No one else listens to these memetic suggestions, but I do: Birds of Tokyo - Head In My Hands
I've been reading a lot of my old shit over the last few weeks whilst everyone around me has been putting up with it, not so much listening for answers as seeing the echoes and tasting the patterns emerging in the words I've used to describe my experiences, and how I felt about them over the last three years.
Yes, I'm still here; no one's as surprised by that as I am.
I was talking about experiencing late-stage burnout in my Penpal emails in late 2022; by that point it had been going on for at least two years.
I was talking about feeling like a failure in Stop; Continue, which I went on to explore in depth throughout It's not you (I'm giving up on) it's me.
Even The cost of doing business is littered with self-deprecation and references to my lack of self-worth.
I referred to drowning in Deadman, and Sandra, before I dredged it up for inspection in Drowning in silence.
The sense of helplessness and second-hand hopelessness reverberates forward from Staring into space.
The perception that life had lost meaning, and I saw myself as barely more than a pendulum at the end of his rope is loud and clear in Above all, be kind.
I was joking about punching myself in the face back in the Art Project email/post, and it became so much of a meme I gave the idea its own tag long before I commemorated it with a tshirt.
Self-loathing and self-directed violence are far from new plot devices in my narrative.
When you put all the fragments together the picture which resolves is glaringly consistent, but even though the pieces all fit together seamlessly you can still see how badly I'm broken.
I've had a lot of conversations over the last few weeks, many of which sounded so similar it was like listening to the same song over and over and over again.
When I finished posting and editing my Note I dutifully sent the link to all but one of my usual list, a good number of whom had little-or-no idea what had just landed in their Messenger chat, and sat there with my phone on the charge waiting for it to blow up. When the echoes of my ringtone clattering off the hard surfaces of my balcony died down I put it back on charge and started sending it to people who I knew would want to know. Whenever someone dropped me a line to check in, or tell me about something that had happened to them, and asked how I was doing, I'd tell them I had 12,000 or so words which answered that question better than I was going to. I'd put my phone where I could reach it, and drop the link to them as well. Finally I realised I'd not heard from Smeghead in a while, so I read him in with an apology for the late invitation to the pity party.
"Meh, at least I got an invite.
"I appreciate the fact that I got mentioned.
"What I appreciate more is that your remembering how to write
"But also that you are using it to process."
Much to my surprise, Mother Dear arrived at the party early; she'd poked the page whilst I was still putting it together and republishing every half-hour or so.
Now I'm pretty sure I've sent it out to, and heard back from, everyone I wanted to see it.
Except one.
"I'm not going to ask if you're ok, because it's pretty fucking obvious you aren't"
With each iteration I've got better at explaining the things I'd already said.
"Well that's a lot... fuckin' hell babe, that's so much, so very much... I'm really glad you're reaching out and being proactive and seeking support... um... but yeah... that's so much."
After a while I started working out things I hadn't.
"We've been talking for an hour and a half, and... there's no anger in you, in anything you've said, there's just grief. I'm not saying that what she did was wrong, but you're allowed to be angry, my man."
I'm not tho, and I don't feel I have any reason to be. I'm frustrated by the situation, at having no agency, no way I can even try to make it right. I'm not even angry with myself, there's just... grief...
For a life I got a taste of.
Which never quite got to happen.
Which I can't stop thinking could still be real if I could just put the pieces back together, and make it right.
"Oh man... that's shit."
But I had this nagging feeling that none of this was really new, and nothing that wasn't on-trend.
"I... how did I not see this coming? How did I not realise things with you had got this bad?"
And because there were a few people who'd never read my blog before I went looking for references which might paint a better picture of my journey, and I found that it's all there. I'm not going to pretend you could predict the outcome, but the pattern has been there for a long time; it's easy to miss if you get caught up in the jokes I make out of them.
But when the chair got kicked out from under me all the signs were there pointing what direction I was I was going to go.
Memetic interference: Bloc Party - Signs
I've worked a lot of things out over the last few weeks, some of which were right in front of me, but hadn't quite connected.
Like the realisation that my apparent commitment-phobia, which has been a running joke amongst my friends for most of my adult life, wasn't because I couldn't or wouldn't, but because I TAKE THIS SHIT SERIOUSLY. At some point deep in the past (I can't remember when, or what; I have very little left to hide, so you know that if I could I would tell you) I made a promise and I broke it. In the aftermath, I decided that was not who I wanted to be. Now I don't make promises I don't intend to keep, to an extent almost so pathological that I won't promise something when I'm not sure I can. I haven't had a response from Penpal since February 27th, 2024, before that was October 16th, 2023, but the last thing she asked of me was that I keep sending my blog posts to her even if she didn't reply. I said I would, so to this day I still email her every time I finish a post, and I have every intention of continuing to do so until she asks me to stop, or I do.
