Shadow Musings
Shadow Musings
(A Creative Non Fiction Piece Amid Coronavirus)
My brain is currently nitpicking ways to feel like my life should be and will be more meaningful. As if there's a certain way for meaningfulness to be done better. As if I am giving up many of my days for the brain's self ordained “pathetic and useless” tasks like buying cat food, taking a long shower. Painting my nails. Doing them all in the same day, no less! It just adds up. The uselessness of your life. I am my own living sitcom, my personal running joke. I do nothing but ordinary tasks, ordinary happiness, merely ordinary servicing of my career I fought so long to have.
Yes, I am making fun of my own self fabricated perils that I still am fully convinced to believe are real. It's all very meta.
There's a thing about mammal vs. reptile stress responses that I read. The mammal, when stressed, responds with a fight or flight response – something that maximizes their chance of personal safety. Raised heart rate. Startling. Running, excess blood pumping. More oxygen. It is prepared to fight the threat or flee from it in whatever way possible. A reptile? They respond just by physically shutting down. And then the trauma book talked about how our bodies revert to our more primitive roots when we are essentially being neglected – out of touch – with the amount of stress that a human body can handle.
I didn't mean to faint on the train, panic out of those old packed subway cars, have him get me a $40 cab ride home. It just kind of happened. I am not remembering those days with the memory clarity I usually have. I never thought stress was valid enough for trauma. Stress is necessary, after all – it might even be what you deserve.
And yet, I continue to stare at my ceiling, hoping it'll give me an answer soon enough.
By the way, what constitutes this “enough” we speak so highly of?
Perils. Perils. Hmm. It seems like an awfully archaic word. A kind of suffering you can never claim, as only a mildly suffering, privileged, complaining little human being.
And the guilt sets in.
I am frantically filling my time with posts I don't really want 1,000 people to see on my Instagram story. It's more to avoid asking for the direct things (or desired responses) that I actually want from people.
And yet, directness always seems to get me in trouble. Standing up for what's right is commendable, but as a musician, it's best to remain apolitical. Shame on you!
She didn't even have to verbalize the symbolic scarlet letter that indicated I would never work there again.
She will hang it over my head until the end of time. And perfectionism chips away - as it does, but isn't necessarily supposed to.
Right?
Does the concept of tough love, “I only do it because I love you”, apply to brash criticisms of one's own mind?
STOP CHECKING THE DAMN PHONE.
I guess there is a reason why my generation all became depressed, preoccupied with marital/statistical/genetic/learned/produced/curated/generated success
Which seems to imply that we are to churn out life's silver linings and perfect backstories like a wheat mill
Reaching a mechanical limit always means shutting down. Maybe the lizards were right.
I never really liked lizards anyway.
Lizards, however, cannot pass judgement on me, for they are not capable.
Evidently, perspective changes everything. And yet, I act as if I have been robbed of my choice.
And the guilt sets in.
My dad, a cynic to end all cynics, told me I could “probably try writing about happier things”.
I don't bother telling anyone about the medications. It's probably easier that way.
A Sasha poem, from 2018: “what a society – where you must work harder to show less of yourself.”
To keep myself from “checking the damn inbox” I am vigorously twitching both legs. Eloise, my cat, sleeps peacefully, curled in the corner of my bed. She is not fazed by my leg rumblings. She's just asleep.
Ordinary tasks.
Con: higher intelligence.
Pro: higher intelligence.
Is it possible to not want to keep your hands off someone with immense sexual energy while you are literally in pain from the UTI they gave you?
The UTI is maybe, instead, a physical manifestation of the number of things that can't stop getting under my skin.
I fear I am becoming an ourboros. I feed my unhealthy self destruction by...being self destructive in a top hat. Self destructive but aesthetic! Self destructive but utterly successful: 10 Ways to Overcome An Existential Crisis That Follows You Like a Shadow. I am only finding more elaborate ways to keep eating my own tail! It's all very entertaining.
But I swear, it is better than not doing anything. Like running in place. At least it feels like its one step closer to where you want to go. I may be treading water mercilessly, but at least I'm not drowning.
It's very possible I don't get my own drift. I start my projects and then abandon them for fear of facing the subjection of the real world – not just the mind-hypothetical, “what-should-work” world.
I am merely in the ourboros void, the lizard state, the marijuana cloud, the place my body has decided is free of harm – even if it is all a trick and illusion. Illusions are comforting.
Bill Wurtz: “you can make a religion out of this!”
Or you can just go on Twitter - the ultimate democratized platform. Illusions run wild in their undoctored state, amongst the facts and fake news and false pretenses and
The guilt sets in.
I miss you. You miss me. But here we are, pretending not to miss each other.
The part I miss most is that you were the only one I know would read to #40 without clicking away. Because I was everything to you, for you, and in that way, I believed it for myself. Often times I don't get to tick both of those boxes.
Maybe I'm not in love anymore, but I can't help but worry no one will find me as utterly brilliant as you did. Maybe I am eating my tail, shutting up, swimming in my own lack of directness, because I feel this. You are the antithesis to every bad habit I have formed. You are an antidote and a miracle in one.
I am sick from withdrawal symptoms.
My words fall short of the depths of feeling, the diminishing sense of choice
And control.
You would tell me not to nit pick. That I do not deserve brash criticisms of my own mind, that I am yearning for impossible standards and setting myself up for disappointment. And I actually believed you.
I worry that my believability may all but disappear in direct proportion to our time grown apart.
My shadow is catching up with me at a terrifying pace. I want your tent of arms, your words that unravel knots and relax blood vessels, your wealth of experience cloaked in sanity and wisdom. I know I cannot ask for these things anymore.
It's like standing on a broken foot.
Sasha poem from 2020: “I wonder what good romanticizing the idea of you leaving me does, other than to reflect my own deficit – of thinking I cannot fill a whole person from bottom to top, I cannot fill a whole stage and also break the ceiling”.
But it's all fine
When it is really that
I am scared of ceilings because they remind me of how much I struggle to even scrape the surface
And reflect my own deficit
And make the guilt set in
And confuse power with pleasure
When they are not the same
And list my worries despite that they are in fact, not chronological,
but rather, circular
but it seems we only find faith in narratives
that have linear growth
instead of the
tails already eaten,
the lizards on the ground,
the skin burrowed under,
the habits still formed,
tasks far too ordinary,
the phone at the bedside
like a superficial lover,
the love unsung
or perhaps told to tuck away
to show less of yourself
as you should
because the shadow is coming again
to render all things threatening
all hands held
falling away
because really,
it is better this way.
Right?
Right, Sasha?
Are you there?