Monday, October 07, 2024
unwrite
๐
unwrite
๐y online-pen has been gripped by silence, because I am not quite sure where and how to write anymore. I feel a sense of ADHD-disorganisation in my mind about where I place my words, because I can't seem to land on a perfected tableau anywhere. I seize up, unable to write as I intend, like an office printer jammed by too many requests and/or unsuitable paper grammage. The words fall nowhere and I resorb them within me, unformed. This blog, worlds upon words, is only one part of my soul. Twenty years on, I feel that I have become more than the specific persona who authors worlds upon words. Like creating of multiple business units within an organisation, I need to create other spaces to publish the written word, in distinctive forms to accomplish different aims, each space of a distinct brand profile and even author persona.
I also need to renovate this blog, and then incorporate it, alongside new ones, into the brand or persona that fits me now, two decades on. My being a generalist versus a specialist means that I cannot just be one brand or one product; much like an FMCG business. But it is more work than I know how to do or able to get done. Until I can do all of this renovating, reorganising and incorporating that I seem to find so necessary, I feel my words have nowhere at all to land, thus they never get created in their written form anywhere. I need to finish laying down the foundations of my web design to establish this โ and I already have the design template in mind โ but I don't know how to build a website and the supposedly useful, even paid, website builder services were all unhelpful for my design brief.
So, really, it is the tableau for writing online that I can't seem to find anymore, that has jammed the imprinting of words completely. It is much like how some people can't use the public bathroom because it is not quite right in some detail or another, and they hold it in till they get out (hopefully in time).
--
๐
stage/canvas
๐uring my teens, for only a year or two, I was a productive student (which was more anomalous blip than general trend). Like the setting of a theatre stage with lighting, props and suchlike for a performance, I could perform my studious tasks better when I set the stage that was my workspace: I made sure only my desk light was switched on, making every other part of the bedroom darker, thus forcing the eye to only focus on my work in front of me. The audio component was the radio: tuned into the Perfect 10, the pop music station of my adolescence, and a radio station that was 24-hours (a rather new phenomenon back then) which supplied perpetual BGM. Sometimes I did play my cassette tapes, but I didn't have very many of them, and you couldn't play them on a loop long enough to last the hours of studying, uninterrupted.
In the same way, I tried to recreate the visual space that looks like this blog's 'compose' screen, by formatting the digital notebook app I favour (when I opt for digital over analog writing). But the resulting creative endeavours led me towards infrequent, incomplete pieces of writing: inertia, instead of impetus.
The process that should follow painting is that of displaying, showing or exhibiting (or gifting and donating) that finished artwork. If no one aside from its creator is going to lay eyes on the finished work, there is far less impetus for the artist to make a good work of art. By designing a notebook to set the stage equivalent to my blogger 'compose' screen, I was just priming the canvas for painting only, without envisioning the exhibition of the resulting artwork to others than my own self as part of the process. If I was setting a stage, I was endeavouring to perform onstage: but, to no one, thus negating the need for many of the stage components: lighting, for instance. Performing to no audience is thus an oxymoron.
(Not to imply that the eventual audience ought to dictate the way the artist should create.)
The stage was set, but there was no audience. I stretched and primed the canvas as my stage; but there was no tableau.
--
๐
tableau
๐he ego, the sense of self of the writer or artist, has to be of a healthy size. The creator should crave some form of transcendence beyond the moment the work is created, beyond being the first person who gets to enjoy the work. Writers want to write and be published because we supposedly want our words to live on beyond us, outliving our own mortality and perhaps forever ('as in, "the internet is forever"). We think eternity deserves us. We want to be read; we want our art to be experienced by an audience.
Even for practical non-artists โ managers, policymakers, historians and suchlike, who write plans, papers, and articles to perform an essential function โ this holds true, innit?
The concept of โyouโ the reader of my written words posted here, has always been more abstract than real to me. It is like that imagined future person who will open our time capsule many years or decades later. Even in early blogospheric times that preceded social media โ and back then I actually did do my commenting admin โ when I was, or became, real-life friends with the people who read me here, I still wrote for a conceptual audience in my mind.
But โ and herein lies the component that transforms a stage into a tableau โ in the 'compose' screen, there was a 'publish' button. Like the ones we see on our social media apps. My notebook, however on point my design was, was offline and did not include this button. Theoretically there was no conceptual someone in my mind who would read this.
--
๐
perform/publish
๐riters want our words to eventually be in a vehicle transporting our ideas โ somewhere, to someone. Through exhibiting our artworks in a show or at a gallery, or simply by displaying them on our own walls, the painting we create, the words we write, the art we make โtranscend ourselves and the moment it was created. It transports our art from the studio to the gallery; our performance from rehearsal space to the theatre; our words from a screen, or page, to the readers. Our art then transcends beyond artist, time, and space.
