i love how past the age of 20, life is just losing more and more of the cells in your body until you are a husk, a mere framework of what you once were like rotting wood, holding form until something breaks the facade. something small and insignificant that tears you apart with ease.
slowly over the glacial course of 80 years you become more saturated, your muscles like liquid sliding off your bones into sacs of skin drooping more and more than they ever did before. your mind porous and leaking incontinently into your every sentence as you wither away.
oh but you're young. you're so young right now. but just as rain the days they came and so they dry inside your mind as memories until you die. but it sneaks up, slithers up your spine, coils in your throat, cotton in your eyes, misbegotten hope, adolescent lies.
for a long time i've felt this overwhelming lack of community in the world. it's easy to see why, when i think about the path my life has taken. it's one of those issues that has been sort of pushed to the back of my mind while i've been more occupied in the depths of ruin. but as my spirit comes crawling out from the rubble slowly, i notice this as one of the things that got me there to begin with. that lack of belonging, feeling like an outsider in not just my home, but in the world around me. i lost all sense of self. i could see people doing it, going and falling on their faces and having fun and making connections and losing some too—yet i just... couldn't. some combination of apathy and fear and perfectionism that kept me hopelessly lost yet impossibly trapped at the same time. i was too lazy to get up, and when i wasn't i was too scared of how i may embarrass myself in some way, and if neither of those things had ever been quite so overwhelming, i was always always certain that it wouldn't be worth it. my struggles couldn't possibly be worth the meager reward of other people’s company—frankly, the company of others was more of a punishment.
no one could be good enough. id rather have nothing than something sub-par. and so i did. i had never truly even glimpsed what nothing looked like. i didn't know how much i still had, how privileged a position i held. even now, im sure that i have no right to speak to it—merely scratching the surface destroyed my psyche for years, one can only imagine what potential for damnation lies deeper. so i count myself among the luckiest alive today, that i have the chance to put work into myself again and have it actually mean anything of substance. a lot of people dont have that.
i’d like to figure out how to find community again. i have things i want to share, things i want to make. i want to work with people and have them work with me, like minded people—i know they have to be out there—people that seek refuge from the storm that is the full unfettered might of the entirety of human society when connected. the times we live in are confusing, and vast, and a complete animalistic mess, but they provide us an opportunity for beautiful pockets of unity. the only thing standing in the way is the wisdom and flexibility to actually know how to best sift through the trash heap, how to effectively communicate within the ever-changing etiquette. i want to set my mind on trying to figure it out, falling on my face, and on having fun. simply rotting away with not even memories for the worms and insects that’ll feast on my brain matter would only make certain that my life was worth nothing.