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An ongoing story for dull moments

I have for the longest time had a long ongoing story in my mind that I think about whenever I’m bored. Waiting in the line at a grocery store? Sitting in a waiting room? Let me think about this story with these characters in my head. Free TV with my imagination. I have tried writing it down several times but it just steals the magic. There can be plot holes and things that don’t make sense because nobody knows about this. Probably a symptom of my mental illness but I quite enjoy it.

@thisisthea

Feb 8, 2025

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My greatest asset and my captor

Words appear as I think them like a karaoke video in serif font on a white background. Sometimes I’ll be doing the dishes and I’ll start repeating paragraphs I’ve drafted and editing and rearranging them and adding to them in my mind and they shift around visually as I’m doing it. Sometimes other words or phrases will get caught in there and they’ll quietly pass back and forth like a sky banner. Songs are often drifting through—right now it’s Pale September by Fiona Apple—and if there’s a particularly beautiful or resonant part it’ll loop through that snippet a few times. I think almost entirely in words, in monologue and in text, with very faint flashes of associative images—I imagine this is to protect me from the dark and horrific things I’ve seen in my life that would be too much to bear if I were to be exposed to them in such a visceral way. I can’t rotate or even envision a shape to save my life. Rarely, strong images will appear to me in conscious life—I remember lying in bed, about to fall asleep, and suddenly seeing from the point of view of an investigator entering a pitch black cave with a lantern held in his hand as his only light, about to discover something terrible, no doubt. My dreams are vivid and laden with powerful symbolism, and usually there is a sense of being too afraid to fully step into my power or claim what’s mine. I have the memory of an elephant, with everything filed in nearly chronological order. I’m sure I tend to embellish and dramatize without realizing but then I think my memories speak to a certain distilled emotional truth, more accurate than pure facts. Sometimes there are some incredible blind spots in my perception that I don’t realize existed until years later. I analyze and intellectualize everything. I’ve been told that my mind is obsessive and tends to fixate. Sometimes the emotions that I keep trapped in the basement push their way up through the trap door and threaten to stampede me as their captor but I manage to stuff them back down again until I’m ready to let them go; some of them may never see the light of day.

@taterhole

Feb 15, 2025

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release yourself from the narrative

This might not make the most sense but if I don’t write it I know I’ll be angry with myself.  As someone who has always naturally been drawn to archives and journals and stories- I’ve found that I’ve been trapping myself in the narrative. The idea that life is a singular, vertical narrative, that pain is not simply pain but part of some bigger cycle of distribution and retribution. That pain is naturally repaid with love or safety or comfort. This narrative keeps me coddled in myself, it keeps me safe from having to face the fact that tomorrow might not be easier than today. That this year might not feel much better than last year. That as some things go on, they don’t always get lighter. They don’t alchemize from emotionally pain into material pleasure.  The hero’s journey tells us that the narrative follows simple steps. We are called- your alarm, a Britney Spears song, plays in the morning. Your car breaks down in an unfamiliar part of the city. There’s a death in the family. Whatever it is, the call is something that moves us from familiarity to the unknown. It pulls the hero into the journey. We will then face the unknown and hopefully overcome it.  But what about the calls that we don’t answer? Or when we get stuck in the unknown? What about when we are braver than brave and we still cannot overcome everything? I’ve learned that sometimes our pain doesn’t come with atonement. Sometimes there is no return.  Life doesn’t fit into the narrative. The alarm in itself is a narrative, you set it the night before, or maybe you set it three years ago and you’ve been waking up to the same song every single day. The car is a narrative, the unfamiliar side of the city is a narrative. Why haven’t you been there? The death is a narrative explored and experienced by every person in your family, every friend of the dead, every coworker who called the morning after to see why they didn’t show up when their alarm went off that day. Everything is a million narratives coinciding and to trap ourselves into one, to tell ourselves only one story, is blinding us to the intricate nature of life. We cannot exist in only one dimension, and to choose to exist in various different- sometimes beautiful and sometimes horrible- narratives at once is to choose to stop coddling oneself, to stop following your pain like it always has something to give you.  Sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe that’s fine. 

@dietcokecat2004

Mar 11, 2024

Top Recs from @jmeridian

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SOLO TRIP

Back in April I went to the PNW for 11 days solo! This trip pushed me and taught me so much about myself. I did a bunch of hiking even though before this I wouldn’t have called myself a hiker. Driving through remote areas with poor reception forced me to trust myself. I loved the solitude and nature and who I became on this trip. I also got 2 tattoos (my first!!) and worked through my fear of needles! I’m tougher than I think.

@jmeridian

Dec 27, 2024

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ice cream is just ice cream

My grandparents owned an ice cream shop for 35 years. In the early days they sold sandwiches too, before moving to just ice cream. At one point when my dad was an adolescent, they actually lived above their shop. My grandma would dream up flavors and my grandpa would make them — he's lactose intolerant, he never really even reaped the one benefit of owning an ice cream shop. My grandparents, dad, aunt, great aunts and uncles, second cousins, and even my mom all worked fairs and festivals scooping ice cream. It was a family business, my grandma and grandpa were the core. They had to change locations twice. They "retired" at least once before actually retiring. This ice cream shop was an institution. For me though it was the place where we would have Thanksgiving. Closed for the season, the shop was the only space big enough for all of us. I had birthday parties there as a baby. It was our first stop after a five hour drive across state lines to see family. That's the place where, at my grandpa's insistence, I wrote my initials into the wet cement he had laid down for a bike rack. They are still there. When I was 16, I worked at the shop over the summer. You don't realize how tough it is. Decades of dipping had made my grandpa particular. I didn't have the wrist strength or the speed necessary when there were customers out the door, all of them hungry and agitated by the stifling heat. I was terrified of giving someone back the wrong amount of change. Becoming almost paralyzed by the responsibility of being behind the cash register — it was their livelihood after all. That was my grandma's responsibility. I was in charge of the milkshakes and malts. I decorated sundaes with hot fudge, wet walnuts, sprinkles, and cherries. I packed the shaved ice into paper cones and doused the evenly shaped mounds with syrup. I doled out the frozen lemonade into styrofoam cups. My hands became raw from all the cleaning. I'm now particular about hygiene in the kitchen and always tip. My grandparents still own the building, renting it out to a dentist and coincidentally, an ice cream shop. It's so strange now to go there. Everything is entirely different while being exactly the same. They painted the chairs a different color, but they are still those heart-shaped wrought iron, poorly cushioned chairs I know from childhood. Some of the flavors have remained. But it's not the same. Maybe they're buying their heavy cream from a different supplier. Or the high schoolers who work behind the counter aren't as precise with the measurements. I can try, skipping the artisanal flavors for the ones I grew up eating, but it will never be the same as it was. And that's alright. They're softer now, my grandparents; the anxieties and stress of those decades having melted away. These days, ice cream is just ice cream.

@jmeridian

Dec 30, 2024

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another one

“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.” James Baldwin

@jmeridian

Dec 24, 2024