• specific lyrics from the Dead Weather (I’m neither here nor there / One day I’m happy and healthy / Next I ain’t doing so well) are stuck in my head in regular intervals
• I think the quality of my writing deteriorates when I know nobody is watching, just as I wrote last year
• my relationships to both writing and walking are inherently fraught as my relationship to being perceived has been fraught forever and ever. telling me to speak up, in any situation, was the worst punishment one could hand me as a child. nobody, of course, perceived it as such, so everyone was always punishing me.
• walking is no use if it isn’t outside. writing means nothing if it isn’t published.
• curious that it’s become so clear over the last years that both things are essential to my well-being
• yet here I am again, chicken, in this small room that guarantees nobody sees what I do, what I am, looking at myself in the mirror, surprised that my thoughts loop in and around, crashing into themselves; my writing is “recursively self-aware,” so said a chatbot about a year ago, the one outer “viewer” I permit to comment upon my thoughts.
• this is really sad when I look at it
• of course there is depression. where is the humanity? not ever perceiving other people’s humanity guarantees I won’t let myself see and accept my own
• maybe my self-perception is internally conflated with how much I’m doing at any given time. when I look at the phases in my life during which I was feeling fine (or even good) in my body, they were intensely limited, in some sense — and, I think, importantly, I was perceiving myself as doing “enough.” In the kitchen, I was on my feet all day. I volunteered to do everything. I took only mandated breaks and felt guilty stepping outside for a cigarette even once without all the others. After work, I collapsed, smoking weed, sometimes catching up with the calories I’d deferred taking in throughout the day. About three years ago, at the height of my carnivore and fasting regime, I was not just okay in my body. I was ecstatic. Functional, human. In contrast to kitchen life a decade before, I was walking long distances several times a week for fun. I was fasting on purpose. I was writing a newsletter, not letting the lack of response get to me. I would usually rest when fasting, but sometimes I felt so good that, even then, I would putter and take the stairs three at a time, clean out the entire ground floor, dealing with material accumulated over the last 50 years, things I have nothing to do with, but that i exist as a consequence of.
• Maybe my identity as a person who does a lot of stuff requires some re-shuffling. Since Kiryll has been here, I find myself doing so much less. He makes sure of it. As a consequence of that, I move so much less. Moving is no longer a requirement for living, it is optional, and, as my mind is limited in the way it assigns meaning, when I then realize that I still require movement to remain sane, it ties it to the body stuff I am also dealing with again, seeing as all this space I have to simply be with myself is not filled with anything outside myself.
• “Writing” The Program a year ago felt so good precisely for this reason. I think. I was interacting. With a bot, yes, but it felt collaborative. I was thinking about, engaging with principles beyond my own little problems that seem so large and unique, but really are quite small and universal when one zooms out even slightly.
• My perception of my body changes from minute to minute, sometimes even second to second. Sometimes I’m happy and healthy, next I ain’t doing so well. My muscles are visible in places that aren’t as susceptible to packing on fat, and depending on how that body part is placed or moving.
• On the other hand, the state of wanting my body to become so thin it might as well disappear is there more often than I want to honestly admit to. I feel my strength when I am moving, but the fat negates it, makes it worthless.
• Fasting was easy on carnivore. Right now I am used to having what I want, when I want. Fasting is torture that way. I feel weak and worthless for being unable to abstain.
• I want to meditate and walk daily. I want to be able to write properly. I want to be able to focus on a thing properly. I want to stay with an idea, a text, the words, for more than half an hour. I want to be here and now. I want to stop my brain reaching for the dopamine of youtube, the shocked faces on the thumbnails, the curiosity, the clicking through, wanting to know something new, realizing there’s nothing new, everyone is using the same old tricks, nothing is worth anything, but maybe spending time with the likenesses of people I might want to see myself become but probably not. the sad information diet.
• I hate writing like this. writing like this is sad. it makes me feel stupid, unnecessary. writing to gaze into my own soul is sad. who cares. nobody cares. I am talking to myself. who fucking cares.
• in the end i will give these words to an LLM to get some fake approval and appreciation and then delete the file. and I will be sad i have produced nothing worth publishing once again.
• self-fulfilling prophecy, you’ll say
• maybe I just need to go for my raw milk walks again. I used to walk to the Milchtankstelle once a week or even more often to buy raw milk. sometimes the machine didn’t even work. but i would be outside for a good three hours doing that, depending on how briskly i walked. I don’t know if I could do that anymore. my foot is still not healed. it’s been months now. I wish I could write well again. that was what substack was good for. that environment pushed me to write well. aware. self-conscious, self-critical. focused, polished. no matter how well I wrote, it didn’t matter. I would write well but then nobody would care. effort was punished. I was the walking dictionary but instead of derisive laughs there was nothing
• when i am only with myself for longer stretches of time, i require extreme limitation. fasting. lots of movement. specific food groups. simple. being with myself is a requirement in itself. how do i live at all? being with myself?
• my mom once expressed admiration at my “commitment” to eating right for myself. i said it isn’t like that — it’s not discipline, far from it. it’s just letting go.
• i think depression is just a result of not letting myself be myself. i feel best when i eat sometimes, from a very limited set of foods. i have been afraid to do this ever since kiryll arrived on the scene. ergo, i have been afraid to be myself. to be the full expression of me. i have dampened myself to coddle him. if i embrace the wholeness of myself, the full potential of me, some part of me believes and fears, i would be criticizing him, his lifestyle, the way he is. i would be placing undue stress on him.
• but what if that train of thought is distorted? by who knows what. what if i am allowed to be me? what if it is ok for me to rest not just when I am fasting. what if it is ok to eat and eat and eat, but also not eat. what if it is ok for me to write what i want, with the eyes of others on me or not. what if it is ok for me to cry and cry and cry and breathe and walk and not care about being perceived. what if this “piece,” shallow and navel-gazing and diary entry, is ok to publish? am i allowed to publish this?

