:(

a while back i read a post along the lines of “if you feel like everyone hates you, it’s time to rest… if you feel like you hate everyone else, it’s time to eat” and honest to god i’ve never used any piece of advice more than i have that one

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My relationship with content creation and hobbies, in general, got a lot better when I started learning to reframe it as a simple act of human creation, and not a metric of my own self worth.

We’re taught competition, and perfectionism, and shame. If I say “I cook” I must add “(but not well)”. If I say “I run” I must say “(but I am not good at it).” I say “I code (but I mostly know frontend).” I create and express and my first impulse is to guard against embarrassment. Lest I fall so short of marketable competence. Lest I subject myself to the mockery of being caught creating poorly. I wound myself first so others may not.

Even the advice that fights against this says “your only goal should be to be better than yourself yesterday.” But why must I be in competition with her? What happens, after the initial rapid climb in skill, when I plateau? What of injury, and atrophy, and depression, that flake these skills away? Must I return feeling compelled to over-achieve? To wallow in embarrassment until I can surpass my own previous record? To hate my work until the reception, the notes, the engagement outperform an ever rising bar? I do not want to be paralyzed by the mountains I built behind me. Why should I look behind myself when there’s a wide swath of untilled Earth that stretches far out of sight ahead of me? I want to enjoy my work, and my mediocrity, moving forward with all its ebbs and flows.

At my worst, I was nothing. I was not a writer. Because I had forgone writing for all the fear and stress and damage to my self-worth that it wrought. I was not a coder. Because I was only useful for the niches of my job, and didn’t have the heart to create something badly, on my own, for fun, lest it confirm my suspicions of mediocrity. I was not even a runner - despite the extreme and exhaustive amount of time I sunk into it - because I fell short of my previous self, and I could not hold a candle to the actually-skilled runners, and I was forced to speak of this hobby in all those guarded terms - “but i am not good” - because of how much that ate at me. 

I was no cook, and no homemaker, and no creator, because when I did those things, (I did them poorly.) 

And when all these came together, I wallowed in emptinesses. (I still do, sometimes. It’s hard and complicated). Because emptiness is what was left when I stripped myself of the things and the pursuits whose lack of value could be used to hurt me.

The change for me - the change, I think - came at the time I started to recognize that I do not deserve self-punishment for my mediocrities, for the failings of my current state of being. It was not a revelation all at once. It was a slow and progressive flirting with the idea, found almost by accident on self-help youtube channels of a very particular ilk. It came with the recognition that I had trapped myself, wiling away my time and my energy, in a state of constant apology, and shame, and self-correction for the mediocrities I dare not unleash onto the world. I boxed myself up with the promise “once I am good enough, I will be allowed to come back out”, and that was a lie. I would never have come back out. I was chasing punishing metrics of self-improvement that I did not need, and would never actually catch and maintain, and which would never love me back.

It took a long time to internalize this. It took a long time to get angry on my own behalf. It took a long time to act on it, and write again because fuck you. To run on my own terms, at my own pace, for my own enjoyment because fuck you. To create with my hands again because fuck you. To lean into the happiness of creation that I had not “earned”, because fuck you.

I like creating because it fills an emptiness that used to be there. It’s so simple, and so lovely, that humans are like this. That we want to build with our hands. That we want to assemble and construct. That we derive joy from stacking pieces together, and stringing words together, and assembling colors on a page, and moving, and singing, and baking, and knitting. Humans love to build little worlds around them. 

So why must we so actively try to cut people off from it off from it? Why do we condition ourselves to fear its mediocrity? Why does this still our hands? Why do we suffocate it for ourselves, before others can? I don’t have an answer. I can only recognize the monster. 

I want to make bad art today. I want to make bad art tomorrow. If I am a worse writer tomorrow, I want that to be fine. If I am never more than a mediocre runner, I want to be at complete peace with that. Because if not, then I might box away my hobbies again, and my loves, and my pursuits. I might go back to empty. I might go back to nothing.

I hate that emptiness I lived through. I hate that nothing. I want to make bad art for the rest of my life. 

thinking about this again

Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.

** Permission to post it was granted by the artist  Do not repost/edit the art without permission Please, support the artist on their pages too **

Artist :  仙都怪谈

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‘So everything sucks’ mental health toolkit

Hello everyone, I lost half my family last year between March and November, three of whom were elderly, and it was Not Much Fun Actually BUT I have had the horrible thought that many people this year are going to be in the same boat I was in in 2019, so here is how I coped:

Write everything down. I mean it. Anything you’re feeling; the grief, the worry about their health, how much you love them. Put it down on paper. Exorcise it. Don’t just let the bad feelings and the sadness fester. It doesn’t have to be exquisite poetry, just catharsis. 

Call your relatives! Especially the elderly ones. After the first 3 bereavements I got much closer to my grandma. Her passing wasn’t made harder by the fact of having spent more time speaking to her; it was eased because I knew that she knew how much I loved her. 

BE SENSIBLE. You want to see your family now. I get it. My uncle was given 3 weeks to live and I caught norovirus. I couldn’t see him for a week. It sucked. But I had to stay at home, because if he caught it, he’d die. Covid-19 is the same principle. Phone them instead. 

Talk to your family and friends about how you feel. Grief is a really, really lonely place sometimes. I didn’t know anyone going through what I was going through. This time, we’re all in it together. Share your feelings. Reassure each other that you’re valid and heard. 

Be kind to yourself. There’s going to be days, especially with all this social upheaval, where you just can’t. This is OK. You’re a human who has worth beyond your productivity. Let yourself feel sad if you have to. Eat a bit of chocolate. Have a bath. Then do the laundry.

Keep being human, in all the ways you can. Keep cleaning the house. Get up every morning and get dressed. Go to bed at a sensible time. Eat healthy, regular meals. Keep yourself strong, not just in case you get the virus, but to remind yourself that you can and will endure. 

As clichéd as it is, remember that you have survived everything in your life up to this point. You can get through this. There will be a time when it’s over. I thought 2019 would never end. It was funeral after funeral. I thought I wouldn’t make it out the other side. I did. 

Check in with people and ask them to check in with you. My friends literally got me through 2019, even though I wasn’t always up for seeing them in person. We phoned and texted. Build a support network. Being socially isolated doesn’t mean being lonely. 

I think that’s pretty much it, but a final reminder that we humans can endure so much more than we think we can, even when it feels like it’s relentless and it will never stop. It will. The only way through it is, well, to go through it. I hope everyone is staying safe and well!!

Nothing that happens is ever forgotten, even if you can’t remember it. Spirited Away 千と千尋の神隠し (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

finally pushed away everyone in my life now i can go back to isolation

god when