postaweek

To Begin at the Beginning, Again

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I find myself here again,in the realization that I have taken steps back when I had hoped that I was moving forward. Even now, my resistance to write only spells the dangers of what is left unresolved, the hurt, pain, and traumas of experience even now I can seldomly understand. So here I am, back to where I began that journey long ago, asking for the world to help light the way.

The problem is, that it feels like a retreat, a loss, a surrender. To be here means that I was drawn back into the vicious and viscous vortex of vexing vehemence I had believed I rose above.
I am flailing, hoping I can grab the branches but my arms are losing strength and these lifelines are out of reach. I sink further into the muck, for the mud to catch in my throat. I cough and heave but my vigor has left me. This monumentous motivation that moved me to climb mountains now sits there, in the mud, sinking listlessly into the dark abyss below.

Soon I will be covered, eyes well below the surface, losing sight of what is high and low, where was in our out, what was up or down. The dark seems so inviting because letting go will free me of this guilt I have about the slide I am doing. As I sink further, so too do I disconnect from the responsibility of moving forward.

Truthfully, I keep coming back to the question, why am I doing this?” and “What is it that I want?”. If I am here, is this the place I want to be? This sense of miswanting arises from following all I’ve ever known. This path has driven me thus far over so many years, but it begins to crumble under my feet. These cracks and rising stones slow my pace enough to question whether I missed the turn off long before or if the path untravel to which I need to persevere.

My legs slow, with no path in ahead. I survey they horizon but find nothing to gravitate to. Perhaps if I look up, at the stars in their meaningless arrangement that I may find inspiration within their ancient flame.

I can’t make promises at the moment for they will be empty but I can tell you want my dreaming. That I will see you again soon, outside the muck and mud, or at least trying to once again climb to freedom.

How to Avoid Betraying Yourself and Your Dreams

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Dissipate – Suzukasuraimu

I’ve been stuck in limbo, not knowing where my future will take me. Or perhaps I should say where I would take my future. I’ve been in this space for a while, wondering where what it is that I am going for. Each page written or application sent, I wait for the inevitable disappointment that lies on the other side. My mind feels stuck in the corner at a party, looking out and becoming envious of all the others who are shining and shimmering. Why can’t I be the one who dances? What is it I’m meant for in all of this world? Where is my next step supposed to be? Am I always supposed to be on the outside looking into the world as if it were to be a spectator to this grand play, never to grace the stage as an actor or an act but simply a background concept in the lore of another history or to watch others make moves. These are questions I can’t answer but I feel like the weight of these questions daily. It drives driving me down and into dark places. I know that these emphatic expressions are the manufacturing of a mind in need, but how do I find my way out when the world feels so colorless and devoid of merit.

I’ve wondered for a long time if being stuck at this doorway to my dreams is simply an act using me using the wrong keys or me finding the wrong address. I knocked at the door that people assured me was the place I was meant to be. People tell me, “There is no way you won’t get in,” and “Of course, you deserve to make it to the other side of the threshold.” And yet, here I stand as it begins to rain. The wet and cold mixes with the lonely feeling knocking at this door. I can’t seem to be able to open door so all that is left if hoping someone will hear my knocking and answer.

“Don’t want too much,” I tell myself. “If you want, then they can take it from you.” Voices of my past pains haunt my steps into those future directions of myself. How can I keep moving forward through all this anguish? No matter how fast my mind races, If I don’t know where the finish line is, there is never any hope of getting there. I don’t want to betray myself, my past, or my future. I started this road, and I intend to finish it, but the lights have gone out, and all I’ve been doing is following my feet. Is this the end of my race or just another segment? Will I find the finish line or just the road? If I make it to the end, will I find that fulfillment or just the emptiness of the road?

I feel again like I am bleeding sand out of my hands. I feel as though I was never meant to create anything of substance. The towers I build will fall away with water and wind as I watch, trying to constantly keep them upright during a storm. What is my purpose if not to create? Will there be a transcendent masterpiece of just dust on the wind for another generation? Though these are dramatic acknowledgments, they feel so real within me.

More questions come that I can’t quell. Truth and fate seem to be beyond reach as I begin to unravel, not knowing the path forward. If this is my fate to wallow and wander, to struggle and suffer, then so be it as it gives hopefully to a greater purpose, but without the name of that purpose, this struggle and suffering become cruelty. If it is just by the circumstance that I drew the shortest straw, so be it, as I know the probability is always reset at the start of the game. But what is this game I am playing, and is it worth it to keep anteing up? Why am I playing by the rules of a game that seems unjust or unfair?

