My mental health is worth a journal. So let’s identify the barriers holding us back from actually journaling: (1) a feeling of hyper-visibility in today’s world (2) deeply rooted insecurities and fears about myself as a person with free will and agency (3) a refusal to accept myself as a flawed, imperfect person (4) a refusal to accept myself as a person who nevertheless deserves to give and receive love.
Is that it? I think also it’s the fact that I’m so precious about my own writing, sometimes – I have too much of my ego invested in trying to be, like, the best instead of just trying to be good, or better than I was yesterday. But I am a person with a beautiful brain, even if it is a broken one, and I should try my best to remember that a gem only refracts the light in new directions after it’s been shattered, and I am no less worthy of attention or even admiration than anyone else. No one is, I don’t think.
It goes back to that quote, again, – “There is no object so foul that intense light cannot make beautiful.” I don’t remember what I said last time I blogged about it, maybe it was the same thing, but the quote also applies to me. And I’m not even that foul of an object, comparatively speaking, so I’m probably solid, if we’re willing to lower the bar a little. But maybe that isn’t the point, either.
Maybe the quote I should be tying it to is “I’m still scared of losing my head, I guess there’s just something selfish about me” in Keane’s “Difficult Year.”
I also need to blog more. It’s all connected, though, I need to do everything more. I need to embrace the fact that I’m one of those annoying creative types who won’t shut up. But writing is so much more annoying than other kinds of creativity – some people have a burst of inspiration and end up with a beautiful thing to hang on the wall or a beautiful object like the ones Brandon makes, but I just make… words. And I’m not that good at it, either. But everyone who does anything is sometimes not that good. And most people struggle to tell the difference between what’s good and bad, anyway. And words can do things that other mediums can’t. But any kind of creativity takes a lot of courage, I think. And it’s demoralizing to me that I have an entire blog that’s almost exclusively about my own anxieties and not something important or meaningful like, I don’t know, political commentary or song lyric analysis or whatever. I don’t know why those were the only two examples I chose, but you get the point.
I think I’m underestimating the audience a lot, though, sometimes. I understand that whatever I’m making, whatever creative things come out of my brain, probably is going to be a niche market, and I’m MORE than okay with that. I don’t need fame or glory or awards, all I really want is to be seen and understood, warts and all. So maybe the new plan should be to go back to the old plan, where all I do is try to love myself as much as I can, and as shamelessly as I can, whenever I can manage to. Whether it’s only in moments, or I can actually manage to do it for long periods of time.
For so long, my sincerity and my vulnerability have been weaponized against me or treated as something that needed to be fixed. But if I stop fighting and start embracing the things that set me apart from other people, maybe I don’t have to keep running away from who I really am anymore. Maybe I can just be me.
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It’s the irony that I’m afraid of being hyper-visible but am the author of my own hyper-visibility (to the point that I literally am posting my… diary… to a blog…?), for me.
Also, MARINA’s “Soft to be Strong” played in my head for the duration of writing this. I just thought you should know.
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