february 2, 2025
promises to myself
i’m running out of places to place this anger and that includes this page. no, i mean, this page is always here, but these days, i am so fucking puzzled and confused inside myself – what any of this is about, and why it is always so self policing and tangled. i mean, i am supposed to not identify with the pain and sit with it as it arises and reaches its tentacles around my neck and rises like lava through my throat and threatens to squeeze, and erupt, and choke, i am supposed to sit with it and observe it and let it rise and let it fall, like i would if i was a child. except i don’t think i was one of those kids either, you know. did my eight year old self know she had to lock herself in her room and learn to speak to a diary instead? did she know there was a reason her birthday wish that year was for a cool new purple diary that had a lock and key feature? did she learn to hide it all, or was she forced to? i am always begging people to see my pain, and they are always walking past it like strangers commuting somewhere, walking coldly past that man who sits there with his cardboard sign every day and probably repeats the same four words ten thousand times a day. spare any change please? is it a prayer if no one hears it? is it a chant if it is a consequence of the world, and all it did to him? does God speak a language, and if so, does spare - any - change - sound different to nam myoho renge kyo? when you’re desperate enough, isn’t everything a sound? when you’re desperate enough, wasn’t my screaming a prayer? humility. humility, i think, must be the difference. that i am on my knees not banging my fists for meaning and answers and for things to get better NOW but i am on my knees because i know i am finally, at the end of all this, helpless. i am succumbing, knees bruised, chest empty, body lifeless, to all i cannot know. all i cannot make happen, all i cannot do here, all i cannot change of people, all i cannot change in myself, all these cycles repeating, all this ache i allow, all this, all this, all this, i am succumbing. i have finished something, but i don’t know what. it feels like a marathon, except i was not running towards something, but away from it. away from this feeling that keeps arising inside me over and over and over and over again and does not let go. away from all the monsters that i assign and blame for creating this feeling for me, for making it happen, for being new reasons why, i am always tearing at the seams. i am always begging, i am always searching, i am always dying – and not in the oblivious and humane death-is-always-around-the-corner way, but in the this-feels-like-death, or what i imagine it to feel like. dying must be more peaceful than this feeling, i reckon – it is too dramatic and intense, like i have looked up the definition of it in the dictionary or learnt of its quality from some james bond movie, or Parasite. the faces they make when they’re stabbing and being stabbed, their eyes screaming in terror before the sound travels to their mouth, that is what i feel like sitting in the back of this coffee shop, where they tell me i look fine. i look fine because i have learnt to be fine inside a world that could never handle me any other way. i look fine because no one has met me inside my pain because they have not met themselves inside theirs. i look fine because every word that has come out of every person’s mouth has either been the most predictable statement known to mankind, or an even more predictable consequence of what i know of them as a person. anyway, i am identifying with the pain again, and i can see Pema Chodron’s tiny book glaring me down. it is no good to be half here – half in this ego entity and material nonsense – and half there – in the realms where nothing matters and there is only peace. but as Symone reminded me – everyone is a spiritual being – and she is right. when i ask myself what i am supposed to then do in this life – to survive amongst what is so caught up in nothingness – i hear the question of how i would have wanted someone to treat me. i don’t have an answer, and maybe that’s the point. with love. i dont fucking want to, sometimes, but i am reminded that that is the cause of all war and violence in the world – that bitterness and poison that finds its seed inside some wrongdoing, some unresolved sense of justice, all this vengefulness that only exists in egoic matters. i never know whether pain sits in the ego or in the spirit, or whether it is constantly swimming between the two, flinging itself between body and mind. i never know whether the ego and spirit exist as separate entities, or whether i am accustomed – or addicted – to dividing myself in two. it’s funny that my reason to continue living on this earth is a sentence, or the possibility that it might emerge. and maybe two or three humans, but that is guilt, and guilt is no good. on the bright side, i am getting better at sitting in the space behind the space behind all my thoughts. i want a pat on the back for it, but i dont know if that’s allowed. i think i am rambling because i don’t want to return to the real world, all that exists outside this device, but that is a separate point. i am getting better at accessing that space, and unfortunately, it doesn’t quite feel blissful as david lynch and all those meditation fans claim – it feels empty. but i suppose it feels empty as in neutral – as in nothingness – as in emptiness – and not emptied out – as in hollow – as in tired – as in absent of hope – and that is good. i want to get to the part where this becomes a sustainable way to live, not some punishment only i and poor old i am enduring. i want to get to the part where i am okay inside it, and not constantly departing, when i encounter all these people, that make me want to scream. it is completely antithetical to be with them and to be here – or at least it seems that way. for example, they are always telling me i should show them more of my pain, so they can believe it exists. what a fucking insane concept, and how reflective of their inability, to exert a little effort, to see a human as a human. i am not participating in this game, i refuse. i refuse to perform humanity in some borrowed televised way so they can believe it exists. i refuse to compensate for their addictions to some wretched hierarchy in which i am on some level where i do not need love – it is only symbolic of how deep in the trenches we really are, as a people. how deeply embedded we are inside a reality that concedes the resource of compassion only to those that appear desperately in need of it, if that. anyway, i am always going in circles in this logic because it’s not like the recognition of my humanity will resolve the fact that they will