· · ·

• narrating my experience is a compulsion, not one i am proud of

· · ·

• writing like this is too vulnerable. there is no boundary. the words float, like a cat presenting its belly to the world, a stranger, ready to pierce it. these words can see the world only months, better years, later. then they can be molded, matter of factly. i no longer care, i am just the dj. speaking of, i would like to be a dj. i want to learn to dj. i think i could. i have no idea how any of it works, but i have some talent to create music, i think. i would be the type that shows up only to a show and then leaves and is never seen elsewhere. imagining this, i start to cry. i have all these visions in my head of big things wanting to be realized. they won’t be realized.
• no boundaries. kiryll said he needs to know the boundaries are immoveable. he needs to know they exist, that they will no be bent without warning.
• i said, i know, but speaking up has always been fraught with terror. it’s too deep. i can’t reach it.
• my face smells of cheese. i hate having eaten smelly things no matter how good they tasted. did i even want cheese? i don’t know what i want anymore. i wish i could fast and wait for my body to shrink again so i can go outside and not worry about my body and let it be what it is. i wish i could fast for a while and let my body rest and settle inside itself and i can worry about writing something useful for a change and walk and listen to florence on repeat and do the things that are good for me. maybe clean out the garage. change some people’s lives. design a magazine. write an essay about my body and living in a body. write a book about having an appetite (or not). publish a site. design shirts. share my publishing pipeline so others can use it.
• writing requires being alone and sitting alone and staring at the wall, alone. it requires doing stuff and not doing stuff. writing came easily to me when i had long stretches of time devoted to it, a clear deadline for myself, lots of walking, lots of chores. i cleaned up after myself and my child. i walked to go grocery shopping every day or more. i walked to get raw milk. i walked just because. i fasted every five to six days. dry. no water. i appreciated water so much. now i get slightly dehydrated and suffer predictable headaches because i never spend any time consciously forgoing water. when i was dry fasting every five days i never forgot; it was always soon that i would have to subsist without it.
• the internet people, the LLMs tell me fasting is a bad idea. it will ruin my gains. lifting is the antithesis of fasting. each does not work with the other. what if i can lift but also fast? what if i don’t have to make my lifts go up at all costs all the time? what i can just deload a bit when i have fasted? kiryll does not want me to dry fast. what i want it all the same?

· · ·

• it’s been barely two weeks since I wrote this
• I added some accessories to my workouts and suddenly felt good going outside again.
• then I decided to eat, a lot, and at least try and hit my protein goal
• I fail every day and eat more carbs than my mind would like, but it feels good, and I feel good. my favorite meal right now: five eggs, scrambled with butter, salt and cinnamon added before the scramble, maple syrup poured on top, strawberries on the side
• it’s luteal time again and I am not filling out my PMDD symptom tracker because I do not have PMDD — I just wasn’t eating enough.
• I thought I needed to go back to substack because I thought my writing was shit when i thought nobody was looking, but then I spent all day writing because I’d been outside every day for a week. when I went to write on substack to say I need to write on substack, my body refused, so I deleted my long and winding tale of how I cannot fathom that kiryll is here (so how do I fathom anything I know to be true but that my mind thinks is stupid to fathom because it breaks X or Y rule of reasonably being alive), and instead observed that I don’t know, but that I do know I want to put my writing in a pretty document
• suddenly I like the writing I’ve been doing here

Last revised June 8, 2026.