Someone on here once said you don't know desparation until you start looking for fanfiction on websites other than AO3 and another person replied that you don't know desparation until you're staring at a blank page. That is the kind of desparation I am experiencing tonight, though not about fanfiction per se. Well sort of about fanfiction, but when you read works to try to find yourself and end up unintentionally triggering yourself, it feels silly and like every bad thing is and has always been your fault. To jump to such conclusions is the sign of a mentally ill mind, but I never claimed to be well or sane.
Anyway, the blank page has called for me because I saw a couple posts on here about how using things or systems as intended is not "wearing them out" or "burdening them," respectively, and one of them reminded me of this poem that I thought was written by one person and ended up being written by another who has some serious accolades, but I had to search the depths of the internet to find her poem, which I likely wouldn't have found if I hadn't saved it to my computer. In it she talks about being Mad and needing medication, but ends so poignantly on a line I think about quite often: "How not to feel betrayed when what you carry carries you. What carries you you carry." How do people sleep or breathe or think after writing such poetry like that because their mind must be the most ingenious and artistic (if not also agonizing) collection of thoughts on the planet. But then I remember how I said a similar thing about Joan/Candy from the show People Watching and how her words were always amazing, how every single word she said was so perfect and she reminded me of me, but I felt like I could never talk so eloquently, so observantly. But then my friends told me I do talk like that all the time, and that's not the first fictional character I have felt imposter syndrome for relating to, saying I was not smart or Sick or interesting enough or in the right way.
However, none of that seemed relatable enough to the original post for me to reblog it with some random fucking poem, so I didn't. I didn't, and I thought about it all night and all the other poets I love and all the people I love and all the things I am not and how terrible I must be to be so nocturnal, so pensive, how foolish and bad I must be to be the harbinger of my own demise by staying up late and thinking ahout thinking about thinking.
then I read something looking to find myself and I found the opposite of myself. I felt rebuked and spat on and terrible, and it's not the author's fault I felt that way, and even if you could argue technically it is, their supposed culpability would not bear the onus of my distress, not morally wrong or wrong in any sense of the word.
There's a big wide world out there and even from my bed that I lay in for so many hours every damn day, I can still encounter things that are hard, but when you can't find yourself in writing, when you can't find yourself in your hands or your walls or your location (even as you strive for better and peace and comfort more and more each day), you decide to write your thoughts, screaming into the void of tumblr and hope that these words mean something to someone out there like authors on AO3 who tell readers to take care of themselves inspire me to be a bit kinder to myself so often.
They say no one is coming to save you, so this is me saving myself. When I wish someone would love me and care about me and tell me to stop pushing myself (even though for me that looks very different than it does for some), I must decide that I will be that person. Even though there are plenty of people out there that care about me, I can't depend on others constantly telling me to choose myself, no, I must choose myself.
So this is not a self love poem or prose piece of writing, but it is not a self loathing one either. It is writing that embodies the fact that to exist is to do things that sometimes may not benefit you or may hurt you even, but that not all of these things have anything at all to do with who you are as a person, rather being part of the nature of the complexity of life.
So my words wind in circles, creating confusion of past memories and dreams I've had and old music and new music and phone calls and categorizing and words, oh so many words, may be the death of me, but I also hope that they may be the life of me too. This feels like riddles and metaphors of the most confusing sort to me right now, but all I can hope is that it helps me somehow someday, that even though now I look at my work with disdain for the simple fact that I wrote it, maybe someday I will not. Goodnight dear reader, may your life's chaos feel more within your grasp on this climate-change-filled day on this Earth we call home.
