apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime

it's been over a month since my last post, and i feel oddly guilty about that even though this blog doesn't have an audience? nor do i particularly want or need it to because it's only my own thoughts written down somewhere that isn't a material object i have to maintain or fill. and because sometimes the detachment of a keyboard makes honesty easier. even if i have always liked the way a pen moves on paper. i remember back in the day (high school) having a diary in the form of email drafts in a yahoo inbox, because that was the only place i felt i could handle talking about my friends growing up and starting to deal with sex and drugs. not so much rock and roll. what is this blog but an expanded yahoo email inbox, with perhaps less spam in it.

things haven't been all that great here. KW's in a full depressive episode and it's frustrating that i don't know how to support him. when a depressed person wants to be left alone, is that the depression talking, or them? how do you make someone smile when they don't want to? when they think they can't do something because they're not up to it, do you let that stand or do you push them into it because you know that they really can? and then i know his depression has nothing to do with me, but it drags me along with it sometimes. it's a fucking bummer, to feel so useless and unhelpful when the person you love is in crisis. but in the moments i've been unable to stop myself from being down on myself and giving the negative thoughts a voice, KW has attempted to be there for me, sometimes successfully, but at other times telling me he can't deal with the same conversations again and again, or that he can't really give me the support i'm looking for because he's unequipped, also depressed. so... i try to tamp it down.

it's one of those days. KW's been in the bedroom all day, i've been out in the living room listening to the songs from the most recent bo burnham special, inside -- a musical depressive episode played out in quarantine, and watching his old performances. just a big bo burnham kick today. i tried to go get KW to do dinner with me, but then raised the idea of maybe going out either to pick something up or eat at a restaurant, and then... things just collapsed, until he basically stared at a menu on his computer for 5 minutes straight, and the plans for the evening ended. i can't get him to have dinner. maybe if i'm lucky at midnight he'll decide he actually is hungry and will sort something out then. i microwaved the remaining 40% of last night's leftover burrito and ate it at my computer. we were going to watch the new in the heights movie; he's been excited about it coming out, and this is actually a night where we're both at home without other real obligations. oh well.

i don't want to be egocentric, what's going on in his head is about him and his brain chemistry. but he seemed to be doing okay, until i tried to make dinner plans. he told me he was a little down, and then i just watched him decline.

anyway, i'm still at my computer, where i've spent the better part of the day. i probably shouldn't, given that i learned at the end of the last month that i actually need glasses now for the computer. i have hyperopia - ironically for my life, i'm farsighted. she who fears thinking of the future because that's how hopes are made, and hopes are how disappointment comes to fruition, is farsighted. excellent distance vision, is what i was told, but having to focus on the screen in front of my face all day is straining my eyes and worsening my vision overall. anyway, i got a pair of glasses but then immediately decided i hated the frames on my face and went back (with my mom's assistance) to pick out new ones, but i had to give up my old ones and haven't gotten the replacement yet. so... here i am. spending the entirety of a day i'm not required to be on the computer, on the computer.

one thing that's become clear - or had its clarity reinforced, rather - is that KW vastly prefers when i actually engage with the world. that's been a theme for a while, as was bravery in our first relationship. and i think the definition of that's pretty flexible - to do more than be carried through life by the relentless passage of time, to be conscious in how i spend my days. it can be playing video games and watching netflix, as long as i do it with intention and find a form of joy in it. and growth. if i find it fulfilling, and not just treat it as a way to make the day end. this comes back to being interesting. passivity isn't interesting, action is. intent is. purpose is. thinking is. i still say creativity is but i don't have that. i find myself, right now, at 11:50 PM (and earlier when i started this post) wanting a way to improve myself, right now. to learn something, to practice a talent somehow. i'm watching bo burnham and i'm watching him express himself and perform with piano, with guitar, with words, with cinematography and lighting. what is my... any of that? on a smaller scale of course, since i neither expect nor have a desire to be famous or renowned or particularly widely appreciated. i'd just like to do something for myself that KW can see me do and be proud of me for. for whatever it is, it would be a thing i did with purpose and found something in it for myself, even better if also for other people. i want to make him proud. i want to be worthy of him. i don't want to be sitting here trying not to fall apart alongside him, i want to show him that i am and/or still can be the person he's fallen in love with. although a part of that has always been a potential, not an actualization. part of what i strive for is to realize that potential, lest i let him down. i can't grasp what he sees in me, but he hates not seeing me be it, or be working toward it.

