I haven’t written in a while on paper and it shows. Not sure how exactly. It’s something in the way I don’t think in words, maybe. I wonder if it’s me who smells or if it’s the chair I’m sitting on, perhaps it was occupied by someone who smells before me.

The experiment has proven me right. Writing for an audience makes my thinking more rigorous. My pieces are sharper. Wilder and more precise, but I also need to be able to tune out the existence of the larger world on the platform. I feel I am writing in the hollow space inside my own head most of the time, not to or for anyone.

My head formulated a sentence, a starting sentence, yesterday during my walk, but of course it went away. It was something about the trouble being that my thoughts have always been meta and self-referential. No matter what was happening, I was always thinking about how I felt in the situation, not necessarily what was happening. I was analyzing it while it was occurring. I have never been ignorant enough to just do things instead of think about them first. At the same time, this is the very way I was and am ignorant. So wrapped up in my analysis that I miss things, important things.

The tea bag is leeching microplastics into my hot water.

The trouble is, the sentence went, maybe, that I need blinders, or maybe I don’t. I need blinders to see only what I supposedly need to see and experience, so I can also focus on writing down what I think needs to be written down. Or, without blinders, I see too much. I am overwhelmed. I need to learnt to focus on singular things. Der Blick nach vorne lohnt sich! an ad says when I turn my head slightly to the left and gaze straight forward, beyond the bakery/café. True dat.

· · ·

I read good books and good internet writing to show myself this is allowed. I am allowed to say things. I am allowed to be someone who says things, I do not have to be someone who says nothing. I think about this often but only when I write it down, my brain also registers that this is what is going on. When I am not writing, my brain just thinks about how I wish I could be someone who writes stuff, just stuff — not always thinking about writing and writing about thinking about writing. Thinking about saying things that mean something. And then I become concerned for myself. This feels excessive. I don’t think it’s normal to think about writing and speaking and just existing this much. Many amounts. I wonder whether I can just let go of the judgment. If maybe then, I will someday write about something else. Maybe what I think about some movies or songs, or people, for that matter. Because I have a lot to say about them. Yesterday I watched Shallow Hal. And now I am wondering again, not about what I could say about the movie — I mean, that thought was there for about two seconds, granted — but about what the simple act of saying I watched that movie does to anyone reading this. It depends on the person, I guess. I, personally, saying I watched that movie, initially feel dumb and embarrassed. I, personally, imagining myself read that someone else watched it for any reason whatsoever, feel oddly envious of the nonchalance. It’s a bad movie. Watching it, for whatever reason, and then stating one watched it, rouses a kind of jealousy in me, of the nonchalance, of the ability to do whatever, even watch a bad movie, for whatever reason.

· · ·

I remember very, very well, thinking as a nine-year-old, that effort is Not Allowed. I put effort into reading aloud, enunciating, having emotions. The kids around me seemed to be embarrassed deeply by my efforts, and occasionally snickered. When any other kid read aloud, their voices flat, they didn’t even seem to try and consider punctuation. I gathered that this was the correct path.

How does that happen? How does a child have so little trust in their own inclinations? How did I not realize that they were wrong and I was right? I was terrified of being even slightly off. But I couldn’t prevent standing out any which way. I was always the weirdo. I was little walking dictionary. It wasn’t funny.

I wonder how much of the bullying and the meanness and the unfunniness was in my head. Which made it very real, because it seems nobody made a concerted effort to make me feel that it was not meant in a mean way, not enough to truly calm me down. I felt I was at war. I hid in the library. I can’t believe that was allowed. I walked past the dentist’s office at school with my heart stuck in my throat, imagining the horrors that took place there. Kids came out of there reeking of burnt rubber. Thankfully, I never went. My mother took me to the dentist outside of school; I lived through the terror in my own time, thank you very much.

I wonder what would happen if I didn’t edit what I write down. If I simply wrote and wrote and, you know, I don’t know. Just didn’t make an effort to make it mean something. Maybe seeing kids make no effort and realizing my own, unconscious efforts were in vain, perhaps even hindering my progress, was in fact my unconscious telling me I need to let go. Be whatever. Stop with the attempts. Just do stuff and, you know, whatever.

But I cannot tell what’s good anymore. I cannot ask anyone to tell me because every other person’s opinion is subjective. Whatever I think, whatever I write. I cannot even trust a robot. Who knows what’s good? The only thing that matters in determining what is good, it seems, is who says it is good. You read and perceive things according to whosoever has once claimed it as good. Just some people agreeing doesn’t even mean it is good. It is about who agrees, and who doesn’t.

The work isn’t real unless it is seen by people. Those who matter saying something. I cannot kid myself that my work is just too good for anyone who thinks so to actually work up the nerve to say so. It is self-indulgent; it is bad.

· · ·

The main reason I read is to show myself it’s okay to write in a non-bad way. Not primarily to enjoy myself or take in information. The reason I buy books is to enjoy myself and take in information. The reason I read non-fiction is to take in information. The reason I read novels is to enjoy myself, but then, as I am reading, I realize the real reason is to show myself what’s okay — since someone is already doing it, with success. So maybe it is, in the end, to show myself it is okay to be successful. I have had a lot of trouble even imagining myself having any kind of success over the past couple of years. In the beginning, when my child was small, it wasn’t so hard. I liked to dream and I truly believed success was possible. I threw myself into work, I believed if I wrote a lot and took the perfect photos, I would be successful. The world showed me this was not the case. I could work and work and work and success would not show up. I tried, I tried so hard. It wasn’t happening. I gave up. Of course I gave up. There was zero evidence anything I was doing was right, and it was so much work. It did not feel easy. It did not feel easy putting myself into judgment’s way, on the internet, as often as possible. It felt like betrayal, it felt like I was taking slivers of myself and throwing them into a river.