I am most concerned for my heart which is aching and tired. It’s through these tumultuous times that I have to express myself. My dream that has driven me forward feels battered. Perhaps it was a fool’s idealism that had driven me to this wall, like a recompense for believing in something. I can understand why it’s easier to not hold onto anything, but without it I would have felt empty for all those years. That’s the strength that my dream has had on me, and now my dreams feel so tenuously hanging by a thread as the world has taken turns swinging its ax.

I feel as though if I were to lose this dream, I would lose myself in the chaos of the world. It’s the thing that I have clung to so readily to get me through all these changes, and if I can’t even have that anymore, then what is it this poor frog will aspire to come out of the well? Can I keep rising on the ambiguous prospect of a future unknown? Like stepping into the dark, hoping that I will somehow find a purpose and path?

I don’t even know what I’m looking for, a sign or a victory. I feel as though victory would not echo in the hollow of my chest. That this void is an endless hunger that can’t be filled as it was never meant to be. I don’t know if anything could have prepared me for my life, and I probably wouldn’t have believed them anyway. Is it foolish or wise? Was I disagreeable or following the flow? Was I foolishly following the path of my own creation or did I truly stumble onto the road where I was meant to be? I have disavowed so much, risen to meet the challenge in hopes that I arrive at the top of this mountain eventually, but I don’t even know if that is achievable for me. Have I hit my limit? Is this as far as I go?

I am struggling, and I don’t know what will help. I want to be alone but never left to myself. I have become the contradiction that I hoped to smooth out. Why is it so hard, and why does it hurt so much? And why does it feel like if I take a step back I would be giving it all away? I guess that is the burden of a dream and the weight of a heart. I can’t answer any of these questions, but all I can do is tell myself to keep trying.

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.

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.

Coming to Terms with Divergent Paths

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Yayuka – DDDDD_DIE

I try and hold.
These things inside,
the struggle to understand
to make sense
the discordant foundations
and beliefs
that come in conflict
and disorient my soul.

I walk at night, after a long day of thinking and doing. Trying in some way to come to terms with the various divergent thoughts and beliefs that been instilled in my from a young age. Freedoms but not too free, compassion but not for those people, love for everyone but yourself. I don’t understand when the lines in the sand the people draw and will not cross end up curved or askew. When certain principles fail to meet a standard of universality it’s hard to understand the hypocrisy behind it. The arbitrary lines that are drawn make it seem as though the some sort of rhyme or reason to them but when asked to interpret them at times there is no reasonable answer or explanation. Most of the time it’s just because that is the way it has always been. The question is to why, and how these lines are drawn never escapes me.

This is why it makes it so hard to pick up and run with anything for me. These discordant ways of living fill up my head and make wonder what kind of path I follow if I were to actually pursue a sense of truth from any of these roads. I do not pick because I seek to understand truth, and to understand truth I have to know that perhaps what I see may not be what actually is. To seek truth means that I may be left wondering how I make sense of all these things I grew up and hold dear in my heart. To pursue truth, I am left open to the possibility of reinterpretation. To know truth I have to be okay with having these hard conversations in my heart to reconcile the earth and the sky.

We grow and change, and as such, as long as we are open, we can step towards that truth that I so crave to see.

In Days I Dreamed Of Dragons

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Winter Vibes – Atey Ghailian

I remember when I was younger that whenever I would be able to see the moisture on my breath it feel like I was blowing fire from my chest. “I am like a dragon” I always think proudly, braving the winter chill of childhood. “Nothing can stop me” I thought as the breath reminded me life inside burning brightly into the world. The world was full of these breaths and their wonder, every one could breath that fire from their chest, some stronger than others but all of us the same. I would savor the moments all wrapped up in jackets and jeans to test my breath to prove what a beast I was to be.

Those breaths changed as I got older, changing from a testament of invincibility to reminder of the thing I had to overcome. These breaths come more most notably on the road when running, sweat dripping down and freezing in the bitter wind. Those breaths represented a burning up inside of all the things I never knew but had to endure. A fighting spirit that persisted beyond the circumstances looking to burn my fate and the world along with it.

Now the breaths represent a small sense of solitude. I quiet moment in the night as I traverse hard concrete and quiet soil. It’s only my breath left, I feel it beneath my mask and skin. There out in the world it seems so empty, so lifeless, so void. I wonder, will there be others out there fight against the cold, looking for life out there in world or will breaths be the only one to refract those dimming lights. I once dreamed that we may have been dragons but sometime, just sometimes I feel that I am all that is left.

A lit wick and a slow burn

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Slowly burn on a fuse that has been lit for a long time, these small but subtle moments that been eating away at me like rocks beneath the shore line. At some point I wonder if there will be a time where I will have no more fuse left to lay to keep the fire at bay, I have no time to check the lead the behind me, just enough time to lay it down and hope it keeps coming.

