thought compost

a place to throw my thoughts when they threaten to overflow; a place for my scraps to become soil

[thought-compost]

I just want to be caught in something all-consuming in every spare moment.

It's never enough. The reading, the gaming, the working, the sleeping. It doesn't consume me enough.

I want to be overtaken. I wish I could be obsessed, or as crazy as it sounds, even addicted. But I can't submerge myself in anything enough to let it overcome me. Enough to let it become part of me. I want to drown in it.

Fandom can't grab me. Addiction can't take me. Obsession refuses my calls.

"Getting obsessed with something is the best way to improve-" how? How do I lose myself in something? How do I throw myself so thoroughly into any single thing that my mind is satisfied and my heart fulfilled?

[thought-compost]

I love you compilers.

I love you archivists.

I love you researchers.

I love you statisticians.

I love you collectors and obsessors.

I love you historians.

I love you journalists.

I love you anthropologists and archeologists.

I love you storytellers.

I love you essayists.

I love you every single person who has passion or conviction about something.

I love you observers, participating quietly in someone else's world.

[thought-compost]

In my dreams last night you came to me. We haven't talked in years.

I took care of you. Until you went back to that place I couldn't reach.

In my dream last night you found me - you called me "Sis" like always and you were happier and healthier than I'd ever known you - and you seemed grateful and sorry.

It felt like a goodbye. Are you gone?

I'm afraid to reach out - if you're not gone will you just ask me for money again? Use me as your personal therapist again?

I can't do that to myself. I can't ask you if you're still alive, with leukemia and a weak heart, after 5 years of losing the people I loved the most, when our last contact was you asking me for more money.

I hope you've found peace, alive or dead. I will not ask. I don't want to know.

[thought-compost]

i'm okay, actually.

i lost 5 family members and my four-legged soulmate in the span of 5 years.

i'm okay, i promise.

i cry when my heart fills with longing for the ones i've lost and the loneliness floods me.

i'm okay, really.

i stay busy, trying to keep up with existing in this country that hates the people i love.

i have to be okay.

i will be okay.

[thought-compost]

I keep myself tense, like the surface tension of a drop of water. Any slight disturbance could come along and break the tension, spilling me everywhere.

As long as I hold the tension, I'm safe. The emotions can't overtake me if I'm holding them in place. But add too much volume or disturb it just a little and I'll overflow. I don't want to be swept away in the current of my emotions. I don't want to drown in the grief.

[thought-compost]

feeling emotional about fictional characters again

[thought-compost]

there are so many many things i want to say about them and what they mean to me and how they affect me and it's 11pm and i want to sleep but i have thoughts™

[thought-compost]

every person on earth has experiences with fictional characters. do you have any idea how amazing that is? whether it's an imaginary friend created by a child or a character from mythos that's existed in the memories of humanity, they've affected everyone. and i have chills just thinking about it.

i scroll through my characters - each one representing a precious part of me somehow - and i feel like crying. we've been through so much together, my ocs and i, and we've all developed and changed through the years. they're my children, my pets, my friends, my lovers, my family, ... and me.

i think about the characters from fiction that i've grown to love and mourn the ones i've forgotten - never intentional, but forgotten nonetheless. they've provided catharsis, and understanding, and every layer of complex emotion that i've been dealing with since my father passed away suddenly, and i'm eternally grateful.

[thought-compost]

feeling emotional about fictional characters again

[thought-compost]

there are so many many things i want to say about them and what they mean to me and how they affect me and it's 11pm and i want to sleep but i have thoughts™

[thought-compost]

feeling emotional about fictional characters again

[thought-compost]

Every once in a while, the hole in my heart makes itself known. You'd think missing a part of your heart would make it weigh less but I'm weighted down instead.

It builds and it builds and I feel like I'll fall apart at any moment. The tears will come soon.

[thought-compost]

There's a void in my heart. It's there because you're not. I immerse myself in tasks to cover the hole like a pitfall trap but I take a wrong step and I've fallen in, broken through the leaves carefully placed to hide it. I find myself trapped in the dark, and I miss you even more.

