a life update but not really
Nov. 11th, 2022 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dayflieshello, how are you? i’d first like to apologize for the silence on my end. as always, consistency is one of my largest weaknesses. i’ve been writing a lot; original fiction, fanfiction, but not about myself – although, arguably, everything i write always seem to circle back to me, in some shape or form. i think it was Mitski who said that there is distance between the stories she creates and her person, but i have always found it difficult to separate my art from me, as a person. it’s something i need to work on.
i wrote the timid beginnings of a life-update which at first was meant to go up on my substack until i realized it would forever remain a timid beginning, so here it is instead, on dreamwidth, where i post most of my unfinished thoughts (but i do plan on moving more permanently to substack, and if not, something similar to it, mostly for my own convenience - dreamwidth html formatting, my beloathed <3).
anyway, i have very dramatically called this halfhearted life update "girl, help! i am caught in the never-ending cycle of mundanity" in my gdocs
this is my life, most days: i wake up, i take the bus to school while telling myself i need to use my bike more (i never do), i spend a few hours wishing i could absorb literary theory like a sponge while in reality my brain is more like a sieve. i go home and the food i cook by myself is something i’d never dare tell my parents about because i can already picture their parental outrage. i am filled with the kind of melancholia that seems to arrive at your doorstep when you start to become an adult; heavy sighs and unexplained teary eyes, the occasional feeling of allconsuming hopelessness, oh maybe nothing i do will ever matter, maybe life isn’t worth it, maybe i was never meant to amount to anything at all.
i guess i feel lonely, but i guess everyone does. i’m annoyed a lot of the time, often for no reason at all – these days i feel like anything could set me off. a group of people standing in a doorway i need to pass through, a group of drunk teenagers yelling in the bus, a guy bumping into me at the university bar. reading some bigoted take on social media from someone i don’t even know. anything really, and i think i might be a very angry person, that my father’s temper is hereditary, because i am nothing if not my father’s daughter, in looks and in personality. i don’t think it has to be a bad thing; both my dad and i are fairly remediable. quick to anger, quick to forgiveness.
my personal mill of mundanity is littered with small, mundane seeds that i collect like seashells: my friends discussing the newest niche internet phenomenon, my roommate arriving home from work and not hearing me say hello because the music he’s listening to is too loud, an old friend’s strange semi-weekly habit of sending a photo of every dish he eats with his girlfriend in both group chats i am in with him which means i just receive two photos of the exact same thing. the food i cook with other people is always better. my friends are getting married, and although i do a double-take every time the gleaming metal wrapped around their ring fingers catches my eye – i can’t help it – my happiness for them outweighs the existential dread such an announcement would’ve brought me a few years ago. at nineteen i thought i’d be isolated for the rest of my life, and at twenty two i’m - somehow - making new friends and reconnecting with old ones.
(here’s a passage i wrote about a person i met at fifteen: here you are, this person i never thought i’d see again. we’re having coffee together, and you’re getting married soon, and we were never particularly close, and we still aren’t, and yet i couldn’t imagine my life without you, all because you used to be my classmate while we were fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen.
another passage i wrote about another person i met at fifteen: I continue to store hearts and smaller parts of hearts, I continue to be a mosaic of different lives lived, of parts of lives lived: an old hair clip from a person I no longer speak to but know, somehow, in my very core, an empty chocolate box that is but a few months old, paper cranes and movie tickets, the postcard you sent from some old town in France, you, the things that make up your heart. With you, things are mostly silent for now, I rarely hear from you at all. But last time I saw you was back in October, you had come to town to visit again and you told me about your new apartment and your studies, we laughed about old inside jokes we couldn’t remember the source of like nothing had changed because while everything had changed things were also the same.)
i wrote the timid beginnings of a life-update which at first was meant to go up on my substack until i realized it would forever remain a timid beginning, so here it is instead, on dreamwidth, where i post most of my unfinished thoughts (but i do plan on moving more permanently to substack, and if not, something similar to it, mostly for my own convenience - dreamwidth html formatting, my beloathed <3).
anyway, i have very dramatically called this halfhearted life update "girl, help! i am caught in the never-ending cycle of mundanity" in my gdocs
this is my life, most days: i wake up, i take the bus to school while telling myself i need to use my bike more (i never do), i spend a few hours wishing i could absorb literary theory like a sponge while in reality my brain is more like a sieve. i go home and the food i cook by myself is something i’d never dare tell my parents about because i can already picture their parental outrage. i am filled with the kind of melancholia that seems to arrive at your doorstep when you start to become an adult; heavy sighs and unexplained teary eyes, the occasional feeling of allconsuming hopelessness, oh maybe nothing i do will ever matter, maybe life isn’t worth it, maybe i was never meant to amount to anything at all.
i guess i feel lonely, but i guess everyone does. i’m annoyed a lot of the time, often for no reason at all – these days i feel like anything could set me off. a group of people standing in a doorway i need to pass through, a group of drunk teenagers yelling in the bus, a guy bumping into me at the university bar. reading some bigoted take on social media from someone i don’t even know. anything really, and i think i might be a very angry person, that my father’s temper is hereditary, because i am nothing if not my father’s daughter, in looks and in personality. i don’t think it has to be a bad thing; both my dad and i are fairly remediable. quick to anger, quick to forgiveness.
my personal mill of mundanity is littered with small, mundane seeds that i collect like seashells: my friends discussing the newest niche internet phenomenon, my roommate arriving home from work and not hearing me say hello because the music he’s listening to is too loud, an old friend’s strange semi-weekly habit of sending a photo of every dish he eats with his girlfriend in both group chats i am in with him which means i just receive two photos of the exact same thing. the food i cook with other people is always better. my friends are getting married, and although i do a double-take every time the gleaming metal wrapped around their ring fingers catches my eye – i can’t help it – my happiness for them outweighs the existential dread such an announcement would’ve brought me a few years ago. at nineteen i thought i’d be isolated for the rest of my life, and at twenty two i’m - somehow - making new friends and reconnecting with old ones.
(here’s a passage i wrote about a person i met at fifteen: here you are, this person i never thought i’d see again. we’re having coffee together, and you’re getting married soon, and we were never particularly close, and we still aren’t, and yet i couldn’t imagine my life without you, all because you used to be my classmate while we were fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen.
another passage i wrote about another person i met at fifteen: I continue to store hearts and smaller parts of hearts, I continue to be a mosaic of different lives lived, of parts of lives lived: an old hair clip from a person I no longer speak to but know, somehow, in my very core, an empty chocolate box that is but a few months old, paper cranes and movie tickets, the postcard you sent from some old town in France, you, the things that make up your heart. With you, things are mostly silent for now, I rarely hear from you at all. But last time I saw you was back in October, you had come to town to visit again and you told me about your new apartment and your studies, we laughed about old inside jokes we couldn’t remember the source of like nothing had changed because while everything had changed things were also the same.)
so the truth of the matter is this: most of the time, i am neither happy nor sad, and i am learning that this is how my life is going to be, even though i have always been told that i should aspire towards happiness. things are never one or the other: i am angrier, my edges are sharper, i have a larger tendency towards melancholy, i push people away. but here's the bottomline i always try to remind myself of: i am capable of love and gentleness and kindness, of reaching out to others. and at nineteen i didn’t think i was.