Writing without publishing is like merely sitting in a vehicle but not making a journey to a specific destination for a specific purpose; it is like taking a drive for the sake of it. The journey becomes the means and the end in itself. But in general, you acquire a vehicle and use it largely for the practical purposes of getting to and from destinations, and for getting something done. The ability to have a joyride car drive to nowhere is usually just a bonus that comes with car ownership.
Your car, or bicycle, or any mode of personal transport, eventually becomes an extension of you, and visually it becomes a space intentionally curated in your own image, or naturally reflective of your personality. But whatever the case, your vehicle will be visible to other people, out in the world. It isn't like one's bedroom, locked drawer, or digital password-protected files and folders: spaces which might never be seen by eyes other than your own.
Likewise, publishing, even in its weakest forms โ through blog posts like this, for instance โ is the vehicle used to reach another reader that isn't myself. Writing in journals and digital notes doesn't achieve what publishing does. Not that the personal diary or journal are unimportant, but that they merely achieve other aims: allowing our subconscious to firm up ideas, feelings; organising thoughts and creating plans; recording minutiae that you may need to refer to again at a later time; or writing for the sake of the process in itself โ like how that quiet car drive or bike ride on the road to nowhere, no one, for nothing, standalone as experientially curative journeys.
This audience may be but a philosophical concept to me when it comes to my writing on this specific blog, in varying degrees of abstraction over the two decades I've written on this blog, a construct rather than a corporeal form, but it exists as a persona outside myself when I do post my writing online. Thus it becomes impetus for me to create for somebody that isn't me โ
โ which brings me back to how I have been figuratively resorbing my words lately. The abstract or real person who will figuratively or actually read my online-published words โ imagined or real โ gives me the impetus to create, create completely, create more, and create better works in the written word, a realised vision to be seen by others.
I have not been using such a stage as this 'compose' screen, this primed canvas, that has a very real button to publish my words. Right now I am back here, because I kept on looking for the right space to lay my words down, and stop them from disappearing into nothing, never-formed, inside my head and heart. For now I disregard the fact that I haven't finished rebuilding my website that will consolidate the new spaces I need to create for other kinds of content I need to create. I will try to ignore the fact that I haven't been able to renovate this website completely, no matter how compulsively perfectionist I tend to be.
--
๐
self
๐ mentioned the writer or artist needing an ego to create work that would be seen, experienced, even admired, by others. Too much ego does lead the artist in arrogance or even eventual mediocrity. But without enough esteem for the self as an artist, there is inadequate desire to transcend themselves, the stage, or the page. Therein lies another problem:
I live with perpetual passive suicidal ideation, and I do not care if I die, if I never achieve what I wanted to in this world. For the first eight years of my depression getting medically diagnosed, when I fell into another depressive episode, one that would eventually be lifelong: I was more than passively suicidal. For those eight years I think I tried to kill myself at least once every year. In the following eight years, up to the present, I have no longer been actively suicidal. I still have chronic suicidality, which I think will never go away, but it has been eight years of inactive suicidal ideation; I won't do anything to end my life, but I die from another illness or by accident, so be it. There would be another, I am replaceable. It is like my ego hardly exists, and my body as receptacle is like a lighter, and it is trying to spark aflame, but having mere fumes and tiny drops of lighter fluid left in the barrel. The lighter fluid well that is my sense of self, should be filled. But I really don't think of myself as necessary. This is why I don't have a bucket list of exciting to-dos. If I die today, I don't feel any regret.
I am not so important that my art, words, and service need to exist for others to experience them. Any other person can serve people and help animals, any other person can create art, write literature, and perform music. Go buy another lighter and dispose of this empty one that is me.
I have mere droplets of self-esteem. I don't have enough desire to transcend my art beyond myself. I did once think about becoming a published writer, and I have a rough-draft in-my-head proposal for my magnum opus, but if it doesn't come to fruition, it doesn't feel like a depressing regret inside me, I don't believe it is the world's loss.
I have enough droplets and fumes of lighter-fluid-ego to post a blog post for now. It needs to spark and light aflame to enable me to write as avalon would on this specific blog. The way I write here, the kind of prose and poetry that I create here, requires a process that is hard to replicate in my offline notebooks, digital or analog. Hereโthe habit has formed, the process crystallised, the brand created; for two decades I have been doing this on worlds upon words. Since I don't actually believe this piece if writing will get read, to me, you the reader are just an abstract construct in my mind; and so I have just enough ego fumes in the barrel to get me to 'compose' and hit the 'publish' button without too much care. I just need this space to lay down my words and stop their unborn selves from being resorbed before existence on a page. The perpetual resorption is an uncomfortable process.
