half full, half empty, half hungry

sour cream crumb cake

i'm not eating enough. not to echo my old blog too much. it's not on purpose, really, i just cannot be fucked to put effort into it. it's just not worth the energy to get up, go to the kitchen, and put even a modicum of effort into eating something i'm not particularly excited about. i'm literally too lazy to eat. a lot of it's probably got to do with the fact that i've been buying and cooking the same food for a year with minimal reprieve. haven't really put many new things in my rotation, aside from baked goods. and i have been enjoying those baked goods, although i've been off my cookie game for so long...

if i'm honest, there's probably part of it that's old ways. like... i guess if i notice it's been a while since i've eaten, there is a small voice encouraging me to keep it going. like, if i've already gone this long without dinner, and it's practically bedtime, may as well push through and just skip it, right? i have lost weight... my clothes fit better than they did a few months ago. never exercising but always baking has its impacts.

this is a terrible habit, though. it'll probably resolve itself when i live with KW and he can cook delicious food and we can order in and there's someone there at least sometimes to hold me accountable. and help me stock the fridge.

i don't know what's wrong with me.

y'know, i'm kinda sad that the old Pretty Thin forum died. and its replacements. i found a small community there, for a time. i wonder why i routinely gravitate towards anonymous forums. there were the old fan forums circa, what, '05? that lasted a while. there was PT the "pro-ana" forum. there was some app? something with an L. and then there was yik yak, and its chain of successors... sometimes i wonder why other people don't need anonymous apps as part of how they spend their time. where do they vent to? why am i the one left needing somewhere to talk to no one in particular? am i running from my thoughts, or processing them?

sharp objects

i've always been too neurotic to properly self-destruct. even when i was best at letting my demons chase me into dark places and dumb decisions, i couldn't help but look where i was walking, at least a little. i never wanted to lose control. and yet something in it has always appealed to me. i feel almost a sting of jealousy when i read about people who have been able to go off the rails, be fully in the deep end, swimming for a little while. as long as they came out whole, or as whole as one can be in adulthood.

i read meet me in the bathroom, about the rock scene in aughties NYC, naturally depicting stories of debaucherous nights - where there is rock and roll, there are sex and drugs. and i just felt like i'd missed out on something i wanted to have been part of. i feel so adjacent to that scene in a number of ways. i like the bands, i lived in the city, but i was too young to be part of it then. missed that window. wouldn't have fit into it even if i were 10 years older, most likely. but it's a powerful case of FOMO it sparked.

just now, i've finished sharp objects, read for book club. and it's a twisted mystery crime thriller, but the main character has spent her adolescence and adult life cutting herself and using sex and alcohol as means to cope and control. i shouldn't find that sort of thing appealing at all. i guess my life has veered just close enough to both of these cases to give me a sort of perverse nostalgia for an alternate timeline in which i ran more wildly from my own mind. maybe i'd have found the catharsis or comfort if i'd just gone a little farther.

rationally, i doubt that. rationally, i'm probably better for the measures i took. there's no safe risk, right? but god i have always - okay, not always, that's disingenuous - too often shied away from risk. to what is probably an unhealthy degree. but people don't really call you out on being careful. can't be too careful is an expression for a reason.

i wonder why this sort of chaos calls to me, though. maybe i feel like i haven't lived enough, or made enough messes. i've played things too safe, done too much of what i'm supposed to, and not enough of what one would want to do, if i wanted to do anything at all. another common theme in therapy, that i seem to have trained myself away from wanting as a means to protect myself from not getting what i want, to stave off disappointment. irrational again, of course. impossible.

i read because i want to figure out how to be more, but sometimes it really highlights how little i've ever been.

good news is at least in reading sharp objects i'm not jealous of the cutting or the unhealthy relationship with alcohol. although i used to cut, and still do honestly miss it sometimes, i'm grateful to not be covered in obvious scars. it makes disclosing that history optional. and i'm not jealous of the borderline alcoholism either; it'd be nice to turn down the volume on my fears and intuitions, but alcohol is just too messy. i do envy some of KW's experiences with AA though. to go through those 12 steps - some more appealing than others - to have someone else help hold you accountable to them, too. i have found myself more than once wishing that there were programs like that for people without having them need to be addicts first. just because i haven't used a consistent substance as a crutch or an escape doesn't mean it wouldn't be helpful for me to do a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. i laughed as i typed that out. fearless, we know, is a failing for me.