not act from compassion at all. we are busy working, you see. we are entering relationships and relying on them as crutches, as responses to some crippling that took place a long time ago. we are confusing romance for compassion, or mistaking it as its only tangible messenger. we are always holding only as much as we are able to hold, and most people, i’m afraid, cannot hold very much at all. we are always failing, and always blaming, and always looking for this enemy out there, when it lives inside. i like being reminded of that, though. that i am also the enemy, and we are all imperfectly addicted to something here, even if that is, in the end, our own pain. i just don’t know how to anchor in some higher plane when i must still live in this world, and somehow live without despair. i just don’t know how to live with this deep and aching loneliness, that i sense may never get resolved. i just don’t know how to stop resisting the fact that it may never get resolved, and be prepared to be alone without despair. the ache that i have always hidden inside me is my quiet desperation for love, but i am told, time and time again, that i am it. i don’t feel like it. i feel dirty, and i feel alone, and i feel abandoned, i feel abandoned, i feel abandoned. i have always felt abandoned, from the day i bought that cool purple diary, and maybe before i learnt to write. i don’t know who i was before i learnt to write, but the thought makes me cry. i don’t know who i was when i was just a ball of flesh with no language to express my existence into form. with no means to make valid this experience, to infuse it with validity, to inject it with all that the world had no capacity or desire to. to put into words, in broken handwriting, everything the world had already begun to reject in me, at age six. to put into words, all it still rejects, when i am thirty. i must make sure i still exist. i must make sure i have a place here, even if it is shaped only like me.
when i stop writing the same question arises every single time. why was i put on this path? this is where the Knowledge of the Past begins to elbow itself into the present moment, and bring a few faces with it. as a pleasant cherry on top, i am constantly chased by the reminder that this is not who people know of me, this is not the box they have put me inside, this is not the kind of dissonance that is welcome in this world, let alone in a woman. i am constantly reminded that i have walked for fifteen years with a mask on my face, inside a body that was true to what it knew at the time, but false to almost everything else. i am constantly reminded that i am still wearing this mask, in some way, it is just less thick, and therefore less sturdy, than the one prior. i am still wearing this costume like a fucking clown, i am still hiding everything i know to be true, and in moments like this, it is obvious why. i cannot trust the world to care for the parts of me i care for the most. the world had, in a sense, shown me its true colours, and i could not let it ruin the one thing that helped me find a quiet corner inside it, and live. i can hear their voices saying it should not matter what they think – they’re so good with platitudes, these people – but i know they do not understand even this. they are always telling me what to do, and never embodying anything i admire. they are always giving me instructions, when i am sick and tired of it all. i am still learning how to survive inside my own coat, and need nothing else. i am still learning how to release this fragile animal into the world, when everyone is a damn disguised poacher, thirsty to kill, all they cannot handle, all they must try and label and understand and force into something or nothing or good or bad so they can survive. i don’t want to participate in this world, and how thinly it hangs on to meaning. i don’t want to participate in this world, and its dearth of love. the only time i feel this sentence quivering in its sanctity, or trueness, is when i am at the homeless shelter, or an old age home, or talking to the auto guy at home, and he is kind without volition. the only time i doubt my own coldness is when i acknowledge that a part of my path has been walking in the coldest places of them all. i doubt all my theories when i see a baby, or toddler, or the tenderness of a stranger. i doubt it all when i realise it is my attachment to the world i claim to abhor that is causing all this suffering at all. it is then i realise i am standing on two floating ice bergs on some ocean that will probably disappear, and i am straddling love and hate, and faced with a choice. it is then i realise i must stop seeking a prize for continuing to choose love in a world i feel hated by. it is then i realise i must count the small ways it still loves me too, and not so easily forget. even if it is one or two, i must remind myself love does not exist in quantity or entity or shape or some countable state – it is a quality, it is an essence, it is a shapeless elixir that is always there. that one instance of love might be powerful enough to drown a lifetime of everything that has existed opposing it. i hate acknowledging that people have tried their best to love me, when it has been so far from enough. when it has never reached me, when it has always felt superficial and transactional, when it has always felt diminishing and dehumanising more than it has felt loving or calm. i hate acknowledging that people have tried their best with what they had, to express what they could with what they knew at the time. i hate acknowledging that there are still many people like me in this world, who have no salvation for this pain. both those truths are connected, but they make me feel heavy. i still have not found meaning inside myself, because i am still so ruled by the rules outside me, and not the workings of what is within. i still feel mad, and angry, and alone, and searching, and resentful at this path. spirituality defies all the world’s logic, because it does not offer consolation in my tantrums. it does not offer me a prize that is external, it does not give me very specific answers that apply perfectly to my situation, it does not talk back to me at all. it escapes all my desire to control and be rewarded, and that feels like my flesh is being pulled apart like meat on the bone, except unready. it does not feel very loving, because i am still entering it the only way i know: lacking love, and desperate for it. it does not feel very satisfying, because all the answers are within. it does not feel very satisfying, because there might not be a prize at the end, or any justice at all. it unsettles me so violently to confront that all this suffering just is. it unsettles me so deeply to know i must release it all.