He comes to get me, after a few days. He always does, although he's slow and I don't cry out for help anymore. Hands pull me up from the hole and guide me away, but never far enough. He'll take me farther if I ask but I can't get the words out, and I'm left by the pit.

Every day others come and move me a little farther from the void. They talk and laugh and pull me along, and when they let go I have the energy to move away from the pit on my own for a while.

Sometimes the duration of my wandering is long and provides respite from my ceaseless orbit of the hole, and sometimes it is too short and I cannot rest before I've fallen back into it, and the cycle repeats.

[thought-compost]

Anyone else ever get in those moods where you suddenly hate everything you've ever liked and made and you just want to be left alone and not touched and throw away everything and become a completely new person?

[thought-compost]

sometimes it's just difficult to go to bed. there's so many steps and on top of that it means i have to make my brain shut down which i don't want to do. it means i'm not spending my free time doing something i enjoy and am instead sleeping.

yet i love napping in the middle of the day. there's just so much comfort for me falling asleep in the warmth with the sunshine, knowing I'll be awake again in a couple hours and will feel refreshed.

[thought-compost]

Maybe the mortifying ordeal of being known is less mortifying than we think, for what says "I love you" better than someone who knows you more thoroughly than you know yourself?

Your partner brings you a snack because they noticed you haven't eaten and are starting to get hangry without realizing.

Your best friend comes over to hang out and does your dishes because they know how much you hate them.

A stranger on the internet sends you a package that says "you give me hope" and has included something you mentioned in a post 5 months ago as a gift

An old friend says "hey you've been on my mind even if we don't talk very often and i hope you're doing well".

The people closest to you send you memes of things you enjoy and can laugh at together, and all is right in the world.

[thought-compost]

never can i sleep in

rarely my sleep lasts past sunrise

sometimes wishing it came later

often hoping it will pass me by

always yearning for more

[thought-compost]

Today the neighbor's children made their way into my garage. They carefully peeked through the velcro and magnetic screen over the opening and I let them know they were welcome to come inside if they wanted. My dog was there so of course they wanted to see her.

This is a space I've been carefully creating, one piece at a time. Used furniture and a new rug and yard sale artwork have allowed me to make the garage into an inspiring place for me to restart my art. The kids seemed to love it too.

Blue drinks in hand they pushed through the magnets holding the screen closed and spent the next hour and a half going in and out, chatting and playing with my art supplies and petting the dog and running across the street to home and back.

The three of them were lively, and I'm tired. I enjoyed their excitedness at my space and their eagerness to learn something new, and yet I'm reminded that I never want children.

[thought-compost]

My hands ache after four days straight of hyper-fixating on a fantasy modpack for minecraft, stopping only when prompted to walk dogs by my alarms or when I got so hungry I couldn't focus. It's kind of a liminal space, being so engrossed in something that time moves past you at frightening speeds - as though you're a steady boulder and time a raging river.

The ache of my hands cry for a break, but the dopamine high I'm chasing by playing is reeling me in. I'm having fun and I've missed that. I'll miss it again when my fixation fades, as they all do, but I'll milk it for as long as I can.

Aching joints and "you've-sat-still-for-too-long" muscles ask an important question that I don't have an answer to. Is being blind to the world and neglecting your needs worth the dopamine?

[thought-compost]

I've been on the internet too long. I've curated my spaces so carefully that i forget what the real world is like. I forget that not everyone i interact with is neurodivergent and queer and traumatized but trying.

I'm not lamenting this. In fact i find it liberating in many ways to leave the comfort of my online spaces and act the same way in public - unabashed and hopeful. I'm more self-aware, more open, more myself than I've ever been and i owe so much of that to my carefully curated spaces.

Getting swept away is almost too easy for many of us here, and i want to remind you that you can just... stop. You can stop followong someone you don't like or block a tag you hate to see, and find better and more uplifting things elsewhere. It's all too simple to graft pieces of internet culture to yourself without noticing, but it can bury you if you aren't careful.