Dear Internauts,
There's a disconnect grown over the past several years between the way I'd like to imagine my brain working and the way it has proven to actually work. This heavy drive inside my mind would prefer that every emotional state and the corresponding level of energy be tied directly to obvious outward stimuli. I'm happy because something positive has occurred or I'm sad or angry because something negative has occurred. To recognize that this isn't the case is at first to see homeostasis thrown into flux via a storm of inevitable, unstoppable chaos. To face this storm, however, is to recognize that it is in fact far more predictable than even what I might consider normal. After all, it is completely subjective to say that some experience is good or bad, and our emotional responses arise through that lens or an even more subconscious one. At least we'd like to believe so. However, the practicality of real experience—the basic building blocks of self in response to the forces of impatient tide and time—are almost binary in their simplicity.
I mean to say that my mood is like an infants. Worse even, my moods are like a vending machine. Put the right pills, food, sleep, and percentage of time spent around other people into the brain slot like loose change and basic stability falls to the bottom.
Oh why am I so tense? When was the last time I ate or slept or remembered to take my medication?
It's astoundingly frustrating at every turn to feel that my existential experience is so limited to chemical inputs and outputs. And yet, to oversimplify can be just as if not more limiting.
While I'd like to believe I'm a complex organism with a wide range of perspectives, motivations, responses, and ideological influences, it's become just as easy to see myself as this emotional automaton. However, when I finally reach some strict, habitual mainframe balance of physical balancing out the emotional, the roaring madness of how utterly foolish I must be to think I could understand myself comes tumbling down to crush me.
I've eaten, showered, slept, medicated, accomplished several things on my to-do list, and am on the precipice of truly feeling some blip of happiness just in time for a wild card stimuli to pop in as cliffhanger like a "who's that Pokemon?" of mood swings. Just as I start to feel in control or predictable, as demoralizing as that can often feel in its own way, and suddenly I am complex and chaotic once more.
When I was a kid, I could simply blame my bad moods on my age, a phase, or some spiritual shortcoming. Now that I've somehow reached a kind of adulthood, it's like these decades of humanity have all been a front. Every clue as to how to respond, process, and interact with the world stands as a red-herring. Life is the perpetual moment of "all is lost" pre-climactic battle, in a script where the ending is formula but its previous chapter never comes.
I would have preferred to write about how legislation will always fail to achieve real societal change so long as hearts and minds remain unchanged. Maybe when I'm feeling less like the lego set smashed to pieces with a few 2x2 blocks lost under the couch, I'll share my improvised anarchical manifesto.
For now, I'll simply say that there are no updates. I continue to work very hard as a songwriter and performer and graphic novel artist and writer, while having yet to hear back from any of the hundreds of employers I've applied to and contacted for a "grown up job". Ugh, because selling your labor is the keystone of our society. The paragons are the miserable and steadily employed. After all, finding a job isn't hard, in the same way that finding a rock isn't hard. It's skipping that rock all the way across an ocean that's a bit difficult. Perhaps especially when your hands are tied to sunken ships and your legs made of rice paper.
Ta-daaaaa! That's a blog.
Thanks for reading,
Odist
No comments:
Post a Comment