what i do find myself bizarrely jealous of is the ability the main character has to just... sleep with people. just fuck. boldly. and again, fearlessly. that'll be a common theme in this whole blog, i'm sure of it. she winds up fucking two people during the course of the story, in the span of a few weeks. she recounts her time as a precocious beautiful teenager wielding a sexuality that probably got out of hand. but still, something in that holds an appeal for me, who kept my sexuality so buttoned up for a decade or more. who spent years wanting to be pure, or the right kind of enigma. desirable but untouched. i'm probably demisexual, with the degree to which i simply cannot truly understand wanting to fuck someone i don't know intimately. but i don't want to be. i want to be able to see a hot man - or just a hot person, really, and go to bed with them. takes more confidence than i have. not just confidence in terms of being able to seduce them, but the confidence to know that i'd want to do that. the confidence inherent to finding a person attractive, to knowing that you'd want to fuck them.

idk, i won't get resolution to any of this any time remotely soon, so all this rambling and reflection is a bit flaccid and impotent, to use some thematically-related words.

the next book i read should be light and wholesome, i think. otherwise reading is going to be a bad influence on me. how hysterically nerdy would that be?

signifying nothing

i made biscuits today. baking is the only hobby left i know how to do, even though it's new. i've finished reading 8 books so far this year. i do enjoy it, mostly, and there's a lot i still want to read. but i still worry that much of the time it feels like something the sort of person i want to be would do, rather than genuinely me. is that a normal feeling? people acting in a way that's more in accordance with some role they feel they should inhabit?

does that make me more interesting, if all i do is read? probably not. i can think of interesting people who aren't great readers. i think what makes someone interesting is a combination of creativity, curiosity, and just enough fearlessness to utilize the two others. is it a coincidence that i think i lack - well, not all of that. i do think i'm very curious. i want to know everything. i love being given knowledge. but i do think my lack of creativity does impede my curiosity. there are some ways in which you can't know what you don't know unless you can conceive of not knowing it, of its absence. and then god knows i have no shortage of fear.

such a common mental refrain is that i want to be more. i'm sure i'll say it many times here. maybe i hope that reading will spark something new in me, or will begin to place enough puzzle pieces that i'll be able to know what's left to fill in.

it just hit me how funny it is that my whole last blog back in ~2011 was about trying to be less, and now it's all about trying to be more.

what even is my aim here? is this just masturbatory introspection? probably. i - i'd say i wanna find my voice, but i think i only have a voice. i am only method, no substance, and i always have been. i was an art major with no inspiration. i loved assignments. i've always said i'm about execution, not ideation. picking an essay topic would always cause a minor breakdown.

i wonder who i'd be if school had been different for me. if it had gone either of two other ways. if i had either learned how to work, developed discipline and a capacity for hard work, or if i'd not been so concerned with being right all the time, with being perfect. if i had only knew how fucking imperfect striving for it would make me. i'd be less afraid of failure, and wouldn't be constantly searching for the right answer. i deeply resent the disservice school has done me.

i just want to be enough. i want to be enough for KW, and maybe that'll be enough for me.

i used to write.

a common theme in my therapy sessions is that i desperately miss creation.

an attempt

well, before that it was that i desperately thirst to be interesting. it finally dawned on me that these desires are connected, and it's possible i have them backwards. i think interesting people create, and so i hope that creating will make me interesting. the problem is, i am not interesting, and so i have nothing to create. i sit down to paint and filling a canvas with colors only fills me with emptiness, like it echoes. i sketch and it could be like that quill in harry potter that uses your blood as ink, but not in the sense that it comes from me. only in the sense that it leaves me wounded. writing is the hardest thing to bullshit, because words all mean something. with paint or pencil i can do whatever nonsense non-representational abstract thing i'm physically capable of producing. but words all represent, by design.

it used to be that shit would just come to me. i always think of the moment i entered AD's old room that one morning, her parents being out of town and we having been degenerates the night before, and the smoke hit my senses just a minute before the words did. the air is thick with stale smoke from cigarettes, hanging stagnant in closed quarters. it became about KW, and quasi-fictionalized, as it always did, but it started as just pretty, true words.

sometimes to get a handle on what i want to say in therapy, i write in my journal. i say sometimes, but really that's much too generous. it's a rarity. but i have done it, and in lieu of being able to say anything better in the moment, i've read my therapist a passage. i remember him saying "wow, i didn't know you were actually good at it!" so he's redoubled his efforts to encourage me to start again. just by writing anything. i couldn't seem to keep up with journaling, because time is a strange trip and happens so fast. i used to blog, back when i used to write. so i'm going to try that again. and before blogging it was those letters, when i'd write to people and just keep it in the back of my school notebook forevermore. sometimes i'd stumble onto beauty and be able to rework it into something.

that was always the best, most fulfilling feeling for me. better than any high, more satisfying than sex. rereading words i wrote and liking them. something of a tinge of pain, but that satisfying pain, something like when you'd lose a tooth and keep rubbing your tongue over the tender spot. when it hurts, but in a way you control.

i just have nothing to say, despite all my rambling.

i'm too young for all my poetry to be behind me.