& the experience is the point

{✁✆🖬❑}, I don't remember what the date and time is, &

time is a flat circle right? No matter where I go I can't escape events from 3 years ago and I'm stuck in a loop. Right? 3 years later I'm doing better than ever but there's still this primordial oil that's coating my arms and legs. It makes everything so heavy, I don't know what will happen and I don't know how to get it off. I've tried genuineness, postironic fervour, dogmatic attempts at cruelty, and it doesn't come off. I've tried burning it all off in hopes I can just get out from the weight of it all for just a single, fleeting second, but it sticks to me like the vantablack of any winter night. I miss the winter, it was easy to just exist in hermitic isolation. I've been off my mood stabilizers for 3 to 4 months, but it runs deeper than that. It's absurd, but it does. This isn't just my disorder, I've known exactly what that feels like. I am starting to gain the verbiage to describe it in puzzle pieces.



Today someone emerged from the desert of the past, seemingly unscathed. Wiser, but still the same person at their core. I know they won't read this so I speak with my tongue coiled in the shape of a key. Having someone just come back and having everything be fine is completely antithetical to everything. It's impossible and I've been short circuted ever since. Whenever I was left alone, it was permanent. That's the worldview I've cultivated for a long time; that no matter what, people will leave you after you stumble one too many times, say the wrong thing at a dinner party that gets the contents of a shotglass thrown at you, piss off the wrong hypervigilant, hyperonline person, or maybe you just sneezed on the bus causing a comical series of events that gets you stabbed in an alleyway five minutes later.

It's pathetic, it's paranoid, it's weak, but I don't know how much I exude this weakness on a public stage. Why would you? The world we exist in now is even more cruel than the one we were raised and accustomed to. Everything is on all the time and the second you position yourself as a figure who is vulnerable online you get eviscerated. I often get people coming into my replies and even one e-mail discussing the 'shifting tides' which are perpetually on the horizon, people are kinder, more understanding, willing to forgive, repair, and understanding the dregs that remain and how to combat them, but how much of this is really true? Sure, some individuals do snap out of it, including myself and some people in my immediate vicinity at different periods over the years, but on a *broader* scale? God, no. My guestbook still gets spammed, I still get anons. Even in the event where people are literally giving me their ip to have the opportunity to fuck with me, they persist. Perhaps out of some sort of understanding that people like me don't hit back out of fear. If you fight back you're either bringing up old dirt that has the chance to push more people towards aggressing you, or being an asshole who can't take the heat. So you just absorb, absorb, absorb.



It feels like a downward spiral, which I suppose it is, it isn't sustainable, but more importantly it affects how you see everyone. Will person A, B, C, so on and so forth, become the next person to wreak havoc over my life? Is the person I'm sleeping next to going to try and squeeze the life out of me with a digital chokehold 5 years down the line? Is this stranger who noticed me a person, or simply another sockpuppet? You don't see people anymore, you see clocks. Perpetually ticking down to some sort of doomsday event that never comes, always a few seconds to midnight, right before it all explodes in your face. And you're surrounded by them, dizzy, succumbing to constant ticking as the people coming to hug and comfort you suddenly appear like a hallucinated suicide bomber. In physical capacities it's easier to shake off, but unless you are so intimately close to someone that their atoms might as well be yours, that constant hum of danger is ringing in your ears.

I almost snapped out of this once, almost, two years after everything blew up, wandering around the digital landscapes, trying to find a place that I felt like 'fit'. Kind voices, gentle faces were ones I met, but nothing lasted, not for the reason I percieved I think. It's so easy to accept the prophecy you lay out for yourself. Friends simply vanished without a trace. Something happened, it was all unavoidable and you can't go back, you can never go back. It's all schizophrenic isolation, none of it is genuinely real. In reality, you're an illusionist on stage, performing the show you've written for yourself, for everyone to see. When things explode by virtue of the walls you've built up, cracking under the pressure of maintaining a constant lack of vulnerability. It was inevitable for things to just fall apart. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20 but how do you turn it off? You can't just decide to stop being a paranoiac. You can't just go back and repair what was left behind, right?