I do not fuck around; if I say I'll do something I will, and if I sleep through it, or get sick, or something prevents me from doing so, I will find a way to make it right.
Like just how meaningful Her Guest Post was, why it hit me so hard when she gave it to me, right where I live, that it embedded Her this deeply in my head and my heart.
Why it hit me so hard when I re-read the second Perthistential Crisis one night, which flows straight into it, that I was left weeping on my balcony whispering "no... no no no, no."
I keep being told I need to let Her go, get Her out of my head, but I still can't; ripping Her out will take so much of my self along with Her, I don't know how much of me there'd be left.
I knew I was leaning on Her a lot, but it hadn't dawned on me how dependent I'd become on the little bits of structure She added to my days, or how focused I'd become on that dream of getting past this limbo state to where we could actually start building a life together. I didn't want to look at how She was pulling away. I certainly didn't comprehend the strain that must have been putting Her under.
The thing is: we never really got to be 'with' each other; we were always kilometres away, just a patchwork of moments without ever quite achieving the truly shared experience both of us wanted. In the end She decided I was just a temporary companion, unhitched me and carried on with Her own story. Our paths diverged, and I watched Her ride away with resigned ease.
Gods... I wish I could make that right.
Rabeh, the counsellor I've been seeing, stopped me mid-flow in our first meeting and asked
"Everything I'm hearing here is about what you do for other people.
"What do you do for you?
"What do you want?"
"...
"The answer can't be Her, obviously," I replied.
Pre-empting the growl he was starting to build, I continued, "I... don't know. I haven't really thought about that in a while."
"Well that's your homework assignment then. Come back next week and tell me what you want for you."
I realised later that this, here, is one of the few things I've always done for me. Writing this blog, ripping parts of myself out and smearing them on the page, has been mine, and mine alone...
at least until She joined Her voice with mine for one, incredible duet, and in that moment I knew that I wasn't.
If Google Analytics are accurate, there are 28 people out there who read this (I have no idea who at least 5 of you are, or how you found me), but I don't do this FOR any of them. I do this because I (mostly... sometimes... at least I used to) enjoy wanking over words.
I do it so that someone, maybe even me, might understand me just a little bit better.
None of this had occurred to me at that point.
I couldn't work out the answer to Rabeh's question, so I did what I always do and thought about it a lot. New Friend Lou tried to help, and wrote up a list made up from things I've not been able to do for one reason or another:
* Mental health care
* PT w/Trainer
* Job hunting → career progression
* Check out Men's Table
* Concerts
* Festivals w/Ian
* Work out how to dating apps?
* Plan a diving trip
All of which felt banal and hollow, so I added one more to the end:
* I want to not hurt
When I told him that he had a 'Eureka!" reaction and yelled
"YES! That's it!"
"Oh... really? Is that all?"
"What do you mean 'Is that all?'"
"I... seriously, I had no idea what you were after there.
"It felt thin, like there should be something... more."
It felt so anticlimactic.
I carried on, "like... I put a lot of thought into it, looking for something Important.
"So I looked back at things I've wanted, for me, in the past, and I realised that the last time I
"Found something I Wanted
"Chose to do something about it, took
"Action, and
"Achieved it
"was when I asked Her out."
<growling commences>
"No, no, hear me out here.
"Take The Job Which Brought Me Back To Canberra. Landing that wasn't the result of all 4 of those.
"I didn't know it existed, I didn't Choose it, did nothing direct to get it.
"It fell into my lap because of things I'd done in the past; all good things; I put good things out into the universe and when I needed it good things came back at me.
"Be the change you want to see and all that, yeah?
"And that's great, it's how I want the world to be - give people what they need, and have what you need come back to you.
"But... ever since then I've been taking Action and not Achieving."
Rabeh sat back and said, "go on."
"So when your Actions don't result in Achievement, you start to question your Actions, but when you've no way of affirming them all you can do is keep adjusting randomly..."
"... throwing shit at the wall..."
".... and seeing what sticks.
"Exactly.
"But you keep going because what else is there to do, right?
"But when nothing you do works, you stop really wanting the outcome; the constant disappointment... it's too much, who can bear it?
"But I couldn't stop trying, because getting the next gig was the only way I'd be able to create the world which made Her happy, the world I wanted to live in.
