I'm Just Calling It Week Seven
yeah, i know that its not anymore but let's just keep the sequence of numbering going at this point. sound good? i don't know.
Wow, so the last one of these was just a real fucking bummer. I guess it took a lot more out of me to write it and to recognize that I’ve been in such a negative headspace for over a month now than I thought it would have. And yeah, the whole point of this is to not wallow and to also try to connect with others who might be wallowing so that y’all can realize you’re not alone and that the wallowing doesn’t help but sometimes you need to allow yourself the chance to feel like shit and not get upset about it. You’re not going to feel awesome all the time and you can’t beat yourself up about that. And also yeah, I still feel like a big pile of shit, and the last week or so has been a lot more mentally taxing than I had expected, but it is what it is and I’m just going to push through I guess.
Writer’s Note: last Monday was my 35th birthday, and that’s a milestone of sorts and even though it feels like this stupid cliche to want to turn over a new leaf and make some changes to my lifestyle and my outlook and maybe try to get back to eating better and fitting into my nice clothes again… it’s stupid but hey maybe let’s give some of it a go. There has to be a less shitty way to say fake it til you make it, but if there isn’t whatever let’s just run with that.
Week Seven
Clearly it has been a weird time for me, after a couple of months of what felt like some clarity and forward momentum there has been a definite regression. In keeping with the theme of this newsletter, I have been searching for little reasons here and there in my life to not be pulled further in and I keep coming back to this line that I have written down in my book draft notebook:
“the people we are now are very different from the people we may become”
Placed, not very neatly, in the margin and then underlined and circled; I wrote it down when I was trying to come to grips with a character development that I fell into that I wasn’t very happy about, but I just couldn’t shake because it felt like not pursuing it would be disingenuous to the person I was trying to create. My methods are probably nothing special, I’m sure plenty of other people do this too, I usually write dozens of pages of notes on each of my characters in order to try to get to know them as best I can. (Some of them have changed so much that its a lot more than others, and also maybe I re-write stuff over and over again because I’m great at writing notes down and very much less great at going back to read them.) It’s my little bit of world building that I do and the way that helps me become more intimate with these people and the life they’ve lived before they become words on a page. It took a lot of self discovery as well as just four or five very shitty drafts to realize that isn’t what actually happens, and I need to let the story unfold instead of me trying to guide it. It feels like a place where I work out some of my own demons too, actually. The way that I will write these notes back to myself over things I’ve written years ago, almost a Lake House type conversation with a version of myself in the past except that me can’t benefit from this outside perspective until now. Maybe in a sense its a way for me to understand that I can’t try forcing something into my own story if it isn’t supposed to happen, sort of like how we keep moving to different cities and for me it never feels like the right fit but that’s an issue to unpack for a later date for sure.
I said earlier in this post that it was my birthday last week, and my wife got me an incredibly thoughtful gift even though I explicitly asked her not to get me anything because that is how I am with birthdays and holidays and anniversaries is that I really don’t feel comfortable getting gifts. But this year I guess it was fine because it was a big round birthday and technically it was a gift for both of us: a household membership at the fancy private library in the neighborhood near our apartment. At first it felt incredibly frivolous, but there was a new member orientation kind of thing and after taking the tour and learning some of the history; it started to feel like weird guidance down a path that I hadn’t been considering for some time. It felt like maybe a sign that I should start writing again. This time for me, and maybe I could actually finish this book if I set my mind to it instead of continuing to get distracted by other life things that, while important, can take a little bit of a backseat right now. This is getting longwinded and meandering again, which in case hasn’t become evident from the ten or twelve other times I’ve mentioned it; seems to be my signature. TLDR: I am going to start writing fiction again, and making a real go at finding a publisher or something. And that feeling of having a goal to work towards and that sense of potential accomplishment has been both a great motivator for me but also a real point of reflection as I go back and read through all the notes I’ve written at different times in my life.
It does feel like an important thing to consider, no? This thought of the person we are now and our agency over it. I guess it all comes down to the person that you want to become and whether or not we even have any control over that. I think that might have been some sort of subconscious thought throughout my weird little journey I’ve been taking in front and with you; who will I be and is that who I want to be? The truth is that we have no idea who we will become, especially since the perception the we have of ourselves can be so wildly distorted from day to day to week to month… especially with mental health issues creating a variable sense of self worth that can be so dependent on our moods. But that doesn’t mean to give up, most importantly when you’re stuck in those days and weeks that you just feel like an absolute worthless piece of shit. Perceptions change and sometimes you can’t see what direction you’re supposed to be going in until you go back and look at it again with fresh eyes, it just means that you owe it to the person you will become to stick around.