can i do art? can i paint? can i draw? can i find a class online and actually stick to it? can i put effort in without immediately feeling it's too hard and giving up? can i do more photography? can i take pictures and like what i see and enhance them in lightroom and photoshop, rather than looking through my shots for the day and feeling disappointed that nothing in there is spectacular? can i study code to advance my craft and my career, or dedicate myself to learning for its own sake, as long as i stick with it and retain it? can i practice languages and not be afraid to use them?

i want to be more confident. i know, i'm sure i've said that before. my self-image is at quite possibly an all time low. and yes, i used to have anorexia. i still feel worse about my body than i did then. at least then i had discipline. my skin's gone to shit and i can barely take care of myself for more than three days at a time. i've gained weight because not only did i stop going to the gym, but i picked up baking. i don't get dressed in the mornings because there's no reason to, and i don't want to wrinkle my clothes and be uncomfortable just in order to spend all day in my living room, or bedroom as the case may be. it's hard to dress up for KW either because he's never really been clear about what he likes to see me in, other than not skinny jeans. even when i try to ask, he just says confidence. he thinks i'm sexiest when i feel sexiest. what a fucking ouroboros of sex appeal. i guess that should make it simple, but it doesn't.

so... what? what'll it be?

precipice

cross the street from your
storefront cemetery

it's almost funny how evocative something can be. those are song lyrics for an old song, but a local song, contemporary to where i've been. KW came home while i was listening to music and a song came on that i didn't know, but he began singing it - all the lyrics before it even got to the vocal part of the song. a song he knew well, clearly. the album art given by spotify was a sort of blurry off-angle photo of a walk light on a street corner, at night. it's a TV on the Radio song from 2003, so the picture is assumedly of some corner in brooklyn. it's not the lyrics that get me so much as the tonal undercurrent of energy that doesn't quite crest that the song carries, imo. 

it's not my new favorite song or anything, but it just hit me at the right angle to slip through a crack and get into my soul and echo around in there, knocking loose some nostalgia for a life i never quite got close to living. it's a song i could have liked, a corner i could have been on, a connection i could have had with a version of KW i probably pined for in past years, or would have strived to be interesting to.

this feels like a related feeling to the book i read, meet me in the bathroom - given that tv on the radio is featured in there, being local to the scene and of it in the moment. 2003. brooklyn. did KW even live there yet? yes, having run the clock through my head, he did.

you're staring at the sun, you're standing in the sea
your mouth is open wide, you're trying hard to breathe

my brain's been being mean to me. i haven't felt equal to anything. not only in past tense, but expansively. i have felt that i will never be equal to anything, will never know how to be equal to anything. i went for a walk on a beautiful day, up to a beautiful park, summer weather inaugurating our hopes for the rest of 2021. some guy even hit on me a little bit after asking for directions. i took some pictures as the light leaned toward the golden hour, although i'd forgotten to bring my new camera (speaking of things to inaugurate). but i still just felt so absolutely miserable, like my muscles protested carrying the useless mass of my consciousness around for nothing.

i don't want to feel this way. KW himself said he felt himself on the verge of depression, like his brain is trying to shut down on him but he just simply doesn't have the time. his work is piling up on him, he's behind on a deadline, he's got term papers and exams and paperwork, he's got no time to sleep, he's got 100 hours of rotations to cram into a month, around a full time job and a doctor's appointment that's keeping him from dropping a shift to save time because he needs to stay full time to keep his health insurance. on top of this, his grandfather's dying. imminently. any day now. KW flew across the country to be with his family on friday and saturday, mostly to provide comfort and familial medical authority rather than to get any comfort himself from being able to be with his grandfather one last time. and that in and of itself is a tragedy, his grandfather's death. i've been really looking forward to meeting him. back in 2019, when i moved to boston, KW was out at his grandfather's remote island house - his favorite place on earth, even with how much he's seen of it - and i remember sitting alone on EG's couch when i was crashing there and talking to KW on the phone about how he finally was able to tell his grandfather about me and that he said i sounded like "a neat lady". he said his grandfather's got an incredible talent of being able to make whoever he's talking to feel really interesting and special. earlier drafts of this year had us going out there to the house to celebrate KW completing paramedic school. truth be told, the house is being left to KW and his sister, so it won't be lost to the family. but i'm sure it'll change how it feels. i really do want to go out there someday. KW's really talked it up, like the phenomenon of watching the orcas gather in the waters just below the house...

