jem on jém

[ENTRY 021]

terminal\user\jem\journal

I spent today quietly performing a substantial handful of tasks. In essence, I liken the day’s activities to digital housekeeping. In past entries, I’ve described this sort of thing to the effect of a waste of my time – a checklist that doesn’t take up real space or provide any real feeling of proper accomplishment. But in fairness, those words I used came from a place less interested in genuine self-criticism, more in favour of indulging in indiscriminate antagonism.

Tonight, as I write, I look back at the day gone, my room illuminated by the page and by soft and inexpensive Ikea maps in opposite corners. I've been sitting with how quiet and productive, but more importantly, stress-free, my past week has been. It pales in comparison to how I entered last month.

Being at the beck and call of anyone, especially family, is something I am no stranger to, and it opens a pocket dimension of uneasy feelings I snap back into seamlessly. It’s a response shaped by experiences that bring out my worst tendencies: the anxiety, the worrying, the waiting for someone to get back, the thinking of executive decisions I’ll have to make because the worst person equipped to make the calls now suddenly has to make the calls…

What takes the cake is doing this alone. How thankless the job is after the fact, when the dust has settled, is something I don’t mind. But I ruminate on it on occasion as time goes on.

As I get older, I see the places where I am worn from the least-best to worst moments of my life and I understand why I am the way that I am quite easily. It’s from this self introspection that I can infer what others likely go through, and I think it contributes to how I find my tribe in this life. I can't possibly sense a deep pain in others or guess with unbelievably accurate precision how someone has turned out the way they have all the time. It's an impossible fantasy to possess that level of extreme empathy and I'm no mind reader. But I think, in spite of how the worst parts of myself come out, there is good that escapes to the surface, and the best people I know miraculously seem to gravitate to the latter.

I’m my own worst critic, the architect of my own suffering, whatever, but I’ve learned I cannot control people, no matter how quietly I try to discreetly manipulate the situation to make myself the most flattering, suitable, or palatable version of myself.

‘I want so desperately to not make anyone uncomfortable’ has been running in circulation across my mind palace trades as of late. I think it means well, and honestly, it's not the worst mantra I could abide by. But where I find myself now, I don’t think good intentions are something I can quietly advertise to myself and expect others to instantly understand through just one conversation or interaction. I wear statements like this around carefully, as if wearing the magic key to knowing me deeply around my neck. It doesn’t feel natural or genuine any more. It never was, nor was it meant to be an exercise in some sort of subliminal messaging that means well.

Not to get all Daniel Plainview when I say there’s a competition in me, not to such extremes, but I think there exists versions of myself in a relay race in perpetuity, all gaining my attention or control of my burdens or whatever the fuck is passed on to new me’s. A stupid analogy for analogy's sake, really, but a visual nonetheless that paints a picture. I don’t know who’s winning right now, and truthfully, I stopped caring about that a while ago.

I don’t know what a good entry is or what it’s supposed to be, because that’s ultimately up to whatever I am currently feeling at the moment. I am endlessly self-critical and glad to be writing. No matter how repulsed or delighted by the words I write and the time I allocate to them, I’ve learned the feelings it gives me, for better or worse, are important for understanding myself.

Paragraphs upon paragraphs of reflection hold endless misshapen keys to respectively misshapen boxes I earn from completing personal development milestones. Embarrassing comparison to game content progression aside, like the aforementioned relay analogy, it’s just a tool for better understanding. There’s no shame in plainly stating the plain with a little flavour, dickhead.

I feel I’m enough for tonight and in general.

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