"And now She's gone... and the reason I kept finding strength to keep persevering went with Her."
"..."
"So now... what's the point of continuing to struggle and fail and keep trying and never prevail when I'm so far past caring about myself to keep taking the smackdowns and rejection?"
"That's something you're going to need to work out, my man."
"...
"I fucking knew you were going say something like that.
"Fuck."
Memetic convergence: Birds of Tokyo - If This Ship Sinks (I Give In)
I've been having a lot of strange dreams over the last few weeks; I've had insomnia and broken sleep for months, so long that I can't remember the last time I slept for more than four hours at a stretch without some sort of chemical assistance. I can't tell anymore what's the result of my brain's constantly iterating knowledge graph inference engine, and what's the firing of random neurons which my sub-conscious interprets into another novel stick to beat me with.
Like the one where I see Her in the street and She blanks me.
Or the one where I start a new job and it turns out She's working there, and we're introduced on my first day, and She throws herself into my arms.
Or the most terrifying one, which left me staring at the ceiling with what I can only imagine was a haunted look in my eyes, where She calls me saying "OK, let's talk,"
and I have absolutely no idea what to say.
Alone in my echo-chamber I keep dreaming up ways I can make this right.
I know I can't engineer a solution, because any meet cute I could possibly create would just make Her reject me harder.
So I imagine things I could do to put myself out in the world so it can happen naturally, which means staying in a world I can barely stand living in.
But the only way that can happen is if I'm here, so for now here I remain.
If only for the foolish hope that I might, just maybe, see Her again.
I nearly smashed my half of the Art Project the other night; I had no idea why. I remember thinking about it before I even looked at it,
about how it offended me,
how false it felt hanging there on my wall,
so proud,
as proud as I'd been when I made it,
like it was taunting me,
a reminder of what I used to be able to do,
I wanted to beat it against everything in sight until it broke,
until it was nothing but glittery shards and splinters strewn across my living room,
the smug fucking cyclops,
staring at me,
I could see myself in it, and
I just wanted to see it in pieces,
so it would better reflect the way I see my self.
I know how to make another one, I wrote down the recipe.
But I don't think I could actually do it again, not the same, not anywhere near as well or as perfect.
Just an imitation, a pale reflection, of something unique and precious, a rare and delicate treasure, a cherished keepsake that I'd always know I destroyed.
I keep being told I need to let go, but I stopped holding on a long time ago; how do you let go of someone who's buried so deep in your chest She's pierced your heart,
when your hands have been tied behind your back?
Who's the hood over your head you can't see past,
and the chair under your feet?
There is a way I could do it, I've graphed most of the vectors involved.
I could find that anger I keep being told I'm allowed.
Direct it at the things She did to push us apart and drive me away.
I can shift my thinking sideways from 'what She did' to 'what She did to me'.
From 'I don't deserve this' to 'I deserve better than this'.
I can convert that anger into hate.
Remember all the things She did which hurt me and reimagine them all as hurtful.
Pretend that everything I did was righteous.
All the things I did for Her out of love as things She owed me for.
Fool myself into believing that everything She did for me was my due.
Transform hate into fury.
Fury into rage.
Use that energy to harden my heart, and
Rip Her out of it.
But...
Who would I be when I was done?
What would I have become?
How much of 'me' would be left afterwards?
Would I still be someone who was worth the love of the people who care for me?
Or even worth knowing?
Let alone being?
If what it takes is the destruction of my self, does it even count as self-preservation?
Am I willing to sacrifice the 'kinder', 'gentler' me on the altar of survival?
I don't think I am.
Because who I am, even this shattered, miserable me, IS worth more than that, and
If that's the alternative,
This is who I will continue to be.
Even if it kills me.
Having the cognitive dissonance I've built to give me a fragile sense of purpose pointed out breaks it, brings the whole artifice crashing down.
I know what I'm doing.
I know what it is.
I've not made any effort to hide that from people.
If I could just build a bridge and get over it I'd have put my energy into that instead of the mental gymnastics I've been using to maintain my tenuous balance edging along this tightrope. The illusion keeps my eyes focused on the horizon; I can't afford to look down, all I can do is keep moving in the hope that when it DOES get kicked out from under me I've got myself over somewhere I can land with just a few broken bones instead of falling forever into the bottomless void.
So what else can I do but keep trudging forward on knees that won't bend for anyone else but Her?
Onwards, for as long as I can, knowing that when I stumble there's no way I'll be able to catch myself.
I will just fall.
This is what you get for Wanting Things.
Not dead, but not living; I am Schrödinger's Dickhead...