to the point, though. this is a hell month for KW and i just want to be as useful and supportive as i can be, so i'm trying to operate in a... facilitative facility. i'm stepping up and taking the household chores, because if KW is here he either needs to be doing schoolwork or asleep. and if he's trying not to slip into a catatonic depression and checking out, i want to be a source of joy and comfort. and that, i think is where i'm losing it. i don't know how to be there for him effectively and my brain is all too aware of that. so him being on the edge of depression is throwing me over it at as well. which is just not a productive dynamic and definitely something we're going to want to get a handle on, given that we both, obviously, experience depression.

it led to the horrible experience this weekend though of feeling like i was about to have a breakdown but KW was there and i just needed to try to keep it together to the best of my ability but i didn't do a fantastic job because obviously he knows me really fucking well by now but what i'm NOT going to do is say "your intended support system instead needs to be yet another thing you have to take care of and worry about now." i cannot fall apart right now because that would just be more shit for KW.

i don't want to trivialize my own feelings by saying that it was just because i've been sad that i don't know how to make KW happy. it's possible that was the gloom-spark but i fucking wallowed in brainshit all weekend while KW was out west. but substantially i kept beating myself up and feeling like the right person for KW would know, the right person would know how to keep him happy and make him be his best self all the time and would be by his side to support him through difficult times. and because i wasn't by his side, because i can't make him do his schoolwork, because i can't keep his brain from shutting down, i'm not the right person. there's a better person out there, someone who would love him better and whom he would love better. someone who would do for KW what he does for me, which is make me want to be more, want to live to and through my own limits. i spend too much time thinking of the other person he loved in high school, when it wasn't me anymore - in seeing him succumbing to his addiction, i just felt sad and powerless, but i continued to defer to him. if he was doing it, he couldn't really be fully out of control, right? i trusted him, so if he trusted his judgement, i decided he must have the right of it since he's smarter than me after all. this other person loved him enough and was certain enough that they were right and he was wrong and dumb that this very petite person punched him in the face about it. he once told me this story with the hint of a smile. he loved that they were driven to physical means of aggression to try to get their point across. not to sound too stupid, but i want to love him in the way that means i will punch him in the face if i think that's what's right. (i am not advocating for domestic violence, hopefully it's sufficiently clear what i mean here.) the way i am now, he'd just say something like you don't need to punch me in the face and i'd go yeah, you're probably right and then he'd continue being a fucking idiot and i'd feel powerless and useless and insufficient as i watched the man i love destroy himself before my eyes. i'm not being melodramatic, that's early 2010; we've literally been there. it was a hell of a boon to my poetry but fucking misery.

i was plagued by cravings to cut all weekend. i wasn't wholly successful in resisting. i kept it light, though. two extremely superficial scratches to my arm that faded by the end of the day (although were def visible as i was out walking around at the park) and one a little more thorough on my hip that honestly i can still see because i know what i'm looking for, but it'd otherwise likely go unnoticed. this may be something i need to confess to him once it's all past us, this tough time for him. but in the meantime i just... needed an outlet and couldn't go to him. trying not to get too hung up on the fact that i'm twenty fucking nine years old and still dealing with cutting urges like a stupid juvenile emo teenager even though i know as i say that that that's a terribly inaccurate and harmful stereotypic stigma, but it's an extant one nevertheless.

monday was better, though. i didn't feel so mentally well during my work day but once it was over i got to snuggle with KW and finally have a lot of good sex and watch tv and cook dinner and enjoy the evening with him. i've felt substantially better since then, although physically absolutely exhausted. we've got some minor germs swimming around up here, that's for sure: low grade fevers and sore throats; KW's gotten two negative covid results so it doesn't seem to be that. anyway, physical health aside, i doubt that a good evening of quality time has fully cured me, nor would that be unconcerning if it did, given that that's a level of dependency i would have hoped to never experience, especially not when i've been feeling so much more independent than i've ever been in a relationship before. and doubly concerning because with KW spread so thin this month, that quality time won't be coming again for some time. i don't want to be in a crisis spiral for a month, instead of the happy helpful person i want to try to be for him.

the water's at your neck
there's lightning in your teeth
your body's over me

incidentally, 3 years ago at perhaps this exact moment, i ended my prior relationship. happy cinco de mayo.

existential crisis time

we've signed the lease! the direction is forward, now. packing, logistics, all the shit i don't know how to stop obsessing about until it's resolved.

