jem on jém

[ENTRY 015]

terminal\user\jem\journal

It’s self-introspection and critical analysis time. A director’s cut for Entry 14, for fun, of course! Not for padding. Good god, no…

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.

Not a terrible start. Writing in the second-person came very late in the process, and while I love the idea on some level, I think you can tell it was thrown in. Pulling back the curtain on the weekly rituals (minute clerical work, really) I perform would likely sound more interesting were it the only drop in a sea of self-awareness.

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.

I’m as subtle as being battered upside the skull by a tire iron, but it’s a fun challenge trying to convey how aware I am of the awareness. Surely it won’t become tired and eat itself to death.

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

I did that for real, actually. Only after I had written it, of course. So then I wouldn’t be lying.

‘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.’

I can’t help but feel this is giving lines of dialogue spoken in an incredibly linear video game dream sequence, where the young adult protagonist moves through angsty ghost memories that wither away when you walk through them. Maybe they pause every five seconds to pick up an item of sentimental value, before explaining aloud and to themselves the precise nature of said item's sentimental value. Side note: I love the colour of lightskyblue I’ve chosen for quotes, which may or may not have been the single strongest contributing factor to its sudden recent usage.

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

Correct.

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.

I almost get into the crux here of how unbearable it feels to not know, and do nothing about not knowing. How many times can I be merciful to myself? How many times can I remove the bondage that I’ve mastered the art of tying a dozen times over, while I keep on keeping on? God, you’re relentless.

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?

That’s what I’m saying!

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.

I sound like a supervillain. It’s fun to write as my own worst critic, figuring out how I can inflict the most pain by malevolently recounting pieces of my own lore. Not to stir the pot of self-pity but to keep me on my toes. Does it work? Maybe.

This is no way to talk to people.

But you do.

Or to yourself.

But you have.

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.

This was partly inspired by that one Breaking Bad scene, minus the comedic playfulness. Trying to distil where and how exactly I went wrong (for lack of a better term) is challenging. How can I condense an entire life lived inexperienced and driven by fear into something easily packable into a handful of sentences? The answer, I guess, is just to say that, and compare myself to an alien. I’m realising that may be where the Evangelion reference subconsciously originated from, but that doesn’t make it feel less well integrated into the thought process.

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?

More acknowledgements acknowledging acknowledgements. At the time, I thought I was cooking here. It’s more plainly stated than something dressier and composed with more time given. It makes me wonder what I could achieve if I ‘locked the fuck in,’ as it were. If I can write something passable, even for myself, in this amount of time, what could I do with more than a day? Probably something marginally more substantial. And good.

You don’t know.

Brother.

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.

Nice, not-so-subtle ripping off what I later realised was a Nathan for You bit. Putting into words what it takes to put into words is alleviating because I dream in my heart of hearts that it can reach out to someone and provide understanding. To wave my qualifications around and say, 'Hey, I experience a great deal too. Please get me. Understand me better than I could ever explain when face to face. Wait, where’re you going?’

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.

Finally, the turn. Here’s hoping I signposted it well enough with the transition to first person (subtlety of a sledgehammer, yadda yadda). It’s always lame at first to arrive at this point, and I yap on enough about the sentiment an exorbitant amount. You get it, they get it, move on. This is cyclical, repetitive, expected. That is the nature of it all. It’s also a way to plug a special interest in some of my favourite genres of storytelling.

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.

Masterful gambit of a conclusion paragraph. No clever or concise reincorporation of ideas introduced earlier. Just bold rawdogging of something that sounds conclusive. But undeniably written with feeling. Such a whirlwind of emotions, being relatively down in the dumps at the time of writing this last entry, only to have come full circle by the end of it with an optimistic outlook.

788 new words in total. All in all, I’d give this entry a [redacted] out of [redacted]. It doesn’t matter to me, ultimately. It’s a rock to get over amongst other misshapen rocks, iron deposits, stalactites, moss… whatever!

One get out of jail free card spent, many others in the future to dispense when I feel out of ideas.

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