My head hurts. I have this string of muscles/nerves that run through the back of my head into the middle of my back. They’ve been aggravated for 4 days, swinging between decently severe nausea-inducing pain, and dull “You know, I haven’t gone away” antagonism that can’t be pilled away.
But I don’t want to talk about that.
For an ever-so-brief period in my life, I found a writing home at Sondry.com. It was the first place you could find both introspective writers and people who were seeking out that kind of writing. The site wasn’t particularly robust, but it eked out an identity and a fair amount of engagement. It took me back to the days when I first started writing on Myspace, and how those would get people commenting and engaging in a conversation. What started as me bursting forth with too much to say and barely intelligible ways of saying it, turned into an exchange, a flicker of what the internet was advertised it would be, as a place to connect.
I’m feeling murmurs of the cultural tide really starting to reckon with the disconnect. I think most people are over being constantly full of hatred and dread. I think a lot of the people mostly ill-equipped to understand internet tone/culture are dying off. I think the things we miss about our nature and history are taking shape again, and it’s not some kind of extra or noble thing to hold an event without phones or install something to shut down a screen. We’ll never go back in time, but I think getting jaded and less mystified about the pace or usefulness of technology is allowing more adult thoughts about regulating and control to take over.
Maybe that’s the theme in the air, “control.” It’s fundamentally always about control over “the narrative.” I can’t control the pain in my head, but I can control how much I talk about it. I can control, or pre-control, the conditions under which I’ll attempt to explain what’s on my mind. There’s something illuminated about the nature of control if you begin listing all of the things you don’t. It’s in that exercise. You don’t get lost in semantics about “free will.” You just uncover and embody “whatever it is” that colloquially registers as a control or a choice.
Recently, I was explaining how magic mushrooms can work to a friend who is often “blocked” or “primed.” While we’re spending most of our time basically locked into our bodies, mushrooms dissolve the barrier between intention and the ability to act on what we feel. The reason you can have a bad trip and spiral out of control is because you might not take up the task and responsibility to prepare or respond to the negativity. It flows just as easily as the positivity, and when you embody the dam between them or the bridge that connects them, it’s hard to unlearn or unfeel that true extent of your power.
There’s much you can’t control while on shrooms, or many hallucinogens, but what you can is the exact same thing you can control sober. This isn’t necessarily the case with other kinds of drugs. At the time we were discussing it, even the idea of experiencing that process overwhelmed my friend and we had to stop.
I picked up writing because I felt explicitly out of control. I couldn’t help myself, so I had to spew. I had to externalize. I had to give myself something to occupy my hands and mouth along to so I wouldn’t keep feeling sick and anxious and whiny. I’ve written more than I’ve posted, erasing or losing a decent amount. I’ve deleted so much that never felt like it was getting to where I needed. All of the time and effort could be conceived of as a giant ongoing summary of feelings and thoughts I can’t control, but for the words they manifest.
I consider it a certain kind of magic and mystery. I don’t know “exactly how” but I certainly “feel better.” I can define this as “order” of what’s otherwise standing “chaos.” Some days I rearrange furniture or meticulously clean something and achieve the same feeling. When I put together a stellar spreadsheet or check everything off on a list I can get it again. It’s not even palpably felt. If anything, it’s felt mostly as that contrast to chaos. Not “good” or “bad.” It’s “can” versus “can’t.” It’s “now” versus “one day.“
I had a job interview yesterday and was asked about my approach to counseling. I said I try to teach what I practice. I said I try to get people to define things in their own terms. We have everyone in every moment telling us something as though we share definitions. You’ll meet people in recovery, regularly, who’ve been in for decades, who deny they have ”triggers.“ Do they have a million things each day that signal to them a desire to use substances? Absolutely. They just don’t have ”triggers,“ or understand the response to a stimuli as one, or just maybe don’t care for the word.
I get intrusive thoughts. In a sense, all thoughts are intrusive, but I’ll have something dark or mean come to mind for shiggles (that’s shits and giggles for you high class folks) and then I am given the chance to wonder what, or if, that says something about me. I think it’s a knock-on effect of having a dark sense of humor. I don’t know where some of my best jokes come from beyond a contrarian dispositional habit and free-association. I do well on hallucinogens, so I don’t entertain those fucked up thoughts as anything more or less than a thought that I’ll eventually move on from. It doesn’t change my preestablished, pre-controlled desire or goal for myself or our interactions.
Making this distinction practically gave me license to mature. I’m an argumentative cunt, at heart. I will fight you, myself, and even people I don’t care for, over anything in which I can find an inconsistency. With no goal in mind, this means you often exhaust or alienate people and stockpile void-screaming time. If my headache was a result of being too full of errant thoughts, I’d know to stop when it subsided. The goal of talking at all would be tied directly towards my sense of my own health, thus I would find the reason and motivation to keep doing so when I experience the same kind of pain again.
Tying things together, though? That’s an individual art. Writing didn’t used to, or ”always“ ”fix me.“ In fact, it’s not the writing in and of itself that does so. It’s getting things ordered. It’s exercising a reflection. It’s allowing myself to occupy each feeling, or lack thereof, as it comes along, and translating it into English words. I feel like a perfect fool for not recognizing the analogy when it comes to writing or playing music. I’m not someone who can cry remotely easily. I’ve shocked myself in hitting chords that ”feel write“ and singing poetic phrasing that could induce tears. I can get a little misty over a line or two in the penultimate paragraph of 1 in 100 or so blogs? And probably only if I’m drunk.
We’re incredibly complex creatures just baked into an unceasingly mysterious and evolving story. To maintain some kind of entitled and insecure ego instead of adopt a curious and matter-of-fact posture about that is a tragedy. You’re allowed to not know something and fuck up as you keep figuring things out. You’re allowed to understand your worst enemy from as many viewpoints as you choose to introduce. You’re allowed to choose your sense and response. Start by listing everything not in your control, and then let yourself feel where the control comes in. It takes practice. And even if you find a way to do it for years, you might still only be telling the smallest part of where you’re coming from.
No comments:
Post a Comment