I want to focus on what I want to write about

I want to focus on what I want to write about, I want to focus on myself, but knowing that what I write will not only be visible, but reviewed by others creates a hesitancy in myself. All of a sudden it becomes hard to just write anything. It is hard because I don’t really understand myself when I am with others - my thoughts get muddied and becomes more and more unclear. Whenever I write things just for myself, I tend to forget or probably ignore the existence of others. When I acknowledge the existence of others, I feel like I have to explain everything to everyone else how things are supposed to work for me. How things are supposed to make sense, why my assumptions are well-founded. I can’t just come at people and shove it in their face that I take precedence in my own world. It is hard, because I get affected by others so easily, I’m not willing to wilfully disregard others’ existence so long as they occupy the same space.

How is one supposed to be honest to one’s self in writing? Write in the style of stream of consciousness, write about one’s discomfort in one’s sitting position, and the aftertaste of that slurp of chai latte, and everything that the mind grabs? How is that being honest? This is being distracted knowingly. Being honest means having a clear visible point of concentration and attention, and overcoming any noise in one’s persistent inquiry into the true nature of said matter. But writing is not prideful announcement, overcoming noise is not the same as writing a speech in the third person, being honest not only implies being direct and concentrating, but also personal, and reflective.

The past few weeks have been extremely difficult for me. There are different factors and not only one will justify the torment that I experience, and there is no need for me to justify what they are or why they are to others. I find it difficult to do about everything - eating, sleeping, brushing my teeth, opening the curtains, going to the toilet. I find it difficult to consider anything that is meaningful or worth looking forward to in my life. I define myself strongly in my presence, and when I am helpless in my presence, I define myself as helpless.

But I don’t think that’s how I have always been. It’s strange, I barely ever reflect on the past, and when I do, it is about the mistakes that I made, the shortcomings that I had, but it’s never about moments of happiness, things I enjoyed doing, tangible drops of life that can never be retained - I never look at the past as a source of definition for who I am, at least it is not what I am doing.

Although, there are moment when that is not the case, when I can see myself not just as simply the currently existing environment and the sets of all habits and attitudes that I carry everyday. I guess I can say those are the cracks in my reality, the crack in a seemingly continuous and coherent stream of narrative, except that I know for sure that the continuous thought process forming a story about reality at the back of my head is anything but coherent and logical.

Of course, I can blame singly, or even in collection, any of the possible sets of external factors in my life for what I am experiencing. But I’ve never found that to be satisfactory, or that even if they were, I would refuse to believe in anything but my own will and my understanding of myself. I refuse to believe that anything gets to dictate my existence other than my own understanding, intention, awareness, and effort. Perhaps it is arrogance, whatever it is, I don’t think I can change my approach easily. Or maybe I can. Maybe the things that disturb me, that make me irritable are small things, small things that I thought were negligible, but small things do add up, and who is to say they are in full control of their lives.

Small things like how the neighbour next door keeps opening and closing the door for like 30 times yesterday, or like how I can’t yell my heart out in my own home and just fucking bang my head against the wall because we’d get a second noise complaint notice, except that I can bang my head, and it doesn’t make a loud sound, and that doesn’t help. If I don’t disturb my environment as much as it has disturbed me then it doesn’t help. I want to burn, and I want everything to go down with me. Because I am not a pacifist, I want to destroy myself and everything.

I want to remove the section above, because of how extreme it became, but I can’t see how that would be honest to myself. After all, I did feel like shit, and I have been feeling like shit, and whatever that is inside me is just destructive and it just wants to get out. There is glory in action, be it constructive or destructive, but there is no glory in inaction.

I contain myself everyday, I try to live and try to act as well-adjusted as possible to social standards, to what is tolerable by society, and by people around me. I always let people know that I am alright, that hey I got everything sorted, in the back of my pocket. I find it difficult to accept my mom’s call, or Rick’s call, I know that they are always there for me, and they call me because they want to be of help to me, but it’s difficult, it’s disappointing, I am disappointed, that I am not improving, that I am improving but it is still so hard for me to constantly stay sane. People around me want me to be happy, but I never see my life as something that is happy. Life is by default rough, we try to be happy, but to expect a life of happiness, of satisfaction without effort, that is just not in my book. What is the alternative? To cripple people with negative emotions? To constantly pull people into my ups and downs?

It’s hard for me to write this, because deeply inside I know there are things that simply cannot be reconciled, that we have to simply live with.

The things that I can do are being reflective, being contemplative, and writing like what I am doing now, and understanding where everything is, and understanding that everything is okay, and understanding that I don’t need to just fix everything, that not everything is effort, that not everything is a problem, that maybe what I just need is just to forget about the bumpy parts of life. This is the answer that no one can give me, not Lisa, not my psychologist, not my parents, not my friends - an answer that I can only get from looking deep into myself - the answer that I have to live a life of my own understanding, of my own appreciation, of non-comparison, of my own individuality - that I have to learn to be comfortable with myself, to accept myself - something that nobody can teach me because nobody is me. Maybe what I need to learn is I cannot learn everything from other people, or that I cannot constantly seek answers from others, or that social validation is not a clue to all the answers of life, in fact probably especially to the deepest questions of life.