#its about lifelong tension reaching an irreversible boiling point!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

titoist · 5 months

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i am currently laying in my bed not strictly out of sense of tiredness or exhaustion but out of an acute sense of mental pain; distress, in the same way you might imagine the stereotype of a hysterical victorian being prescribed [x] many days of being bedridden. i lay myself down & allow myself to be enveloped by the matching floral patterns of my duvet. this is something i did very often in the past, but not so much now. it does not make the issue itself any lighter but it reduces, in whatever way, through the quality of one no longer standing or sitting, the sense that the pain's source is so immediate. "you are laying down - it's okay."

what follows from this point onwards is an attempt at describing a condition that feels very existentially risky to think about, much less admit openly, cast it into reality via its codification by language. 'existentially risky' - by which i mean, thinking of it too seriously & too in depth feels like teetering over the edge of an abyss. it's what i imagine thinking about Death might feel like for young children, or maybe how people raised in religious environments might regard the hypothetical possibility of the non-existence of God. my goal here is not attempting to come to a conclusion or even a definitive reckoning, a point after which it will 'be solved', merely attempting to cast it's specificities outside of my mind. as such, combined with my not having slept for around 26 hours, i suspect it will come across as very dry & matter-of-fact, more like a disorganized point-by-point historical retelling than a piece of written expression;

winter of 2021 was a point at which i had definitively collapsed into thousands of shards & had been left with the existential project of attempting to.... not only make sense of a collapsed, initial prototype which had been built in isolation, but to refine a kinder self out of it who would at least be self-aware about also having been built in isolation.

this coincided with my discovering the writings of a person who's existence often inspired a sense of... understanding. i did not know this person, never really talked to them, it was a purely voyeuristic & self-serving feeling that they were, or my perception of them was, the most i had ever seen myself reflected in anybody, visceral & instinctive, maybe loosely-defined as 'parasocial'. it could be, i think, uncharitably, referred to as as obsession. i still feel immense grief over what i regard as having started as an innocent admiration, a kind of respectful awe at something i had never seen before, backsliding so rapidly & so perversely. it was disturbing, to an extent. even now, i think a lot of my traits could be traced back to attempts at mirroring them one-to-one. most things i enjoy, or stumble upon, lead back to them if i can find a way for them to. even retroactively, if i start thinking i might have first heard of it from them, or if i project the idea of their character onto it in worry & anxiety. in short, i was an embryo, & they were the only visible example i had of a grown human. i think the way i felt about them could be succinctly described as equivalent to a word or a phrase where... you might simply read it or hear of it, & your immediate thought is inexplicably & apropos of nothing: "/that's/ the one."

a general state which fermented until reaching a kind of boiling point in august of 2022, inwhere a switch somewhere in the back of my mind was unceremoniously flipped & i came to the conclusion that my sense of self had been irreversibly molded into the shape of the idea of them. i felt like i had no cogent sense of self beneath that, i think, though i attribute a lot of this period to histrionics. emotions were high, evidently, & i did not have the capacity to sift through each one individually.

this realization, & the resulting horrorous tension, crossed with a lifelong valorization of suffering as being integral to my becoming a person - intense fixation on the concept of a "trial by fire" - to create a period where i actively tortured myself in an attempt to educe something wholly unique from wiping clean the built-up layers of cultural detritus in my brain. i felt fake; like a plastic human. i think the misguidedness &, ultimately, the silliness, of this endeavor is betrayed solely by the fact that i still possess a lot of the traits i regarded as 'stolen.'

even just the general mental texture of the memory of august 2022 - it feels like it still haunts me in many ways, or at least tacitly affects my procession. before spring of this year, i routinely laid awake worrying over where my personhood began & ended. i lost sleep, wondering if i suffered enough, if i only postponed the issue, if i will need to somehow suffer to become "really really really real."

this following year is one where i would like to definitively come to terms with it, but i cannot imagine how i would. frequently, i come to consider that... even in some hypothetical best case scenario, it would only amount to me simply learning to be at peace with the unassailable reality that a significant portion of my cognitive & experiential brainbed is lifted piecemeal from another person, a reality i can't change. but, nevertheless, i would be at peace with it.

i often pick & idolize a specific day in november of 2021 where i was bedridden with a cold, precisely because it felt like… the penultimate manifestation of the unconditional existence of a version of myself who i feel had… still grown kinder & more understanding in the aftermath of self-decimation, simply existing as myself & being silly with the fever melting away most inhibitions - but still inhabited a mental space before i had forcefully stuck so many ideas to myself. ideas that seem kind of irreversible, now. so if nothing else i am glad that at least some of you [internet] people got to follow & see me on that day.

most people are probably at least basically familiar with the concept of not truly knowing "who they are", in at least the very vaguest sense. but i feel that comparatively very few are intimately familiar with the gut-wrenching soul-destroying sense of freefall that comes with not even having a conceptual basis for what your presence constitutes.

that sense is one i would like to avoid at almost any cost, really, almost with the physiological compulsion of a preservation instinct - even at the cost of willful ignorance, choosing not to worry in spite of worry seemingly justifying itself

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