Stateless

Nights of Broken Lights and Darkened Paths

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I used to want to be a hero when I was younger. Someone who shines a light on those around me, allowing people to see the world and all its wonder as I have. To be able to find hope in the most dire of situations, to find the silver lining in the cloud of grey, to finally understand their worth and the worth they bring to others. Though there is nothing wrong with these lofty goals, wanting to make the world a better place, but I realized that heroes can only exist where there is danger and distress. Where the time and seasons fall hard, and waves wash over our heads, a hero is needed to be there to right the wrong and save the day. It’s the light that needs the dark to exist. The greatest gift to a hero would truly be a world where they are not necessary. It concerns me sometimes that the archetype of the hero presupposes their rarity. That their actions would not be commonplace. That other would not act when the need arises. We need those to carry that role for others as the world will not take care of them on their own. Though this is a bit of a ramble, what I’m trying to get at is that is that there is not enough action and care to go around, that certain people need to shoulder that burden uniquely. That the world is a dark place for many others and people crave the path forward. It’s a lost place, with people feeling like their are surrounded by thick fog, feeling their way through and hoping that each step they take they are not getting close to the edge of a cliff.

It’s been my experience, as of late, that there are so many people who’ve just lost their way. People who have been out into the world with the expectation of competency but no explanation of how they are supposed to proceed. That they see the world and their situation as dangerous, disenchanting, and disastrous. That the bell rings in the morning and dispair for the continuance of life of the sets in.

I understand this completely because I’ve been there. The world, at times, is a harsh and unforgiving place, which leaves no room to know where to go. It feels like we fall behind because this mismatched expectation gives us no understanding of direction or feeling as if there is no time to grow to meet the challenge. We are stuck in a cycle, hoping for someone to reach out and tell us that we will be okay or extend a hand in help. It’s so hard to push forward as we feel alone in the universe, just trying not to get too close to the edge.

I’ve recently, for better or worse, taken on the whole of mentor and teacher to some very unexpected people. People who ordinarily would be perfectly capable on their own, but their lives seem to have burdened them with unnecessary troubles. But as time has passed, I’ve become more acutely aware of all those around me who feel the same. These people want that light, that guide, to clear away the fog and give them some semblance of direction. It’s just within these systems that we live that give no real guidance in the path to take, so we cling to the familiar in the hopes that the path we have taken will eventually lead us to where we want to go.

It feels like a breakdown in the community in which these problems can be voiced and care can be provided. I feel sorry at times for those who I help because I know I’m not enough. I can try to be the light in the darkness, but sometimes I feel like I am but a mere candle flame among the sea. That I, though, can help illuminate the way, but may not be able to show them their direction or help them heal from their wrongs. I’m scared that the advice I give will hurt them, that I will lead them astray. that they will regret their time and for listening to a fool like me. I just hope that I can be a warm presence to them. That I can give them strength to stand on their own. That one day they won’t need me anymore because the love and care they need will be right there for them.

I don’t know if I’m enough on this broken street of mine, with flickering lights and overgrown paths. I will keep you safe, but your journey is your own. I just hope I can help you be more of yourself and remember your strength because I think there should be more of you in the world, too.

Somewhere I belong

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Linkin Park’s music filled the headphones during my youth. Being played on repeat to a crowd of one, their music was like a perfect whirlwind touching down into my life when the world felt chaotic, and a storm was exactly what I needed. The music themes of hurt, pain, and loneliness resonated with the depth of my desperate struggle to feel wanted in all the years I felt alone.

As I grew older, I found spaces that I felt were supportive and people who were willing to support me. The need to listen to Linkin Park went away, and that feeling of finding something new to sustain me grew. Years past as I made progress towards feeling whole, maybe by pushing aside these much more difficult feelings. I sometimes wondered if I was actually healing or just pushing away these sorrows and hurts to a more manageable place. What I didn’t expect with all my progress is that graduate school would uproot my comfort, uproot my hurt, and make me come face to face with my trauma when I still felt unready and unwilling. Though we do not get to choose the moments of our lives that need to deal with our problems, there were certainly better and worse moments. Even through the miracle that has been brought about by the most recent freedoms, I still feel drawn back into that darkness, drowned in difficulty, feeling alone and out of place.

