The anatomy of unsaid things
Weekly Notes #17
It is unclear to me whether it is the springtime starting, the F.P. tour ending, or the configuration of certain celestial bodies, but I am inspired by the prospect of an unknown future. I want this, #17, to be the final Weekly Notes. I want to delete my files, clear my calendar, and stare directly into the blankness, free.
Weekly Notes has been a cool way to care for parts of my mind and life that aren’t as easily captured elsewhere. The formlessness of the series—which only asks that I write something weekly—was once liberating, but is now old and weighty.
To give this post a retrospective feel, I went back through all 16 of the other installments, looking for some sort of conclusion or through-line. Looking at them as a neat little pile, I see a lot of things. I see honest looks at myself and earnest efforts to make sense of what I found. I see a lot of talk about resisting the temptations of consumerism (or whatever you want to call the general social programming under Neoliberalism) and earnest efforts at structuring my life in resistance to them. There is a feeling of momentum, of progress toward uncharted territory. There are little gems of genuine clarity and novelty in what is mostly just effortful trudging through murk. There is a repeatedly stated goal of moving closer and closer to a position of pure self-definition—of maintaining a center of gravity (for my self-image/self-esteem/sense of right and wrong/purpose/etc.) that is located purely within myself, and sturdily so.
I also looked at the blogs that weren’t published, of which there are 122. The sense I got of myself via skimming these hundreds and hundreds of words was quite a bit different than that of the published stuff. There wasn’t a single one of the drafts that I now wish had been posted. In this other, less-neat pile, there are themes of entitlement, disappointment, annoyance, anger—and deeper: insecurity, threatenedness, fear. Seeing these things altogether, it is clear that these feelings are not generative. They don’t build on themselves. Their existence is always just a footnote on the bigger, more interesting thing at play, whatever that is. It was really helpful to see that so clearly. And liberating. Like, my shitty feelings about something aren’t nearly as interesting as the source of the fear that’s causing those feelings—or even more radically, the intention and/or cause of my object of fear.
The unposted stuff represents less “high-minded” reactions to pain. The posted stuff is how I chart my course. But I still want to create space for the less high-minded stuff in my mental map for who I am and what I’m capable of. That stuff is interesting, too. Just, like I said, as a footnote. And that’s just me, by the way. There are people who I believe genuinely achieve transcendence via petty feelings (e.g. Larry David). Just not me.
It is really difficult to be a human being, and learning how to chart your course through your specific destiny via your purpose and neurology/physiology is no simple task. I’m proud of the progress I have made.
~
At the end of May, I will turn 28.
My 27th year is when I started writing here. Turning 27 was psychedelic and strange. It has been comforting to have this outlet to lean on.
The public and private writings of my 27th year (Weekly Notes and otherwise) paint a picture of someone who is deeply conflicted. I obviously have had a lot of opposing feelings about a lot of fundamental things—I saw them written out. There’s a temptation to think that I need to fall on one side or the other on certain things, and that that will be the satisfying conclusion, and that it’ll come about in moments of epiphany, or maybe after weeks of deliberation. I have an impulse to assert, to exert control over my feelings/will/worldview in these ways. The truth is, these preferences/perspectives/etc. just exist, and I am here to see them and describe them as they flow and change and conflict. My job is not to try to force clarity. My job is to stay out of the way and let flow what must, to allow questions that do not have answers to not have answers. What is interesting isn’t which side I fall on w/r/t various issues, but watching what happens when I allow enough space and grace for opposing feelings to exist simultaneously
Anyway, until next time, however that looks.