So I gave up. And something new came up. And I was so entranced. It required less throwing slivers of me into a river, because it wasn’t about me, it was about other people’s work. I could do it, and well, because it was about making other people’s work nicer, more readable, more beautiful, more attractive. I can still do this. I can make people more attractive than they are. The problem was that as I was doing it, I found that I could not quite do it with all my heart if I felt that what I was trying to make more attractive wasn’t attractive all the way through. I found myself editing the work because it wasn’t good enough on the inside to justify being so beautiful on the outside. In fact, the only work I truly found beautiful and easy to make much more attractive than it was, was not work done by a human, but work generated by a program. It was easy to make it attractive because it wasn’t trying to be anything it wasn’t. It was dumb and hilarious and not pretty and it was honest about it. This was my proudest work, and has been since I went to art school and couldn’t decide what to do, and, above anything, if at all.

I love books that pretend they’re doing something we know from too many other stories before, and then don’t do it.

I love books that don’t do what they’re told. Often, interestingly, they are very successful. I do wonder why these are the books I have gravitate towards. The successful ones. I don’t truly gravitate towards the obscure.

I feel a tightness in my chest thinking about these successful books. They are rightly successful. Just as good kids’ movies are rightfully successful. When will I be rightly successful? How in the world do I stop thinking about how I will never be successful and just do what is needed to become successful?

· · ·

Calling my piece one thing and then not mentioning it, really, even once, is audacious indeed, and I like it.

Watching contemporary shows increasingly fills me with pride and hope for our generation. Let the Boomers have their last round, soon they’ll all be old or dead and we will have our way with the world. Do you realize this? A very, very much better world is just around the corner.

Good new media is aware of itself. The contents either know about the form or makes one completely forget the form. Good media that can survive without self-referencing needs to be so good, so immersive, that the consumer does not require it to know what it is. Villeneuve’s Dune is one such example. This doesn’t mean very good media cannot be self-referencing at all. Self-awareness — subtly calling itself out — makes a piece go from good to excellent.

· · ·

And then I wonder about the finality of words. Unspoken, but written. Words on a platform require an opinion. If you have none, you don’t belong. You will not be seen.

Okay, so what if I have none? Because it’s always been like this. I will tell myself an opinion is required, but, truthfully, if I think about the issue, it is too obvious that the details, all the sides to the story, make it impossible to hold on to one — and if I did, it would not be me, it would not be mine, it would be an attempt to do what is supposedly the correct thing to do, what one does.

But this whole undertaking, since I started writing on the internet, and especially since I started allowing myself to write about writing, to go where my attention is, has always been about realizing what my head has soaked in and up all these years, the ignorance of freedom, is Wrong. I have been wrong, all my life. I am not required to do things any certain way. I am not.

The internet has done us a huge disservice. I was brought up by parents who were brought up by despots. My parents fully believed there were right and wrongs ways to exist, and so I grew up not questioning my conviction that if I did not, at some point, cease making “dumb” mistakes like being five minutes late to school because I didn’t think through all the things that could go wrong beforehand, I would cease existing. That a righteous court would descend from the heavens and rule me unworthy of life. I would literally die because I did not think about everything that can go wrong before it did.

Then the internet came along. I was on Facebook in 2007, my own blog two years later. Neopets, way, way before that.

The unknown faces tell you how things are in a way nobody in your life ever can. Mind you, these were people I had already seen, known, in real life. They were the people I grew up with, the non-enunciators from elementary school.

Notice I haven’t mentioned I may be or am, perhaps, certifiably, AuDHD, even once. Now that I have, I wonder how many people think, oh, come on. You’re just describing normal childhood experiences. Because that is what I think. I think all this is very normal. The books I read tell me as much. If they don’t, I think, lucky kid, and move on. If they tell the same story, but worse, I think, yes, I know, but man, I was lucky, and move on.

· · ·

I want nothing more than to write a lot and write well, but every time I write, over the last two or so years, I am filled with despair. I hate my writing. Is it the AI? Is it all the exposure to a machine writing stuff I sometimes don’t even understand, in seconds? It has to be.

I feel I have also become so much more aware of how bad my writing is. I feel there is no hope for it. Yet I love it so much and I cannot make myself simply not think about it, or not do it at all, when I hate it so much. How can I not do it? I break down in tears writing so often, you’d think I was writing about some horrific memory, but no. All I am writing about is how much I love writing and how bad I am at it.

And how much I wish anyone would see, and how much I don’t want anyone to see.

I am jealous of my friend. She wrote an obscure Instagram account back in the day. It was different, it was beautiful, heretical. I loved her writing so much, and I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know what she was. I shared her posts and her account blew up and she revealed her identity, and I was relieved and peeved. I was jealous. Her writing was crisp, clear, opinionated.

I am not. I observe, but my opinions are minimal. I believe a lot of people have things backwards, but I am not about to tell them. Why should I? It would change nothing. So I keep to myself. Maybe I should tell people what I think. It has never actually changed anything at all, though. My mother, once or twice. But no more. Usually, if I say something opinionated, to anyone at all, it backfires and they will think and do the exact opposite, and subsequently believe me even less.

· · ·

People don’t believe me if I want to make them believe anything. Either I have to write it down, not directed at anyone in particular, or it has to be said so nonchalantly that even I myself don’t believe I am saying anything in particular.

If I work up the courage or the time comes to express an opinion, a feeling, a knowing — more often than not, it turns out I was wrong. My head was working with faulty information. I was projecting. I am not thinking about what really matters.

This feels like I have no control over anything at all.

No wonder I try to control everything I can.