Sometimes, my life feels like I’m still that kid, listening to that cathartic rock/hip-hop music, wondering when my time will come. When the doors open, when I feel welcomed into a place I was meant to be. When my talents, time, and presence are all seen as an asset rather than just existing in that space. I feel warmed by conversations and don’t feel paranoid about whether or not my comments are received positively. Maybe that is too much to ask from the world, but it’s so fundamental that it feels wrong to believe it should not exist.

This is my great fear for the next stage of my life. That I continue to feel this unease as I move into these spaces where I don’t belong and miss the opportunity to find a better place for me. That the uneasiness is not a feature of needing to learn or adapt but a much more fundamental impediment of my character. That I have gone all this way just to be unfit for the spaces I have striven for. After all these years, I’m still that kid wondering when my time will come, and I will find these places and people I am meant to be with. When I finally self-actualize and feel like I could contribute meaningfully. Places where I’m not constantly second-guessing myself because of this fear of ineptitude. Is this just how academics are meant to feel? If so, why would I want to put myself through this. If this is a sign I don’t belong, then why am I so afraid of doing something new.

Though I have moved to a better place and found friends I can rely on, I sometimes feel still like that lonely boy listening to Linkin Park, but maybe that will continue to be my motivation to find someplace better. Someplace I belong.

The Art of Change and Growth

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In times of great change, when the ground shakes and the skys buckle, do we say that all this is how it is intended to be? Do we believe the earth,3 after such torment, was always this way? We just needed time to discover some humble facet that, through time has gone overlooked. When mountains rise out of the sea and when great valleys are carved, do we believe that nature is just returning to itself? I say this as it makes me ponder the essence of change for ourselves: can we truly change, or is this journey of continual self-discovery?

I’ve just returned from a trip, one of those trips that I always promised myself I would go on, and I am endlessly happy that I did. I walked across farway lands, across fields, mountains, and forests; all for the purpose of finding something I had lost long ago.

I can recount this tale in its entirety, telling you about each step I walked and the road I crossed, but those are simply the mechanics of a much more magnificent journey. A journey of the spirit and the soul let to wander and heal.

You see upon this path for me laid a great many things, but most important of them was time. Time to process and debate all these little things that I had experienced through the past four years when I had felt like I had lost myself. Time made synonymousw with distance as each moment was a movement, and so as I was moving through the world so was I moving through these heavy thoughts and emotions.

I started with rediscovering love, allowing it to pour from my fingertips onto the land. To pervade my thoughts, words, and action. To imbue itself in a sense of care that I feel an outpouring of myself. Through love I felt full as I continued to give it away.

Then I thought about the idea of quality and meaning, these things that can not be readily measured by scale or stick. These pieces of ourselves become disregarded as those around us have difficulty writing down or calculating their metric. The idea of being good, is so amorphous and yet so vital to being human that we write books and tales about how to achieve it.

I experience the anger that I hid away, behind rocks and stones. It came out on the heated road, alone on the way as this even hotter frustration pushed it’s way to the surface. To be heard, to be seen, to be experienced, as it was meant to be.

I experience that healing, this breath of the world. A peace only achievable, I’m convinced, when you allow everything to flow through you. To allow the pettiness and grief to run its course so that way you can inhale the world and all of its wonder. It allowed me to let go and in doing so find myself.

In the finality of this journey, I was filled with all I could describe as life, vital, chi, and anima. This spirit of things made me thankful for existence, thankful for the time and all I have left of it. It made me thankful for my moments and wishful for the future. It gave me back to myself and this feeling of being whole.

So I ask this question: Did this trip change me or did I just become more of myself? Did these moments impact me or was this all just there in the first place. Did a mountain form or a valley manifest. Did the sea come knocking to shape my body just as the world? Changed irrevocably, though made better by its presence. For that, I don’t know, but I am nevertheless grateful.

Teetering

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Ronan Furuta

This post has been a long time coming. The idea for it has been sitting in the back of my mind for months as I’ve been attempting to deal with my own mental health in the wake of the pervasive shock to my system that has occurred since I’ve been in this stateless place. Though through the process of thinking through this post, the contents and contexts have changed, I think the feelings generally still apply.