--
๐
vessel
๐ecently, the state ofmy perpetually empty self-esteem tank has surfaced in my relationship with my God. Through his words and his Spirit, I have been told emphatically that I am worth something to him, and I am still alive for a specific reason, for work he wants me to accomplish on earth. I was nudged thus: if God says so, that I have worth, who am I to challenge that fact? To not believe this would be irreverent, like throwing sand and soil at monks and priests carrying bowls, asking for alms: an act of irreverence and disrespect. Even if the monks and priests do not share your specific stances on faith and spirituality, you wouldn't show that kind of disrespect as a reasonable, decent human being.
I might be a broken clay jar, but I am a jar that contains treasure that is not my own. God has a purpose for this broken vessel, still. I don't see how I can eventually and sooner than later get back to doing the work He has called me to, because I am literally disabled right now. Yet, I cannot merely press on, like I have been doing in my recovery journey, so that I can get back to my work; my perseverance needs to be tempered with a sense of self-worth.
Which means I have to work on that objective โ of coming to believe in myself and to start esteeming myself more โ in this, my unending, spiritual and my recovery journey. Maybe it is the missing ingredient I need to gain more progress in my recovery.
--
๐
avarecs: avalon recovers
๐ecause right now, I feel I am back in late 2022 once more: I am not eating much, I can't get myself to make two meals a day, essential meals that complete the profile of nutritional needs one needs per day. i have resorted to ordering food because I can't get myself to make my own food. Without calories I get very dizzy and being alone and disabled, that is really dangerous and unsafe for me: if I blackout, I might very likely die without a single person knowing until it is too late. I don't live with a family anymore and I don't have friends who would knock on my door to check on me, like TV and movie characters seem to have, a protrayal or friendship as unrealistic as rom-com love stories.
I just placed a new grocery order of mainly fluids so that I can ingest via liquids: protein, vegetables, fruits, probiotics. I ordered more snacks like nut mixes that help me with fibre, and I bought pears to enjoy daily as a snack I like as well: I am still able to get myself to eat snacks. So, I also procured (an unhealthy snack, by contrast) more of my favourite vegetable chips as easy and tasty calories. I can't use the vegetables in the fridge anymore because I haven't been able to get myself to cook for so long that they have wilted. And I did not buy any more fresh vegetables, because I don't think I can yet bounce back to being able to feed myself dinners properly again; not yet, anyway. I do have bread as one form of solid food, and I find it easier to make a teatime meal of eggs, coffee and sandwiches, than a dinner meal of fried rice and vegetables. Eggs as well as almond butter and almonds in the nut mixes I snack on for fibre, and almond and soy milk, help fulfill the essential need for adequate daily protein: important for both depression and ADHD. It also helps keep my diet alkaline, in order not to trigger gastritis or dyspepsia attacks. This is my better-than-nothing plan, a solution so easily executed because I have been here before.
And this week I am alreadly scheduled for one consult with one of my psychiatrists, and for a psychodynamic therapy session with another one of psychiatrists; it is on my agenda to work on this with both of them. I haven't lost the grit and perseverance to successfully recover towards adequate functionality; I am too absent of success in my recovery journey, apart from infrequent dribs and drabs that are too little, too slow.
So, I have to value myself and believe in my worth, perhaps, to move as successful recovery journeys do: ongoing two-steps-forward one-step-back, instead of of the correct one-step-forward and two-steps-back progress rate that represents successful recovery and rehabilitation. With the inverse trajectory I seem to keep experiencing, never-ready enough yet to go back and join my work-family and relieve my volunteer leaders, I am helplessly and involuntarily watching time pass, and seeing myself unhealed. Trying to value myself, ascribe worth to myself, to add myself as as one of the persons I stay alive for, besides my two parents (I used to have three persons to stay alive for, but one โ Sayang, my cat best friend for 14 years โ died last year). This is a radical thing for me: like forcing the existence of God onto an atheist and force-feeding them to accept it, or like how stomachs get pumped when a patient overdoses or ingests poison.
Believing that avalon is important and essential and has still yet meaningful art, service; light and love, work that the world needs or deserves โ from me! โrequires a lot of work on my my part. Theoretically, I get it, but it is too far out for me to fully accept as reality and truth. Not that I won't try to make myself believe, just that I am simply an empty tank right now. I have to bring myself to at least a level equal to how I am able to visualise an abstract concept of a reader in order to complete a piece of writing (a bare minimum of completion, at the very least), and hit 'publish' like I have done so, often. Not caring about all the visual untidiness of this blog, or about the incompletion and disorganisation I feel my web persona or personal brand is in right now. Perhaps only one or three people, actual people, will see this post and read it. Less still would someone come to my aid after reading this. But I still have to visualise a reader to write. Perhaps I need to visualise this worth and value, esteem for myself that I have to believe and below upon myself, in order to recover more quickly, and get back to the helm of my organisation. Instead of frustration at my slow rate of recovery, perhaps I should channel my energy towards visualising self-worth. Whether I will succeed, is unknown.