insomnia brain (if said brain were made of bullet points)
musing about god, perfectionism, & the myth of closure
(shirt by holybeings)
hello dearest,
i hope all is well in your realm, wherever you may be <3
my brain has not been abiding by the rules of structured/linear thought as of late, but i want to check in anyway. there are a lot more of you now (hello! thank you!) than the last time i wrote, and i’ve got a little screen locked stage fright. i’ve been thinking and not thinking about a great many things, so here are some bullet point musings for ya
i think that i think too much, and i also think that my thinking too much is the only reason that i’ve occasionally got anything worthwhile to say. i think that my concern with saying something worthwhile can sometimes be a prison. i think the urge to wait to speak/write until i know exactly what i want to say is a trap. i can think my way in and out of a point of view a hundred times, and maybe that’s okay. maybe i won’t like what i’ve said today in a year from now, but expression is not a noose. i think i need to get more comfortable with being a person who's changing all the time, in a world that’s changing all the time. i also think that all of this thinking can be a shield against feeling, against faith. sometimes i can think myself out of tenderness. i can think the world into a beautiful place, but i can also think it into a hellscape. this is a nasty predicament.
another predicament: i don’t think i write well when i am happy. i know that pain is not where the art comes from, but the perceived urgency to make something ‘worthwhile’ of my life, that manic need to become something worth loving, it’s from that space that much of my work is made. i don’t like this. i’d like to love myself the same amount whether i am binging a series (currently: ‘the great’ on hulu) or working on my next book. i’d like to love myself as a process, not a product. i’m not there yet. i’d like to be.
i’ve been talking to god, a lot. i write letters to my god before bed. this is becoming my most important relationship. i didn’t grow up with religion, and i don’t have much theological knowledge. my relationship to my god is deeply personal (which is why i’m talking about it on the internet ;). in reality, i don’t speak of god often, because a lot of people have god related trauma. i think i’m lucky to have not been raised in church, because my experience of god hasn’t been tainted by human power dynamics or general self interested weirdness. i know there’s a lot of lore about god, many books in many languages about Who God Is, and these portrayals of god’s will have been used to justify a lot of shit that i don’t think god would be down with. when i’m talking to my god, these are not the things i feel from her. i experience my god as fluid, not rule obsessed. i don’t enjoy the idea of a wrathful or cruel creator. i’ve felt god, i’ve heard her speak, and her presence always been an all encompassing warmth, love, and acceptance. my god is funny and feral. my god is an artist. my god believes in the beauty of experience for the sake of experience, the subtle and boundless intricacies of every vibrating atom, every divine bit of matter that she sculpts, over and over again, forever forming and reforming this gift, this passion project. my god is change, things in motion. my god is chaos, but she is not cruel. she pushes toward advancement, the personal and the universal. she does what is necessary, even if we do not see why. i’ve looked back at my life and seen how every heartbreak, every pain has inched me closer to where i am now, who i am now, and i wouldn’t change a moment of it. i have become remarkably attached to my own lore, my backstory, my plot. the fear i felt last week has been replaced by faith (and i know, the feelings oscillate. i will find my fear again, and i will find my faith once more, ad infinitum). i know that my god has not once transformed me to my detriment. the more i speak to her, the more i find her everywhere— even in myself. sometimes when i’m out in the world, i experience something so surprisingly divine, or witness something so mundane and find it awe inspiring for the first time, like i’ve briefly been gifted new eyes, and i see all the little love at work in the world, and everything feels so charged with it, charged with god. in these moments, i can’t hold myself back from laughing, laughing with my god till i get stitches in my side. it’s like living inside a planetary inside joke, finding easter eggs as i move through the world with my little ghost friend on my shoulder, and i love her, and i love the feeling, even if i look a bit insane.
