How good can true things be?

Weekly Notes #11

Morning. It’s Tuesday. How are you?

The big headline of this last week was my band announcing our first album. I am very proud of the work that has led up to this. However, the feeling of rolling this album out is not entirely good. It is also strange and sad. I’m watching something I’ve cared so much for—something I have carried in secret with my collaborator—be birthed, perfect and theoretical, into a world that is jagged and real.

Which, of course, is the point of making an album in the first place. Perfection is a myth anyway—and even if it isn’t, it is boring. I cannot think of one thing that I have truly loved that I have loved for its perfection.

That is all to say, complicated as the feelings may be, there is no question that this is what I should be doing.

~

One particular point of pride regarding this roll-out is the existence of the Finnish Postcard game, which I scored, designed, and programmed. In the winter, I was struck by an itch to build an experience that reflected my childhood wanderings through polygonal lands on N64 and PS1. Which, seemingly like everything else, comes back to my older brothers. These gaming consoles were not even the ones marketed to kids my age—nor was I conscious when these consoles were marketed, period. They were the consoles that my older brothers (and their friends) played, and that I occasionally played with them (or thought I was playing with them, holding controllers that weren’t plugged in). I have early childhood memories of seeing my older brothers and their friends—who may as well have been seven feet tall with impossible amounts of facial and body hair¹—spread out in our den with bright, spiky geometry flashing violent and blurry out of a cathode-ray tube television screen. There is probably more there psychologically, but I’ll have to get to it later. For now, here is a screenshot of the game.

Regardless of the origin of my inspiration, building this game fulfilled a lifelong dream I wasn’t quite sure that I had. You can play it on the Finnish Postcard website in your browser.

~~

Something that my therapist likes to do is ask me to name my current chapter. I would call this one “Focusing.”

I have been cutting things out that don’t serve me. I quit nicotine, I quit working in food service, I cut back on drinking. I moved into a teeny bedroom (that is technically a nursery, which itself has involved cutting out loads of my belongings). I got a flip phone. I am emotionally oriented around my important relationships, with my girlfriend, family, and creative collaborator.

These choices make me feel proud. I am prioritizing my agency. I am standing in resistance to mindless consumerism. But boy has it made me fucking irritable—and not in an imperceptible way that makes me a good person to notice. It is very real and causing damage and affecting trust in my relationships.

There are questions coming up that are new to me: do these new frustrations reflect legitimate grievances that, up until now, have been ignorable? Should I act on them? Am I just being a dickhead because I want my binky?² Suddenly my emotional world feels very real and intense. There is a lot to navigate that wasn’t there before.

It is making me realize that a lot of why I was “good” at navigating my emotions in the past is because I wasn’t navigating all of them. Just the convenient ones. And when you’re only dealing with the feelings you want to experience, it isn’t very difficult. My most recent theory as to why this became my M.O. is that I developed a thick protective layer over my nerves as a sensitive little kid (which, like, who didn’t?). I was called fat and f*g and annoying, yadda yadda. It wasn’t just me. Some kids dealt with it by getting super into their stuffed animals, or impossibly niche music, or leaning into the role of the weirdo. I adapted by developing this layer. And carried it into my adult life. In a lot of ways, it has served me well.

I remember being a shaggy-haired, baby-faced seventh-grader, and having this grown-man-looking eighth-grader bully. He was sort of friends with my friends. One day, after school, he remarked to me (in front of my friends), “You have tits,” to which I replied, “Yeah, and I feel them when I jerk off. Do you feel tits when you jerk off?”

Kind of dark. I do feel bad for my child self reading this back. Kind of sold myself out. But, the fact is, it got a nice laugh, and, more importantly, shut him up. He had some uninspired response like, “That’s weird,” but it didn’t matter. It was clear that he got out-classed by someone who could take an emotional punch.

It would turn out that life is sort of a cornucopia of emotional punches. And being able to take them is something that is rewarded. It has separated me from my peers in many ways. I cannot count how many times I’ve been called “chill” by friends and acquaintances for how I’ve moved through the world. I think it’s pretty clear now that there’s a cost to that.

A few years ago, I lived in a dingy warehouse full of aging musicians, and one of them said to me (I think right before handing me a tab of acid), “People are emotional. They only ‘chill’ people I know sustained some major damage at some point and hardened into place.” There is truth to that.

Part of this “Focusing” chapter has involved (and will continue to involve) a process of unhardening, of opening up. I am moving away from a mode of being which ignores feelings and seeks distraction. But being focused makes letting things slide harder. My Selective Feeling skill has been a huge and winning part of my personality. As it has faded away, what is revealed is someone who clearly isn’t used to having to feel all of their feelings.

This distracted/ignoring self/pressing onward mode of being isn’t technically a drug, but it is similar to one, specifically in that it presents you a version of life with an asterisk. A life that is too good to be true. A life that isn’t truly yours.

So how good can true things be? Have you ever known a true thing?

~

So far, my approach has been largely subtractive. These negative little things that I cut out were doing something for me, after all. Now that their absence is painfully apparent, I think it is time to start answering the question of what to replace them with.

1. People who, in hindsight, were 15 year-olds.

2. For the record, 99% of it is this one.