jem on jém

[ENTRY 014]

terminal\user\jem\journal

For this entry, you’ve decided to just write. Which is odd because that happens every week. Yet every time you load up a Google Doc from the week prior and copy and paste the titles over to a new document while changing the dates, you get the faint urge to admit defeat. Many times you look at the page and it looks back, a mirror to your blank mind.

You mention the difficulty. How hard it is to come up with something week after week. Perhaps a gross violation of the ridiculously rigid rules you impose on your self-expression or creative output. You’ll even place your struggles in the front and centre of your writing, or at the very least, talk about it in extensive detail.

You get up from you chair, pace about (not really) and remind yourself again that:

‘I need to relax. Take a chill pill. Put a smile on your dial. It’s not that deep. Write what you want. If it’s honest, that’s all that matters. Who cares? It’s enough. You know this. It’s known. You’re enough. It’s all part of it.’

You hate this most of all because, often, you feel you don’t learn anything from it, really.

You never retain important information for long, and if you do, it’s called upon in broken and scattered pieces, if at all. You know this isn’t always true because you still remember how to do basic things like drive and eat and breathe. But the feeling is nearly constant. To feel in your bones how inexperienced and futile you are in this body when it’s called upon for something real this time, while you stand and stare at the ground.

In truth, writing about it makes you feel better. You manage to get it all out, in a way, for yourself. An invisible yet not entirely negligible weight is lifted. But it comes back, and every time, you wonder why you haven’t done enough. How have you not come to terms with yourself by this point? Why can’t you remember details or follow steps or do… anything?

On one hand, you’re driven by fear and a lifetime of not asking questions because of it. On the other, there’s something darker and more volatile festering. It’s the shortcuts, the quickest ways out, the bluffs you can count on because you know there’ll be no follow-up. It’s the backdoor brags jammed into conversations and the behavioural ticks you’ve invented over the years to try to blend in, tested in a range of social circles like subliminal test screenings to an unknown audience. A range of casual and malicious pathways are calculated in each and every deployment like a ballistic missile.

This is no way to talk to people.

Or to yourself.

You don't learn, because you never learned to learn properly, and the same goes for thinking. You were stunted so early in you’re development, going down the wrong hall or falling behind everyone else in line so many times, that the final product is now alien, an alternative version of a person communicating with others that isn’t quite human but passable enough (emphasis on passable). The A.T. fields are up, and you have no cool, two-pronged spear.

You have the foresight to recognise these problems, but no will to reckon with them. You’ve learned how to delicately articulate thought in the written word more so than practising speech in real life, because outside your house, actions are where you hit a wall. Because where the real work is done, and you’d rather not be there if you have a choice. You get on with it and get better, but talking about getting better is exhausting. Is the improvement there, just hidden under all the discussions, the talking, the padding for time?

You don’t know.

It takes so much energy to ponder this for minutes at a time, sometimes hours, but no longer, luckily, for days or weeks. It takes more energy to write about it, tossing up between how much self-deprecation should go there, how much levity should go here, where to put all the flavour or winks or polite jabs. It is beyond tiring and excruciatingly lonely to play this time-travelling wizard of loneliness rewinding the lowest hits on repeat.

But I won’t be exhausted by the weight of the hyper-sensitive, incessant self-critiques, nor the predictable happy endings I get at the realisation I just have to keep going. It happens every time. This pattern is cruel and unrelenting, yet the lows are only raised again by the indomitable highs. Perhaps it’s why I enjoy stories and themes about cycles, how they are perpetuated and broken, whether it’s a product bound by the generational or traumatic or both.

I give major flak to the cliche human spirit because, somehow, time and again, I am convinced by the stupid, unwavering spirit. The posters and propaganda in all their forms. That you can build something, be pushed over, and start again with newfound knowledge and perspective. I may not feel like I possess either, but the change is evident whether in the action or inaction, the written or spoken.

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