When I was young, I hated the rides and roller coasters at theme parks and fairs as the idea of being taken around a metal contraption you had no control over seemed like a silly notion to a kid who never felt in control of his own life. So any time any of my family or friends wanted to ride a ride, I would walk through the lines with them until it came time to take your place in the wagon, cart, or wheel. At that point, I would simply walk out the exit. Everyone in line would try and convince me to stay, telling me how not scary it really was and if I were to just try and ride, I would like the experience. However, I knew this to be untrue as every ride up to this point felt like an excruciating experience, and making the ride taller and faster did not make relate to making the experience any better for me. So I would leave, and in those few moments of freedom, I would watch and wonder what the other people must have been experiencing being taken around by these giant machines.
At these parks, I become fascinated with one ride in particular, round up. This ride consisted of a spinning disk surrounded by metal fences, usually with beautiful blinking lights on the outside. Every time the ride stopped, new people would file in and find a spot, and then slowly, the disk would spin like a top. Up and down, left and right, round and round again, as people felt themselves pushed back into the fence without so much as a strap or buckle. I would watch people go around, unable to move as this large machine tilted and teetered back and forth. Until sometime later, the ride would slow and come to a stop before starting all over again. I wasn’t so much fascinated with the experience of the ride but the motion of the machine as it would bring people up and down with so much ease creating the illusion of excitement with every lift but never actually changing the experience of those who are riding it. It is in these times when I would stand there watching the blinking lights go round and round, what it would be like wondering what it would be like to just spin forever.

I never really put much thought into the ups and downs of my life other than the occasional consideration as to whether the inconsistent but frequent tumults stem from avoidable circumstances or actions. It wasn’t until the stacking of traumas and tragedies that it felt thought that my own world began to teeter uncontrollably. These high highs would be followed by low lows, each success followed promptly by a disappointment. This moving back and forth became heavy, and I began to become scared of spikes that would throw my world into chaos.

Truthfully it felt like someone had their hand on my head and would push it under the water, only to bring me up to catch my breath. I was swaying, spinning, and losing my footing. Each day became a chore, and each night a relief. Life became like walking through water, getting up on instinct rather than motivation.

I can tell you that I didn’t realize how much my mind was spinning round and round until I finally got some medicine that let it stand still. I didn’t know how pressure accumulated and built upon me, crushing my body and my hopes and dreams. It was then that it felt like I had lost myself, and it made me wonder why I tried so hard in the first place. I lost my way; the spinning made me lose sight of the ground and the sky, for it all to become a blur that some invisible force kept me down. Each teeter gave me hope but then promptly dashed it. Things I could normally handle began to stack higher, and the impossibility of banal tasks made me sink lower. When these dark thoughts began to pervade my mind and my feelings, all my actions that I felt out of control and I wanted to disappear. To hopefully be thrown for the ride and survive or at least to stop this misery.

I don’t know how to escape the ride or if the medicine will let me off. These pills I take scare me because of how well they work. Knowing some external force is making my body feel normal again. It makes me worried that I will be stuck with them, forever unable to be me on my own. Dependent on something else to stop the spinning. I feel like I’m on that round-up machine that is beginning to slow, hoping now that I have the power to make it to the end. I don’t know what else I may experience, but I know I’m not cured. I feel my body still be heavy but at least I feel strong enough at the moment to lift it. Through it all it still feels like I’m still going round and round, watching the world teeter and twirl, and wishing I was still that kid watching from the fence, wondering what it would be like to spin forever.

Hoping for Wishes and Wishing for Hope

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Snow by Pascal Campion

I don’t know how to speak to hope, with the words I put to the page never seeming enough. The only reason I want to speak to hope in the first place is that I’ve been thinking about hope, or the lack thereof, in both myself and the world around me. It’s like gravity pulling dreams and aspirations down to the ground and burying them beneath the soil. It’s like a force is speaking little messages to people, telling them not to hope or pray for wishes because wishes are for the lucky and hope is for the foolish.

But what is hope except for a wish not yet to come, a part of our heart speaks out so loudly that ask us to take a chance on the world and its wonders and believe that more is possible? Hope is what the architect sees before the building, the engineer sees before the machine. Hope is an extension of the dreams but… dangerous thinking that is, because to aspire to leave your neck out to get cleaved and those who forsake hope, survivors of the dream guillotine, don’t want to get hurt again.

