Tuesday, 12/24/24 // Entry 5: being dramatic
In all the goosery of adolescence I am becoming you. I have never hated you, but I've been considering the fact that you have irreversibly changed my life, and I'm not sure how much of it has been for the better. I have always thought I was the foolish one, but I wonder if this is what you felt. I've never felt so much like a burden before; I have been crying waterfalls over nothing. I don't know when I started hating when others hated themselves, or when I started hating myself too. I know it is easier to take the pain of guilt and hatred over that pain and fear of love, I know that I have the duty to eradicate shame despite my hypocrisy and find some thread of inevitable change, but here I am. I feel so horrible and I know that I don't have to be. Maybe some part of me likes the novelty of it all. I miss you. I'll try to become a better person.
Friday, 12/20/24 // Entry 4: christmas list
in other news, i love you and im not sure what to do with myself
Wednesday, 12/18/24 // Entry 3: drastic
I wanna do something fun and inconsequentially drastic now that I have finished a lot of work. I wanted to dye my hair but like. I also don't really want to that badly. I want to cut my hair in general, but it probably won't be anything new. I could get piercings, but. Don't really want to. It's almost like desiring a status symbol of change or freedom or something like that. I just want something to want. I bought this awesome little tiny light projector thing at hmart. There were two different versions and I told my friend "I feel like I need to buy one of these to confirm my identity as a person and that's a lot. I'm so normal." I got the purple one with the bear and it's awesome. I want to be a shiny new thing. I want to be scarily unrecognizable. But erm. I am still me.
Though also I do need a what's it called? Outlet for chaos. That's called Art bbg. I guess I will make more art. Maybe my whole life is really just that. Nature reckons with itself in mirrors for ever and ever
Tuesday, 12/17/24 // Entry 3: feeling, or Edna Pontillier did nothing wrong
Gonna raw dog this entry straight into this html file :heart emoji:
Tomorrow I have to write an essay about The Awakening by Kate Chopin and I will supplement this via thinking about feeling? I love that book. A lot of ppl in my class fucking hate Edna but I am in love with the potency of Feeling in the book. It is so relatable yet not; I honestly have been pretty numb for quite a while. I also watched the new video from Savannah Brown yesterday and it broke me so bad. I want to feel again and love again. I did a lot of processing the summer of 2023 and I did a lot of living the summer of 2024 and now I realize I have to do it all over again.
For a good portion of my life I wasn't sure if loving being alive was a sustainable thing. We all fall into routine and monotony at some point and the novelty of seeing things in a new way must fade eventually. Yesterday I talked with my teacher about The Awakening and told her how much I loved the book's vigor of emotion, how it felt like the book's identity even if I could not relate as much to the perspective of motherhood and womanhood. Though the personal identity of Edna and the societal and emotional pressures that come with it are obviously a whole big ass incredibly important factor of the book, I felt her feelings to be universal, the self-discovery and the possibility and the futility and all. I haven't felt those things in a while, but everything she felt I could understand so personally.
My teacher responded by bringing up her own personal connection with the book, which was based on the idea of conformity and how even if we have the will to be our own person, the pressure of societal expectations is always there. Even if we think we want to do something for ourselves, there is always an invisible coercion that begs the question if it was really our idea to begin with. And perhaps Edna's end was a result of how intense her feelings were when she let go of the customary. The pressure and routine of society dulls that intensity, and maybe it has to, or maybe it is simply incompatible with our raw, untethered feeling.
But I think feeling can be sustainable. Mademoiselle Reisz conjured life through her "divine art." Edna could not live as freely as she wanted to; she would still have to conform to like. Not cheating on her husband. Being a good, or at least decent mother. And there were much less opportunities for her escape that at that time. It's not like she could go back and decide for her younger self to not settle. But she could still be herself in other ways, probably. Connecting with nature; touching grass n shit. Making art, making new connections with some fucking boundaries, etc. Maybe she would still ache, but she could have still bought that pigeon house, sold her art, been herself in these different avenues. Maybe we cannot overlook social sanctions but we can revolutionarily connect with the person we are without them, challenging conformity over time without burning ourselves out. A bit easier to say now than in the 1800s/1900s but. I would like to believe this is a possible message.
And I think it is possible to keep the novelty of life alive. Again, to connect to the person we are or could be when we reject the rules and expectation and mind-numbing habit. Is a wonderful thing. We cannot always be that person but we can always try to be, to live authentically. The more immersed we are in our own lives and in the connections we make with the world around us, the more we generate creativity and possibility by paying attention, by caring, by bellowing our capacity to be alive. I want to live purposefully in such a way. I want to be that bitch with utmost clarity and feeling and inevitability, creativity running through my soul in the constant pursuit of meaningful change. I want that feeling to come over me, bring me to life so that I can understand everything, but there is only and ordinarily me. I must live knowing that only I have the power to know myself and choose to be myself and that only by comprehending that sense of power can I bring about the potency I hope to experience.
Meaning I have to confront myself, again!! Man!!
But it will be ok, hopefully. A lot of it is a slow and heavy trudge, but some parts are fun. Dragging myself out of hell into a still messy world of purpose. Connecting to the sensory and the transitory and such. And I will probably lose it again as I fall into my flaws in society but if I have lost it before I can try it again? I guess in short I need to heal again and remember who I am again and live again and feel again and love again. I vow to not Edna Pontillier myself. amen
entry 2 monday 12/16/24 i have the responsibility to heal. again. man!!
entry 1 monday 12/16/24 hey chat i should be doing work rn. i am so good at what i do