I’ve been feeling burned out by the world and work for a while. To be honest world and work might be one in the same. I’ve been searching for meaning in what I do because of it. Trying to find purpose in the waves of things I don’t really care about.

Though I am getting an education what I am left with is a particular set of skills I never wanted and a set of knowledge I had no desire to have. That might sound particularly silly and ungrateful but to be honest it’s more that it hasn’t met my expectations. Maybe it’s the pandemic and maybe it’s the classes but it makes me question what I’m doing and for what reasons I am doing it. I continue on in hopes that all of this will make sense but knowing I have give something up in myself to get anything out of it.

It feels sometimes like I’m a mouse in a cage running on wheel hoping to get somewhere, deluding myself into believing that every step I take is one that will bring me forward but in actuality all I am doing is retreading common ground. I wonder how I will look back on these moments in my life and think about them. Will they become a delightful serendipity or a bitter pill to swallow.

What I can say though is that I’m tired, I have been for a while. It’s the only thing I know I have been quite some time. Day and weeks blend together as I stare into the abyss and hope to find meaning. Hours lost, moment wanted. All I crave really is some type of substance to fulfill me and this releive me of this itch but for now I will just keep my head down and keep going. For now I will just concentrate on not getting burned.

Move, Pain, Repeat

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To Start Over Again – Shal.E

It’s actions which define our days but our habit’s which define our life. But what happens when our habits fall apart, and our actions become strained. What would we do to try and regain control?

I’ve been having trouble sleeping and trouble waking up. I lay in bed late at night, after all my tasks are done and my body feels strained, wondering if it will be few minutes or few hours before I finally see the sandman. I sleep for as long as I need to or can before I start the day again, knowing I am missing some parts of my preparation and others of my coping.

It’s because I want accomplish things that I feel my body turn against me. I have resorted to super charging which makes my muscles feel strained the next morning from how tense it becomes. I feel sore the next morning, not from exercise but from the toll on my body all this energy comes. Like a double edge sword, stealing power from tomorrow to use today, indefintiely until my body feels like it’s slowly falling apart from just moving.

The good thing is that all this energy my body in place so I can be a puppeteer to a marionette. Moving myself in a way that makes the show go on, that gets my work done, and makes me feel as if I am finally getting things done. They don’t tell you about the strain on the strings though. Creaking loudly throughout the day as they continually push against the burden of a resistant self.

I question whether life at the moment is a series of trade offs and balancing acts, and for a man who wants everything this becomes problematic. To I push my body through the ringer to get my body to follow my mind wants or do I let me body continue to delay workings of the mind and soul.

I come up on this dichotomy and my decision usually is to throw myself through the pain and anguish if it means that I can get what I want. What is one more step full of pain if it means I can get the life that I want. I just feel the strain right now, the pain in my muscles and bones, but it’s the price I am willing to pay for the moment, but who know what I giving up in the long run.

It worries me though, that I may be giving up too much. That these things shouldn’t need all this extra help and I should just be able to persist without all this extra help. What is happening and has happened to me and what might that missing ingredient be in all this. That would make me feel whole mind, body, and soul.

For now, there is no time to worry, I will just keep pushing through until one thing finally gives.

Tar And Feathered Words

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The Wanderer by Dániel Taylor

I am always afraid that as I put words to a page that content of those words become meta. Words talking about words, language talking language, and yet I can’t divorce myself from these words. This language for me is as muck and tar, stretching and pulling me inexhaustibly to get stuck and dirtied. I fall back into them because of this apparent mismatch between me and them. Like an abusive relationship where I am betrayed over and over again by these things that I give my heart to only to fall back into their arms again.

It’s in a lot of ways the an inevitability as I am so scared of my own voice for it to ever learn to fly. So afraid of my words evaporating into entropy, crumbling into dust in those who they happen to reach. This why words become so focused, like a fetishism that my words are never allowed loftier dreams and goals as I just want them to work in the first place.

If only their were a tangibility to these abstract figures. To manipulate more fully with my hands aside from the language we have all agreed on. To put my mind down on paper, to transcribe these inner thoughts and feelings in a way that does justice to them.

The destruction of this fantasy is what spurs these regular meta commentaries about my inability to articulate in my everyday life. I keep telling myself to be more deliberate with my words, less is more and more is less but I spew them as a safety net as saying something always feels better than doing nothing. A fallacy I repeatedly find myself falling into, but trudging forward just the same.

I’ve already said too much so I shall leave it for now, but I am wise enough to know this is not the end but just another step on long journey.