trying to start this journaling thing again. lately, overconsumption has made me feel like i need an outlet of some sort to distill my thoughts before they blur together and take over. actively trying to read and watch long form content the past couple of months has helped to slow me down in a good way. i feel calmer. more myself
maybe that's what has been missing in the last decade of me jumping from one thing to another. somewhere along the way, i became overly performative, too intuned with every else's energy that i forgot my own rhythm. only recently does it feel like i can breathe again. i'm learning what i like and what i don't, which feels embarrassinly like meeting myself for the first time. funny how it takes a whole two years of being alone to learn how to actuaclly be with yourself.
now that i feel less guilty about carving out solitude, i want a better way to put my thoughts down, to refine them so that they aren't just surface-level impressions or shower thoughts. the way i see it is that, i have too many questions and not enoungh answers. i ruminate compulsively, circling the same ideas from different angles, as if repetition alone might force some clarity. i tell myself this is reflection. but really, it's avoidance.
i think i'm afraid to figure it out, of being known - afraid of discovering that i don't have fully formed thoughts of my own, that whatever coherence i do have is just residue regurgitated from whatever i have consumed. the past week, this fear has kept resurfacing, in what i read, in what i watch, in the quiet panic of realizing how fast time is moving and how much of life i still haven't lived or documented.
i say i want a certain kind of life. so why do i refuse to even outline it?
forming a vision feels more dangerous than failing to reach one. to want something clearly would mean admitting that i haven't been 'figuring it out' all this while. i've been stalling for time, and here i am chasing after it. commitment feels violent because it collapses ambiguity. once i name a direction, i become accountable to it. if i commit and it doesn't happen, then failure becomes legible. public. real.
overconsumption isn’t overstimulation for me. it’s anesthesia.
i've told myself that uncertainty is humility, that opennes is wisdom. but often it's just fear dressed up. questions let me feel deep without obligating action. they give me motion without direction.
i also realise how much of this hesitation is relational. i've been afraid of how wanting things too clearly might disrupt the people around me. for years, i mistook self-erasure for maturity. i buried myself in relationships and activities that drained me because endurance felt virtuous. being 'understanding', 'patient', 'reasonable' became my armor. it made me feel strong. but strong for whom?
nobody who mattered was watching.
i’m only now seeing how much time i spent avoiding desire altogether. digging a kind of internal black hole so i wouldn’t have to confront what it would take to fill it. i thought not wanting was safer. neutral. but it wasn’t neutrality. it was abdication.
the truth is, nobody cares how i live my life as much as i once imagined. every image i tried to present fractured anyway, refracted through other people’s projections. the only people worth attracting are the ones aligned with what i actually want. assuming i ever let myself want it.
the cost of not choosing wasn’t freedom. it was erosion. and i’ve already paid for it in years.
titsay
stormborns
snowghoul
kianamaiart
kaledo-art
yousharknotpass
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
annaxmalina