speaking of looking insane, i have decided that being sane is overrated. i think we could all do to relinquish the weight of the Serious Suits that we sport in efforts to seem Cool & Smart & Normal. i am no stranger to the trap of the Serious Suit, but where exactly has wearing it ever gotten me? to the frickin psych ward, that’s where. life is absolutely bonkers, and i could to try and comprehend it, but i’m leaving that task to god. for all my pouting and thrashing against the tides, i’m still exactly where i’m meant to be, even on my worst days. serenity prayer. lalalalalaaa
speaking of worst days, today was one of those. i woke up in a friend’s bed, writhing in incredible pain. i’ve got a chronic mystery ailment (CMA) that sometimes visits with no warning, and today she made herself at home in my little tender vessel. torturous bitch that CMA is, she stretched herself out inside my abdomen and dug all around with her knife hands, shooting sharp stabs up and down my body with every flick of her wrist. any attempt to move on my part enraged her, making her stab more ferociously, so there was nothing to do but cocoon myself in a bed sheet and lay perfectly still while i allowed her to play pin the tail on my goddamn guts for as long as she pleased. in response to these sensations, i got very Cranky and Serious and Woe Is Fucking Me and then my brain turned to pain putty and there was nothing good going on. i thought maybe nothing good would ever go on again, and i let god know that i was very pissed off at this development. and then my friend came into the room, and he told me my little blanket fortress looked like a chrysalis, and i laughed, and it hurt to laugh, and i couldn’t stop laughing, long past the point where anything was funny. i thought about who i would become once the pain ceased and i hatched from my dirty cocoon. i decided that i would be stronger, and maybe have superpowers, and suddenly this was not a Seriously Stupid Fucking Burden, it was a case of growing pains. CMA was not chopping me up for fun, she was making room for all that i am to become. this was a much more fun idea, and now the pain has left, and i’m excited to see what’ll be different now. maybe i’ll be really good at parkour. who knows?
in other news, i carved the word ‘tender’ into my arm last week. the irony of this is not lost on me. fyi, this was not an act of self harm. seriously. i was initially trying to tattoo it using white ink, but the ink didn’t take very well, so i gave up on the ink. it’s more like a scar. i think it looks cool. i’ve got a very tender relationship with scars. i have a lot on my arms and legs from back when i was Super Big Sad in high school. teenage Sad is the worst period of the Sads, because it’s all so new! first you’re a child, and suddenly you’re smacked with vicious initiation into agony, and there’s no warning! no guidebook! just lana del rey and malboro 27s? absolute crap armor. still, we made it through, and we managed to keep our tenderness. that’s a big win. i’m proud of us :-)
on an unrelated note, i’ve been thinking about closure, and i’ve decided that it’s a myth. i’ve tried to find it, tried to facilitate it, been asked for it, yearned for it. i’ve googled and journaled and had long talks over coffee trying to make a thing end, and it’s never worked. nothing that has entered my heart has ever found its way out. things don’t die, not really. maybe they change, maybe they shrink to make room for other stuff, but i think it’s more likely that my heart just keeps growing to welcome more things to be held and hurt by. and maybe there is a temporary forgetting of a thing that has marked me, maybe i’ll think i’ve moved on, but the strangest thing can bring it all back up again. the scent of cologne in a crowded subway car, or a song you’ve long forgotten but still know all the words to, a stranger on the street who looks just like…and suddenly the feeling rushes back, and it’ll be just as strong as it ever was, even if it only lasts a moment. i am thinking about people who i no longer speak to, and how much love there was between us, how crazy it is to think of loving someone so much and then moving on, and years go by, and if you met again you’d be near to strangers. but the love doesn’t stop, does it? it may shape shift for a moment, to anger or spite, just to give you enough space to move on, because more often than not, there comes a time when it is necessary to move on. but then you make it out, far enough away to allow for new things grow, and the love comes back, and you know you’ll carry it forever. it’s bittersweet, and it’s also a blessing. the wounds of love open and reopen constantly, and still we keep letting it in. logically, this is very dumb, but truthfully, it’s a superpower. it’s an honor.
thanks for being here, thanks for being you. thank you for letting me be me, even through a screen, even if we never meet. i hope that you get to be silly and childish and loved today. i hope that you feel all the love vibrating around you and within you, even if it’s just for a moment. wherever you are, whoever you are, you deserve it. we all do. no matter how shitty the day, our capacity to give and be gifted love can’t be taken from us. that’s our superpower <3
lots of love, dearly and endlessly,
jomé