should i have KW make a zipcar account just for the month of April so that we can run apartment-setup errands without having to lug stuff on the subway or pay for expensive ubers? IKEA is so far.

see, that kind of stuff. i'm just not going to have a resolution for that yet. i want to solve all the problems but it can't be done all at once, by myself.

it's hard not to feel distant from KW right now. he's busy, i have only a sketchy idea of his schedule... i should check in and see if he's put in for the friday post-move off. see? logistics take over my brain. as i was saying... i texted him a time or two yesterday and didn't hear back until late, to learn that he had actually taken the day off and done nothing. why that didn't mean he could answer my texts, i am still unaware. sigh. it'll be less of a problem in 2 weeks. texting has never quite been his forte.

the rest of my time has been an existential crisis on a few levels. one, i decided to take the enneagram test (the free ones online, of course). i really tend not to buy into personality-descriptor type stuff, knowing that my birthday may class me as an aries but god, nothing about that sign describes me. and having taken online MBTI tests a few times and consistently getting different answers. do i have no personality? or poor self-awareness? it seems to have low test-retest reliability, to reach back into my college-brain for some psych research methods terminology.

anyway, as i was saying - i decided to take the enneagram to have another personality type indicator to reject. i got typed as a Nine (or 9 with a 1 wing), which i guess is the type that strives for peace and harmony in all things, including internally. which like... idk if that sounds like me. none of them sound like me. but apparently part of the Nine type can be poor introspection and therefore thinking that none of them sound like me. so that's been too much introspection for the past few days. i don't think it really has any implications on my life, but it does cause me an odd sense of anxiety in my chest to think about it.

the other existential crisis is that KW wants me to be more useful to the world. a job recruiter reached out to me on linkedin - and then followed up, which caught my attention - for a position in a truly frivolous industry with a starting pay of $100k. naturally, i followed up with the recruiter (unfortunately it didn't go anywhere), and i talked to KW about it. he was like, "wow, that's awesome, i'd definitely be happy for you if you made 6 figures... but also it's ridiculous that i save lives and am paid dirt." (i'm heavily paraphrasing here.)

he wound up calling me to chat about it and said that he feels like i don't respect the work i do - i disparage it by describing it just as "arranging rectangles". and he wants a) his partner to respect the work they do and b) to respect his partner's work, which is easier if they do. there's probably a good amount of imposter syndrome at play, and my own lack of self-confidence (it must be easy, if i can do it), and i told him as much. he said that he'd like to see me make a difference in people's lives, that i have a skill that is still (for now) relatively rare, and i could use it for good. i could help make websites for small woman-owned businesses, for instance. maybe that could be my job and i could take a step down in pay for it, or that i could do that volunteer work on the weekend or something if i still wanna stick with a high-paying, less-useful job.

i just... don't know what to do with this. i don't feel useful, i never have, and in all likelihood i never will. KW has always talked about his drive to feel useful, how that helps him feel better about himself - no matter how low he feels, he knows he's helping people who need it. and that's just never resonated with me. i don't know if it's that i'm selfish, but i think more so that i just feel innately useless. there's nothing i can do that someone else can't do better, and it would be a disservice to do something for someone when they could get someone better to do it for them. all i would do would be to come in and fuck it up and complicate their lives when i should be doing the opposite. like making a website for someone - no, they should have someone who's good at that do it. i can't take that kind of pressure. to know that if i fuck up there's actually something at stake. i will not rise to the occasion, i will not meet the expectation, i will let everyone down, and someone will suffer because i suck. that's why i don't want to do anything useful. like i said in a joking tone (but fully seriously) during a classroom mock interview during my coding program, my primary goal anywhere is just to not fuck things up. i can either have no effect, or a negative one, and i don't want to have a negative effect so i will aim to move quietly through the world and leave it undisturbed. i want to not make a place worse for my presence.

one of the things that drove me to choose KW instead of running from my feelings way back when is that he really does make me want to be better. he's always seen potential in me. in my most insecure moments i've described it as him seeing something incredible in me, falling in love with that possibility, and then being let down and leaving when i show him i'm too fearful to be what he wants me to be. i think to describe this as being fearful would imply i see a truth in it i'm just too timid to reach out and grasp. that's not the case here. i have no idea what i could possibly offer the world, and as such my life philosophy is basically the macroscopic equivalent of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

i guess this will have to be another thing i strive for to keep him. i try to be braver, i try to be less insecure, i try to be more interesting... i'll have to try to be useful. i thought i could get away without it, but i guess i was wrong.

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.