I can understand this apprehension and this desire to abandon hope. As you get older the world continues to test the willingness to hope and more of your life feels as if it were to be a graveyard for dreams. Those who are lucky, seem to be blessed in some way by the universe to continue forward unimpeded, but the for the rest of us, it feels as if every day we spend climbing mountains.

I’ve lost hope in people and institutions while I’ve been living in this stateless place. Maybe I’ve been an idealist all this time because I’ve been fortunate enough to guard my heart and hope enough not to get ravaged by the hands of time. Now my heart lays exposed and bloodied by the experiences of the past few years, marred and marked about the failings of hope and effort. I’m sure there are some that will believe that the death of ideals and dreams will give way to a clearer view of reality. Those who believe that setting the bar low only provides a more accurate view of the universe. The people who call themselves realists have been beaten and broken by the cost of dreams, see the world as one broken place and that if they dare to dream that dreams would be dashed and only pain would persist.

Maybe this is why I can’t stop myself from caring because I stop caring about this world and others that I give way to the death of my dreaming. That if I lose all hope and persist entirely without the expectations of others or the future, all that would be left is a shell of myself who goes through the motions without an end in sight. That it’s this foolish hope about the change in the world, that someday we find can find a better way and my efforts mean something that keeps me looking forward and coming back to the table.

It’s hard though, to hope in a place that has done nothing but balks at my dreaming and my aspirations. To call only for persistence through extraordinary circumstances as a solution. To feel isolated, alone, and not to be taken seriously. I can understand why I have so much hurt with hope because hope is the knife that continues to make me bleed. It’s the belief that things will get better here and that all my experiences have been a string of bad luck and not the result of my failings. Hope has me believe that the future is calling, and as long as I work towards it, things may go my way. It’s hard to continue to be as I feel hope as I experience the cleave of dream guillotine regularly. At times it feels as if these people and places are avatars of the universe acting like an executioner of my dreams.

I know the power of hope, though small at times, keeps me persisting ever longer with the belief that my continued progress will get me to eventually meet my dreams. I haven’t given up but man… it’s been hard, and at times I find myself hoping for wishes and wishing for hope.

More Morose than Most

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Moon Sea – Sun Kai

It’s difficult, this wandering mind that speaks of despair and death followed by feelings that prance and plague the heart and soul with solemn thoughts and wicked words. It is the invasive conceptions of a traumatized mind that form an inescapable umbra casting shadows in the light and swallowing hope whole. It is cruel premonitions of a life steeped in inadequacy that encroach like a predator starved for prey, slowly and with great care, only to strike right at my throat, choking me with metaphor and simile until I feel myself grasping for breath. I fear these moments because it leads me to believe the floodgates on my feelings have been loosed, and that I will forever feel that dreams of death will always taste a little sweet.

It scares me late at night or worse, during the day when I feel this crippling sense of lowness. This feeling that through all my toil, I am unequivocally bound for a life of ephemeral mediocrity followed but the subsequent oblivion of being forgotten. It paralyzes me, drowning me in this waking nightmare about a time that has never come and still yet never may be. The visions appear to me in the visage of a well-worn memory, as if to be assured premonitions warning me about the future that is to come. It sours my mood and makes me believe fate is a foe insurmountable.

It speaks to these insecurities of mine that those around me never put me in their mind. That conversations are short, and feelings are even shorter. That I am minuscule and momentary to the experience of those who are meant to serve as compatriots for a time on spaceship earth. It makes me read between the lines and question all statements. To take every action, movement, song, and verse as evidence of my accusatory paranoia. Though I override these thoughts and beliefs, I grow weary of fighting with myself to come home exhausted and unable to sleep.

It’s a menagerie of experiences that culminate to inexorable episode of multitudes of meloncoly. I try to see with eyes unclouded, but wounds in my heart remind me that this place I exist may never be as I want to see it. I have become attuned to my world, and I find it darker than the halls path I walk at night. This cold place makes this feeling echo loud and makes the noose tighten slightly around my dream.

These feelings come in ways and waves that I don’t know how to fend. I may have let too much in to be free of these feelings for the rest of my life. For now, I try and rest and write my way through it in hopes that by the time the morning comes that I can once again start again.

The Hate In Healing

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Failed Work – Dino

I hate this.

This continued conversation I come back to. Taking this meta-focused approach of writing about how painful the writing process become and to wearily replete the page with a sincere apology for the indiscretion of not arriving sooner.

