Narrow Road to the Exterior

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.

This past semester was the first semester where I didn't felt like I was dying all the time.

like, something was DRAMATICALLY different. I had the social stamina to hang out with friends and actually started making friends with my coworkers. No mental breakdowns. I wasn't walking around in agonized suffering anymore. At work I started leading events and actually being comfortable doing the public-facing parts of the job.

Something changed, but what?

So the weird thing is. I think it may have been. The Bucky Barnes fanfiction. I started posting it the day before classes started. I had been in the remotest pit of a depressive episode and as soon as I locked onto this writing project, I felt life return to my body.

Maybe having a creative project to pour myself into that was completely outside of the realm of college gave me the strength to continue. I felt a lot before like I was suffocating because my life had narrowed to this tiny sliver. It felt much better to have something important to me that wasn't part of college.

Or maybe putting the guy through The Horrors helped me to find catharsis with/process some of the shit that was passively hurting me in the day to day? Like, I don't know, I'm aware on some level that I bottled up and locked down my own traumas and horrors for a long time and it Affected Me, and I eventually found my way to, like...a craving to work some of that out creatively. I dunno, it's good. It really helps with the self-compassion thing.

I also took a yoga class, which was really good because it wasn't like an "exercise" class and like "pushing" yourself, but more about like...existing in and noticing your body and how all the parts work together, and where you're holding tension and kinda systematically wringing that out. Very good. Had a couple yoga videos though that triggered the absolute fuck out of me because of the "push through pain" kinda mindset. So be careful with that one.

I will say that some of it probably was building over time. Like. As much as the academic pursuits have beat me with hammers and crushed me with bricks, I have grown in a valuable way from the experience, in the sense that I have learned to just. Choose for myself what I want to give a fuck about. Not play along with the institution's incentives and pressures.

Like. It was almost a problem, but it wasn't? Instead of making rational judgments about whether I could afford to slack off, I slacked off because I just did not fucking care.

And the sense of "omg omg omg shit fuck shit there's a deadline I'm going to be late I have to turn this in aaaaauuughhg" feels very hard to let go of, because it seems to be the thing motivating you to meet those deadlines. It's the thing that keeps you safe from failure. And people will encourage you to hold onto it.

My mom would ask me, "Oh, when's your paper due" and I would be like "Yesterday," and she would be like "omg you have to get that done" and I would be like *shrug* and she would be like "you still have time to work on it tonight" and I would be like "I don't want to work on it tonight."

And it was fine. I made a B+ in the class, actually. If I had spent the weekend grinding to finish that paper as fast as possible it would have done nothing but make me exhausted. Nothing is as serious as you're supposed to feel like it is.

I feel serene, or maybe indomitable, because I do not feel the pressure the world applies to me anymore.

Last year, going through the worst and most grueling gauntlet of horrors, I was sitting there realizing that whatever happened, I was going to wake up tomorrow, in this body that keeps me alive and allows me to feel, in this world where everything is interesting. And if I didn't wake up tomorrow, well, it wouldn't be my problem anymore anyway.

Like...I was just an animal. A creature. I had days where I broke down consciousness to its atoms, noticing myself as a creature reacting to stimuli like I was a paramecium floating around in a drop of pond water. Colors! Light! Interest?? Mystery??? Snacks! Hunger! Snacks! Good! The constructions around me were very flimsy and fake, and pleasures and interesting things were real, and I would wander around just...doing what my body seemed to want to do. I thought of myself as a wildlife, fulfilling my biological needs, investigating novel stimuli.

Sometimes with the biological needs thing you really have to like, throw off all social and external expectations about what behaviors are allowable and go full creature mode to figure out what the fuck your body wants. Sometimes this means eating whatever the fuck you want, whether it seems like a meal or not, and eating it until you genuinely don't want to eat it anymore. Sometimes this means sleeping when you feel like sleeping and not waking up until your body says so. Lay on the floor, roll on the ground, pick a direction and walk as far as you can, run really really fast, sit in your room buck ass naked.

One day last month I legitimately fell asleep at like 5pm and when I woke up again it was 4:45am. I got dressed and went outside and went on a long walk, halfway across town, past the gas station and the apartment buildings, all the way to the pollinator garden at the park. It was dark and I was completely alone and I noticed how the stars became more visible even a short ways outside the lights of the town.

Another time I went downtown to the railroad tracks and decided the follow the railroad tracks as far as I could. I was wearing flip-flops so I got stabbed with a stick very nastily, but I walked over a mile and I passed through a tunnel under an old bridge with cool graffiti on it, and a drip of cold water from the ceiling of the tunnel landed on the back of my neck! and I kept going until I started leaving the town, and then backtracked and climbed through some scrubby bushes and trees and came out onto a small road where there were some kids playing basketball and they all stared at me, but I am unaffected by staring. And then eventually I found my way back to campus.

Hello! Aw, thank you so much!

Love Dracula, obvious, um...xenophobic themes aside, lol. It's very much a prototype for the superhero-style team-ups we've now grown used to, and I think a lot of adaptations forget that. We basically get the 19th century Avengers teaming up to take down this guy! And there's a cowboy. Dracula canonically encounters a guy from Texas. It's so hilarious.

All the bits with Jonathan at the castle are my favorite parts of the book, and I think Eggers' Nosferatu captured the hallucinogenic danger of those scenes more brilliantly than any other adaptation.

And holy moly, Jonathan with the brides in the Coppola film? Monica Bellucci bride? This has nothing to do with intelligent textual analysis and everything to do with me being thirsty, but Jesus burger-flipping Christ.

Very telling, too, how, like Phantom, Dracula has become this suave, romanticized, often tragic figure in popular media. I can see the 1:1 progression of how that happened with Erik, and vampires are often just...sexy by default now, since they've strayed so far from their origins. But every time I reread the novel, I love how disgusting he is. He's like this monstrous beast of a weird old uncle who shakes his fist at the ceiling during Thanksgiving dinner and goes, "Back in my day, we ate our dinners surrounded by impaled Turks and we liked it!"

Although we do get that little glimmer of Dracula as a tragic figure at the very end when he's killed and relief flickers across his face, as if he's been cursed and the curse is lifted and he can actually find some rest when he dies.

Jonathan is also one of my favorite, "In way over his head" average guys/audience avatars in all of fiction. He's just a normal, khaki-ish sort of fellow, desperately trying to do his job so he can come home to his fiancé, and I do think Stoker was putting a little commentary in there on how, in corporate situations, we're willing to overlook glaringly bad things. As someone who has owned a business for a while, you do get nightmare clients that give you a little bit of an out-of-body experience when you're working with them that make you go, "Is this actually, seriously happening right now?" But you have to keep your professionalism intact. It's accidentally incredibly funny. (See Eggers' film when Orlok quips, "Now ve are neighbors!" KILLS me.)

"You don't even have a dog"

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history of getting carried

away with lipstick.

And the thing that made it absolutely terrifying was that Hamlet was the only one who reacted. He was cowering, and covering his ears with both hands, and yelling to be heard over the noise.

And no one else seemed to know why he was doing that. The other actors didn't even raise their voices.

Many of the people who have significant enough pain to require long term medicated pain management have addiction complications.

And no one is waking up one day, happy and healthy and deciding to start doing opioids for the hell of it. Basically everyone experiencing addiction is also experiencing some sort of pain they're trying to ease.

Addiction is a common comorbidity of pain.