#writing void

To feel so distraught within yourself is nothing short of torture. My self imposed anxiety pulls me in the undertow of a thousand waves; each carrying the full weight of my whole life onto me. It is hard to know if I will ever feel what I want to feel. The fabrics I wear that are glued to my skin carry scars of a past that was never mine. How lonesome it is to suffer inside yourself.

I sit in the sun and it is hard to not feel such overwhelming love for the earth. Everything untied to humans; the trees, the air, the soft crunch of dead leaves as you walk on the ground. To breathe in the movement of the wind as it fills the caves of the lungs; a full breath. The way in which I internalize my pain creates remnants that are part of the core of my soul. It goes beyond mental boundaries, and is buried so deep into me that I can not find it. Perhaps this is where the lost feeling comes from. Everything I feel has been compounded over years of experience, and as the tower gets heavier, the restructuring falls further away. Every brick becomes a moment in time that I had to construct a wall; a protective measure to somehow survive.

I continue to sit here and observe; to fully immerse myself in the current environment. My thoughts are seemingly always blurry these days. The idea of living much longer past this point seems incomprehensible. If I can barely feel myself now, how would I twenty years from now? Ten? A part of me has always felt that death will come for me much earlier than that. I've felt the passing sway of it. The perspective changes when the notion is there; just beyond the peripheral. I feel caged in this life. I am always drowning. The intensity to which I hold sorrow and pain are like needles relentlessly stabbing my body; I constantly bleed.

I truly wish I could be understood; to be felt; to be seen. To have a shared understanding of what this feels like; but this is impossible. How could I ever be known in this way? At times I wish I could be completely annihilated; entirely destroyed piece by piece so the soul that feels broken couldn't hold onto anything anymore. Maybe then it could feel the freedom I've always longed for.

Hello, 

I just began reading the artist's way and am already starting to really feel a shift in the way I think. This is my first introduction to really feeling myself as an artist and as someone that needs this for life. I have for a long time not felt comfortable in giving myself the title of artist because my skill sets do not feel antiquated enough in what I want to be. Even right now as I write down for this exercise, I can feel the weight of this pen and even the sort of distraught nature of my thoughts in execution. At this point of the page, the idea of getting to the bottom seems impossible. Another two pages on top of that seems almost inconceivable. This to me is entirely due to the nature of today's world. The way in which media is consumed, the way in which we are supposed to fully give in to the media and really lose our sense of complete identity. It is this in why I so desperately want a shift. I know within my mind that who I am is so far beyond this simplicity. I know within myself that who I want to be is unfulfilled because I long for more. I long for connection with people who understand me. I long for connection in regard to the projects I so desperately want to get better at. All my life or at least my life in youth was filled with strife in the sense that my foundation of self never existed. I never during that age had a glimpse of what or who I was. I simply existed in space. I ragdolled through my youth and rode through in utter turbulence. I never knew calm except for the pockets of time in which I was alone and in nature. Nature for me has always been the place that I have longed for. It has always in a clear sense been pivotal in my own creative direction. I have gone to spaces of nature just to feel that sense in mind of who I am. How am I in tandem with the universe? I love the trees, the clouds, I love the sky, I love the flowers that shimmer in the light from the small light of the sun. I love the color green because of the representation in our world.

I will never forget the first time I really experienced the forest. I was young and my dad took me through birdhills park. I remember walking into it feeling complete freedom. The path of trees in front was ever expansive. They represented something so much bigger. They were magical in scale. I ran through the thicket; alone and in love. I felt as if I was transcending space. The woods are soft in their calmness. A space of such beautiful magnitude. Ever since then, I have gravitated to the forest and trees. They are the limbs of veins of the planet. They bleed like we do. They are ancient relics of time; their history is reveled in the spirit of the woods. It's this magic that makes me feel this way. It is also why princess mononoke is such a lovely movie to me. The balance of the world rests on the state of nature. To follow its process and live in tandem with it. We as humans are not above the earth, we are all children of it. It is this planet and the universe that represent our mother and father. I don’t understand why so many people believe that they are so above the universe this way. How can you believe that our significance is beyond the eternal energy that is nature? When I look at my life and the moments of specific significance, I think of the way in which I perceived all of the beauty of the natural world in full. I love my time in the forests, I revel in the sounds of all the creatures of the outdoors, I crave the colors of all the flowers as natural beauty. The earth should be allowed to be bountiful; not have to feel all of the effects in which human disregard afflicts it. My problem within my life has not been about my need to be above the world; it comes from a deep inner turmoil about not being able to be fully aligned with it. How can I be more than a sensitive, reactionary response to the organic stimuli that I experience? To me there is a disconnect to how I live and think, and I feel what I know I want to be in this life. I want to represent something more aligned with the values I possess. This again is perhaps why I have felt such a level of discomfort in time. I do not feel aligned in my life with the values I possess. I want to create everyday and I want to feel fully aware and able mentally. The lifestyle I live is not conducive to this. I work in jobs that while sometimes provide insight, they usually are a mental strain that makes it hard to fully understand myself. It becomes a cycle of overstimulation in these places and then believing in the fact I have changed too far from who I used to be.

It has been a particularly long time since I really utilized this platform in making my own documentation. I used to live vastly different in comparison to how I am as a person now; the pace of everything changed. I live and operate in response to sequences rather than on the basis of my own doing. At least in current times, this is the case. It does something to you when you move at pace with the modern world not because you desire it, but because you have no other choice. The lack of choice is a detriment. It creates a subspace of arguably negative undertones because of the entrapment of it all. You are in existence only according to what you are; what you can do, not in tandem with the natural process of life and death.