I hate this is the only way I know how to return to this process though my brain fills to the brim with words left unsaid. My hands freeze now every time I return to writing, be it personal or professional, this feeling of impending emotion begins to overtake the reminiscent pleasure I used to receive from putting my hands to the keys. It feels strange as if I am faced with an invisible wall that I am scared to touch because it will hurt me, or that when looking at the page that some invisible hands begin to squeeze my heart.

I hate them for all this pain and strife I’ve encountered as a result the trauma they have inflicted upon me. This inability to escape from this shadow they have placed me under, no matter how illogical this may be.

And I hate myself for letting these wounds seep in deep and scar because of my fear, doubt, and pain. I speak to healing but never allow myself the space to return.

It’s been difficult because every time I don’t quite make it to putting my thoughts on the page as it adds one more to my list of failures. The wall of returning becomes greater and greater until I stand before mountains made of the mind. To speak of being able to do and then looking to the mountain I need to climb and I am disheartened.

Though I return to the space of needing to be compassionate to myself. Just like the act of physical therapy or attempting to get strong, the expectation that I should return from a prolonged break or hurt without the need to build back this muscle slowly is problematic. Though this may seem simple and obvious to some, the practice of it is harder than it seems.

What I need to do this slow again, and find myself in the words that used to call for me. Spend time but be okay with retreating a few paces to give me the space to grow again. I need to heal and more fully acknowledge the effect of the wound on my heart. “Start slow”, I have to tell myself, “but be consistent”. It’s okay to write a little as much as it’s okay to write a lot. Just be consistent, and remember your audience, me.

I hope then I can find that solace in these words and upset the upset in my heart. For now, it’s just a step, and one small step, one after another, and I will find myself in having traveled to where I want to be in no time. Just keep walking.

Asura Instinct

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You have to forgive me, for I’m using words and phrases for which I only have a tentative understanding of the complexity, history, and significance to describe, most likely poorly, my own experience. To be fully transparent, it’s because of this naive understanding that I can, in any way, describe my feelings sensibly. I’m to co-opting these words and phrases, not to describe these borrowed concepts in any negative light but to illuminate these emotions which I can’t readily discern otherwise.

Begin

You can’t hold a flame in your hands. – Auroradiation

It’s a fury in my chest, a fury that arises from the seething fire of the accumulated stress and pressure of my everyday life. A fury without direction, coursing through my body like boiling water, scorching my veins and arteries and wanting me to turn everything back to black. It strains my muscles, my mind, my flesh with an untempered ferocity that asks to destroy, to upend, to dismantle, and to reduce everything back down to its component parts. It’s a frustration with my circumstances that calls for me to rip and tear apart everything, but most of all destroy some foundation of myself.

These destructive impulses call so loudly for destruction, like being opposed to creation in its purest form. The desire or instinct to bring it all down to nothing – that in my mind have named the Asura instinct. This idea of being opposed to heaven, to creation, to everything that sentient existence convenes upon us. To raze towers and seas. To bring mountains low and us even lower.

This Asura Instinct on the surface appears to be this overwhelming negative impulse, because how could these feelings of wanton destruction bring about anything good? But it’s because of this desire to destroy that I understand the true need, the need for change and control. That my life in some ways is not working. That this pressure begins to build and build until the whole system feels like it’s going to come down. This directionless fire and fury in my veins serve then as the power to change, to dismantle systems and build them anew for myself and my future.

It reminds of the three principal gods of Hinduism and the cycle they foretell through their role and existence, the creator, the preserver, and the destroyer. All three serve an important purpose and each role is seen as essential for the process of life and reincarnation. Destruction and death are all part of this cycle because without destruction we have nothing to create, and without destruction, we have nothing to preserve. It is true then without destruction we cannot fully be.

It’s this fury in my veins that tells me that something has to change, that sadness and frustration are, too, the part of this journey. That all things must end no matter how much I fear the end and how much this fear paralyzes me. I’m scared of the destruction because of what will happen when I can no longer hold onto something in my arms so tightly. That I have to let go and say my goodbyes wholeheartedly. That it’s okay for it to disappate and no longer return. That it’s okay that the permanent state of a thing could be in both its ephemeralness and its finality.

