to do that. And most importantly… embrace your cynicism in positive ways instead of in ways that honestly just fucking suck!
Oct 13, 2022
"Relationships with other complex, flawed people are beautiful and transformative and fulfilling, but they’re also inherently maddening, infuriating, hurtful, stressful, and yes, triggering. It is ideal, of course, for us to work to understand those conflicts and thereby make them less destructive to ourselves and others, but we can’t make those feelings disappear; nothing real can have contact without friction. If you’ve been encouraged to define a healthy life as a frictionless one, I think it may be inevitable that a life devoid of contact starts to feel like healing.
And here’s the thing about friction: it really does hurt. Isolationists have one very strong argument on their side — when you’re alone, there’s no one there to hurt you, even accidentally. There’s no one there to throw your own flaws into stark relief. There’s no one who you might hurt with bursts of uncontrollable emotion or human carelessness. It’s hard to be hurt, and perhaps even harder to hurt the people you love — why not cut the risk, lock the doors, and live a life of robotic, impersonal, action-oriented optimization?
The answer, of course, is that none of us are any good alone."
–"No Good Alone" by rayne fisher-quann, @internetprincess
Oct 5, 2024
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Ripping into fruits on a hot summers day, juice dribbling down my exposed chest pooling at my feet. Sitting in cool river streams, a part of the natural world around me. Not a thought beyond the immediate. Stuff like that.
Jul 10, 2024
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I have many Ideas. I ponder over them like an obsessive collector; organizing, re-organizing, packing them into words so the meaning is captured, transferable. Most of my transformative experiences are unexplainable - how does one capture the depth of a still, silent night? The whispering of leaves in warm summer breezes. Vague feelings of wholism while sitting in the grass, photosynthesizing like plant ancestors - a fish swims without direction. Many call it god but the church is alienating; the word massacred and butchered beyond the recognition of what it once meant.
One idea I have kept unmolested by the opinions of others, is that these holistic experiences in nature, with friends, live music shows, where the pulse of life beats strongly, are everything. An anchor point for a life well lived. It’s not enough to just be in nature, alchemizing the circumstance missing the key ingredient. A couple of friends and I went on a trip to where the ocean went on forever, unbroken horizon. We were down by the water, sunset and glistening, warmth of the sun and sand beneath my feet. But it was nothing more than looking. I did not have access to this other way of being - locked out, truthfully, by being eaten alive by the stress of exams and stewing in the feelings of being unlovable. It is somehow within you; the trees and ocean reflect it back to me. A quality of self brought out by sincerity and solitude. It’s everything, reflected in everything worthwhile.
Apr 17, 2024