Some people are much better at this than I am, able to reflect and speak honestly as if it could just slide off the tongue, but there's that inherent inability to communicate those feelings in my psyche. It's a lot easier to just sit and ruminate, try to communicate through art, psychic emissions, other futile endeavours. This is one of them, as if most keep up with this blog. I cared a lot about people but I failed to show it. I hung on the shoestrings of people I cared about like an anxious refrain, slipping off as I had no place to learn to love. Maybe I should process that. Is this processing it? I don't like to think so far ahead or pat myself on the back. I wish I knew the secret of the world. The way I could remain in touch with all those people.



All of them are still in my life, to some extent, but it's like an organ vanishing suddenly on you, a kidney failing. I might operate still, the corpus survives but all of the little networks and tiny vessels die off and it all becomes numb, nothing jolts it back to life, not of their fault, but of my own. I watch every attempt to reconnect and kick what was there back to life from a labyrinth of my own making, responding coldly or awkwardly, sometimes not at all. I see how it affects people and I hate it, I want to have control over my own mind and body again and stop having it be up to the whims of a person who left my life 3 years ago. Connections are carved into my mind and much of that is my own inability to fully unravel them. Knotted red string defines my life, and the only way to change that is to grasp that.



It never feels good when you hurt people, but it's easy to justify. Simply writing off everyone as another person who simply doesn't know the nature of the world, treating everyone like a newfag, veiling everything in a r eference to avoid tearing down that wall. But it eats at you, progressively, I've felt more and more tired with the way the world works. Sure, sometimes I see a kid or someone who maybe doesn't understand how to read the room and it frustrates me, but to take those feelings as justification to avoid further connection, to continue sapping a world of its wonder. I want things to be better than this. It can be better than this. I often take this broad, sweeping stance when I write on my blog, getting on a soapbox and calling for a restoration of some sort of lost community, lamenting the lack of connection in the modern web, projecting my view of reality outward as if it were something I could psychologically spread like infection. The truth of the matter is, many of these things are in history, maybe . It's not about outward colonization of dogma, maybe it's about putting in the effort to cultivate some of that wonder internally, and letting my connections and friendships be my own little world. As I write this, a user enters the chatroom and says, 'I'm glad my only followers are my friends' as I look back at roughly 2500 strangers staring back at me. It's not something I wanted. But maybe I can view it a little more positively. There's no performance without an audience, right?



But it's about starting small. I have a partner, that much is known by the all-seeing-eye of the panopticon that is total entertainment forever. She once said I carry myself so differently online, my tendency towards meanness, masking which just falls apart in person. How much my language softens in person, the gentleness with which I touch another person, both on a physical and emotional level. It used to be something shared with every facet of my existence. I am not a monster, nor am I a teacher, paraiah, victim, but as I stand, I'm a foreigner . My evocation of a sort of kinship with certain figures is well established. But I'm hiding behind another veiled reference again when I say that. It's difficult to express that alienation, the way in which you watch people naturally twitch when you present yourself, being viewed as a spectre, because that's the version of yourself that you've created. I never smile, when I send a message. I used to all the time. Maybe that's an unfolding of expositional abundance, but it's the truth, I miss it a lot.



Why type all this? Why dedicate so much time to it all? Maybe it's an attempt to get better. I can't perfectly reverse everything and come back fully formed, shot out of some emotional womb fully formed, matured, healed. We all embody an element of childishness in some way, no spirit so knowing and hardened that they could reject that side of them. I need to admit that more. I, not anyone else. I can have a wonderful life, if I make it wonderful. Out of all of the communities I've stumbled and fallen into, the writings of one person have probably affected me the most. I know a lot of people who felt the same way. I let down the most important one though. Maybe I'll admit that to her someday. All this, is a start. It's weird to draw people, supposed monoliths to my inability to foster meaningful connection that lasts, only to see that, in reality, they're examples of the hope that still exists in those relationships.

Some people are rea{ly amazing and can affect the way you see the world in wonderful ways. But you have to let them do }t. Sure, there are some bridges that never really can be repaired. But does that make you avoid walking entirely? It shouldn't. I know it shouldn't. You can always start a new chapter, rekindle something you snuffed out in the past. A little wonder and a lot of love can do amazing things, if you're vulnerable enough to let it in.

If I'm vulnerable enough to let it in.

I guess it's a start. If it ends up not working out, I'll just remember that the most important thing in the world is to love what you never see t