Too many screens.

Monday, June 3rd, 2024.

10:58pm Posting my first lengthy blog post in quite a long time was good for me. It felt right. It made me feel like myself. To have written and then put it out there - to have done a writerly thing - that is what I needed to do. It wasn't difficult to type over two thousand words. I felt as though I could keep writing once I got into it. I'm back to hesitancy though as I start this entry, as I begin typing my words for today. l've left it to the last hour of the day.

I'm not in writing mode. I just finished uploading photos to Flickr and I've not switched over to this yet. What I do know is that I managed to stay off the video game for most of the day while I had my laptop open. When going through some old photos, I saw all the instances of when I would be reading a book or writing in my paper journals, photographing myself typing my words --- all the things I used to do before I got caught up in racing on a video game. I look at past me and I want to be like that again.

It's about making the choice to prioritize the things you know will help you become a better version of yourself, or the version that you know you could be if you'd put forth the effort.

It is easier to just press the power button on a controller but how has that improved my quality of life in recent years? I'm not saying that I won't play the video game - I enjoy racing too much - but I will give the other things I enjoy more of my time and attention from now on. Life is going by so quickly and things are so stressful that I can't just let the time I have left (and how knows how long that might be) be lost in endless hours of streaming and thinking without doing - without writing.

If I'm doing streaming, let it be stream of consciousness. If I'm going to be thinking in loops and caught up in past events in my mind, dwelling on things and feeling all the feels, then let me write some of it out, let me pin it in pages and write it out on here so that I might have something I can see, to face it down, to get through it, to learn and move on.

No one is coming to save me. I knew that years ago.

 

In recent years, with all the death and loss, I retreated into the cave and went into tunnels so deep that nothing could reach me, so I thought. But there is always something in the dark. And that something is not always kind. I need to go outside. I have to start inside. The corners of my mind? The crevices of my soul? Somewhere in the dark, I know there can still be light. I'm tired of lighting fires for others. I need to spark my own. You know how some come to you for warmth and they take that for themselves, as if you were born only to be their muse or their inspiration or their light. But no, you were born to be your own force, your own creativity and your own inspiring figure, your own quivering flame in the dark. You're not their spark. Your fire is your own. Why do some of us only lift the torch for others? Never thinking we could hold the flame for ourselves? We burn for so brief a time. Does it come back to love? To learning how to love yourself? What is it really about?

When someone says you're their reason to live, run.

 

11:23pm I was asked why I stopped writing and I've wondered about that too. I could write about that now and try to explain what happened. I know that things happened that were too overwhelming to write about - I couldn't write in my paper journal (or if I did, it was dry and didn't feel like enough) and I couldn't seem to write about it online. As more things that were awful happened, it became too much. It was as if I couldn't imagine how to even begin to write about any of it. Where do I even start? And so I didn't.

I raced a video game instead. I talked about a little, especially with my Aunt Terry, and sometimes with others but not into the detail and depth of how painful it all was.

At one point, I tried to come back. I thought, I could make my journals (online and paper ones) into some books. Into volumes of diaries the way some famous diarists have. I meticulously went through every post I'd ever put on LiveJournal and copied them into documents into batches of years and then deleted every entry from the internet. There were some feelings and memories brought up through the things I had written about in the past - and some of the people that have died that I had put into my entries - but it was a good project to work on and I still intend to make something of them, though the work would be emotionally heavy, as it was to put them into docs and to skim over choices I'd made or things that had happened to me. When I finished doing that, it helped me to start writing again, for a brief time, and I would send the entries to Aunt Terry in batches through email. But I knew that I probably should create a blog again. I put it off and let myself get consumed with distractions on a video game and during that time, some more loss happed, and I still wasn't writing.

I don't know what I was waiting for. Things weren't going to get easier. I'm likely to lose more people that I love as time continues. We're living in some difficult times and things aren't likely to get much easier any time soon. I am feeling the passage of time. I need to write.

Why didn't I write? I don't know. I tried to repress things but that didn't actually work because I'm always thinking and I didn't forget what was happening. I just turned to something easier. But it wasn't easier. It made things hurt more. I still felt it and thought about it but didn't use the best tool I have to live with it. I didn't write.

I was afraid of what I'd write. I was afraid of what I'd say. I didn't want to examine the pain in a form that I knew held power. I didn't want to make myself cry. I felt so lost and so alone that I didn't even think I should have writing to help me.  It felt like holding my breath and drowning.