It’s this Asura instinct, the fire within my veins that I know that I need to complete the cycle of change and growth. That the wave has to return to the shore. That projects and problems must see an end, and in their end, they may not be perfect but they may be perfect because they end.

It’s acknowledging this Asura Instinct, my need for destruction, that I know change needs to happen and that I must let it. I must let things end so they can begin anew. I must let go so I have the opportunity to hold. It’s through this destruction that I know that I can truly live at all. It’s through this destruction that I can finally be me.

The Art of Letting Go

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余熱 – あをじ

It was because of a conversation that I had recently, a conversation about addressing a progressively troublesome tribulation that has made a reappearance, that made me realize it. That I’m having trouble letting go. That in my mind and heart I am still living in this space of trauma response. It was made more clear when the other person caught wind of this and asked a simple question “What is it that you want?”.

Resolution.

At the time I couldn’t put this concept into words. I attempted to throw together scenarios that I felt would uplift the mood and bandage the hurt that occurred. It wasn’t until reflecting later that I found it. Through everything going on, I still don’t feel resolved at the original transgression. I am living in a wounded state, letting the hurt begin to scare but never close. Always in remembrance to ensure that I remain ever vigilant for a potential hurt to come.

It makes me frustrated to know that this pain still circulates through me, to what benefit does it hold other than to make me fear each passing week and to remain on guard for the potential surge in negative feedback. This is no way to live.

I know that this part within me wants justice, or to feel a sense of fairness. That the transgression was, in some ways, acknowledged and accounted for. That the cosmic scales would be tipped in a noticeable way that I can feel that the pain and anguish is the cost for something more that I want. I want this knowing that the universe doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t give you something just because you may believe you are due. I turned this situation into a large lesson on life but these experiences are continually pieces of wisdom that I wished I could learn some other way.

This resolution has to come from within but I don’t where to even start. Where to begin to let go and leave the rest of these feelings behind. For now, I will settle for an acknowledgment within myself that something needs to change and that if I don’t desire to change it then I won’t be able to truly heal.

A Torent of Wind and Rain

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Near and Far by まかろんＫ

A wailing torrent of wind and water crashes upon my shoulders. The path below becomes unsteady as water mixes with soil and stone. I feel my feet slipping, my body screaming out in pain as I am pushed down by the storm. I want to stay down, stay on my knees to bandage my hands and feet and rest but I know I can’t stop because if I stop I may never get back up again. Sitting under the rain as it hit my face I wonder why I do this at all if the trail guiding me up the mountain has become is so uneasy and treacherous.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, I am afraid to say that it won’t be the last. This instance though, I have been disabused of the notion that my relationships to this journey, at least for the moment, won’t always be in some sense attempting to placate a higher authority. An authority that, in many ways, does not seek to understand but dictate the journey which I am on. One more satiated by the milestones reached rather than the climb itself. I don’t fault them for that as their progress is invariably tied to these milestones, but I do question the method in which they have sought to pursue them. To weigh me down with stacks of rods and weights and tell me to achieve without giving me much guidance as to what it is that I am attempting to achieve or how I should get there. So then it becomes unsurprising that at some point I will fall short of these goals and ultimately disappoint.

Failure is built into this system as well as paranoia as I attempt to create stability from ambiguity. It makes me realize how much I’m afraid of the lash that has left these scars so saliently on my body. I wonder when they will heal but never give the time or the energy to do. I keep myself just keep far enough ahead so the punishment doesn’t ring against my skin or continue to scar up my heart.

I’ve become afraid. Afraid of words and their delivery as it opens myself up to this unanswerable criticism which is unsustainably lacking of any true solution to the problem it seeks to criticize. I have seen the darkness and the void, the chaos which lies beneath, and attempted to quell it using time and resources but I can only go so far before I am pulled back down the mountain on my hands and knees. I am not afraid of falling, and tripping on this journey but what gives me pause are the instances of being pushed.

It hurts me and I feel it. I don’t know how to describe it and try to deal with the absurdity of it through laughter and prose. In truth, though it hurts every time someone mentions how unfair this all it, the cards that I’ve drawn out of the deck of fate shouldn’t have even been there in the first place. The unavoidableness of this situation makes me want to just wish it all away but there are no easy solutions. Just mud, rocks, wind, and rain to move through as I climb. I know will be stronger by the end but I pray that I won’t lose too much to the pain before I can get there.