I find these micro understandings in passing through the time I spend in currency. Phases where I can analyze and gauge the environment; pry through the details. If I do know something in regards to myself, it is the intense level at which I feel my function and the same capacity towards every moment I give myself to feel it. This becomes harder and harder everyday. Either to the circumstance of existence in this "modern" age or the ease of access to which one can nullify their thoughts. I found this out recently during a moment in which I had the time and space to meditate. I felt the surge of pressure pushing to the forefront of my brain and the weight of being that it brought. The sheer tension that exists can really only be noticed when you are able to thoroughly examine yourself. Again, this is not practiced in modern era. It is more difficult everyday to even possess the ability to do so and unless you as the individual put forth the effort, you will drown in the vastness of sensory depreciation.

Hi,

I have not written like this in a minute of time, just me and the digital page as this is. I woke up with the pressure and stimulation of stressors in my life. I can’t seem to erode them away. The sheer weight of all that seems to come to mind exhausts any ability I have to rest and find calm. The idea of calmness; still life; seems impossible to me now. My brain is always bouncing and reading the events of the past and future. Trying to maintain myself in the battle of it all is exhausting. I understand the need to remain in the present time and make these moments stick in to clarity, but this overall seems impossible as well. I can’t understand the pieces that are lacking. I understand the struggles I face and the needs of what I must do, but to lock the concept and feel real within myself is all lost to me. I feel anguish. I feel centralized pain. My head feels empty; soggy, blank. It is morose. Yet also within it, the weight of all my decisions and missed moments and life that I can never live seem to be creeping up again. The residual pieces come back to me and are a small reminder how lost I was and in many ways remain to be. Daunting it is to even have a remote idea where to begin to address the issues. What I used to have and what used to be available to me are no longer in any concept of reachability. I have no way to find that. No way to feel what energy I had felt before. Where did it go? There was a period of time where even in less association with my ego, I had the energy of it. The draw. I felt desirable to the world as the options of opportunity seemed ineffable. Everything that I could reach even within my own derelictions was something that I felt confidence in. If anything, it was something I could pursue; I could see it become realized. My ability of standard comprehension and self sustenance seemed concrete. Now I am dim. The strength to my self created conceptualization feels lost. I have no idea what to do. What can even be done when your own perception of who you are becomes intangible? When there is not but a bare wisp of it to grasp? My security in myself and my environment is foreign in the way that it now bleeds and ebbs like ink in water. Even the way that I can compose my thoughts in writing and description is a skill that seems to have become pathetic. I feel dull in my mind as if a chunk of my processing ability has been eaten whole. The ability to perceive is nothing but null. Dead weight. I can’t feel beyond it of late, in particular it seems to be bolstered by the loss of all direction. I currently have no knowledge of the next time that I can even feel the emotive sensation of learning. My brain feels full when I can learn. The new information that is gained and created. This passage of facts and infodumps that is the current experience is dumbing down everything. How can I find sustainability in this? Connections with everything else around me seem so nullifying and craterous. Empty rooms are unable to be filled because I can’t find residence. I feel no sense of home; I feel no sense of self. I feel the obligatory nature of my relationship with friends and family, and yet how can that be justified? I could not be allowed to get up and disappear and yet the strongest desire comes from the want of this. To erode away into myself and my thoughts, while isolative, is exactly what I am and have been. I think. I always think. Endless streams of moments quilted through strands of thoughts and feelings that I can feel. The void of return kills my understanding of myself. 

Can I be addicted to loneliness? To utter isolation? To complete sovereignty?

I feel at a loss. I have no thoughts like this. No consultation to feel differently. What is normalcy?

If I had grown up differently and had understood self settlement, this may just be a moment of struggle; a moment of hardship. But this is horrifically abyssal. This is forever falling into nowhere. I am losing breath as if I was wound by ropes that continually tighten. A silent devastation. The constraint leaves no room for movement. A caged animal that has been beaten into obedience. Reinforced by the basis of what should be the correct response to all that I am supposed to be participatory in. I am in mental shambles and always in constant disarray. Forced to put everything together in a somewhat clean package that can be presentable to the people around me. Perhaps I wish that no one thought of me; that no one cared about what I did, or where I go, or what feelings I have within the recesses of my mind. It feels like I am not even allowed to feel this way, but can I combat my own internal reality? 

I am bound to the humanism of being human and the inconsequential particulars of being involved with it. Spinning around on the planet and acting like we are a mass to be reckoned with and yet seem to lack any real awareness of our true insignificance. I don’t write that in a defeated way, but rather how could I cling to such surface level conceptualization when it breeds nothing but inflated arrogance? I just want to create the worlds I believe in; on paper, in sound, in sight. Everything else is just physical stimuli and brain waste excess that has to be tossed away to continue onto the next ploy. I can not stoop to such a lame way of being, and being coerced into this by the routine of it all is entirely demeaning. This is artificial. This is devoid of the certainty that is grasped by understanding.

Everything in all that I have written makes the clearness of how numb I am to emotive response fully visible. I am conditioned and unstable in the sense that stability in myself has never been real. I am sick of trying harder for the same result and have no desire to continually achieve something I know to be impossible. I feel my own inadequacy in this. Am I really the problem?

Scars.

I remember myself at 12 having little to nothing in self love or self respect. Lost in my own process of surviving. Continually doing what I could to get through the day, till I could get home and completely escape to worlds I didn't have to be self actualized. To sit on the roof of the garage and write about dense forests and magic within nature. I would read the same books over and over just so I didn't have to feel anything else around me. I couldn't even see anything past the desperate desire to be swallowed whole into a world that I could just be free in. These days were filled with sunshine in contrast. I'd sit outside and listen against the hedges around my house. Listening to conversations, atmospheres, and anything that was not my thoughts.