B Writes

(adapted from my journal entry this morning)

Stories and essays do not necessarily need to be some transcendent metaphysical Athena springing fully formed from Zeus’ mind; I am allowed to write absolutely anything and it will start sloppy! A friend of mine who studied in Rome with me once said something incredibly insightful about the way that she only became happy after she stopped stopping herself from doing things out of some internalized sense of shame/perfectionism/properness. It’s absolutely true; I basically hid from myself and my ambition during college because it was from moment-to-moment easier than the ‘risk’ of putting myself out there and seriously being perceived and evaluated, even though in a long-term sense that exact behavior is what transforms the activity from something to avoid and build up anxiety about into something that is itself easier from moment-to-moment. (Yes, yes, we’ve all read Brene Brown B, move on!) 

I trapped myself in a cyclical pattern of abusing substances to arrive at acceptance of (or perhaps more accurately something closer to ‘no longer being actively uncomfortable about’) my ever-shrinking comfort zone, which, in turn, made those substances an integral part of that ‘safe’ feeling. By the end I was taking hours-long baths (a strange self-imposed Marat arrangement) where I just opened my skull and poured in as much content and substances as possible, becoming numb and dumb while directly feeding my greatest fear of potential cognitive decline (Flowers for Algernon deeply impacted me when I read it in school) and enabling my evasion of all there was to do in college, whether it was required or otherwise. That I graduated is a testament to both my ability to do the work at the last possible moment and an exceptionally-lenient academia groaning under the weight of college-as-job-training and student disengagement which has only accelerated since Covid school shutdowns. Of course given this context regarding my experience as a college student a reader might roll their eyes at my attempted treatment of the topic of academia (or frankly anything at all), and that may be valid, but only by expressing these things can I move forward.

While the substance abuse was idiotic and wasteful, this cycle was rendered nigh-inescapable by my rampant phone usage, a different sort of addiction altogether. I think imagination had almost vanished from my life because I was constantly consuming content, often uncritically. I effectively reprogrammed my brain – no more silence, no more being alone with my thoughts, no more boredom, no more creativity. I think I am stuck writing ‘I can write about anything I want’ on here as a constant reminder to myself because I effectively destroyed my ‘creative’ mode. To be clear, consuming art and the various things one might call content is not some fundamental evil, it just needs to be balanced with space for oneself. I deprived myself of an inner world because I was horrified of what I might hear from myself; I didn’t want to understand, I wanted to be distracted. I am saddened by the fact that it ever got that way. Something interesting to point out / consider – I think there’s something important to be found by considering the limits of video games as a creative storytelling device. Because the game, even an open-ended one, had to be created by somebody, it fundamentally has limitations; creation means both defining what something is and is not. I kept turning to games like Crusader Kings II to try to tell nuanced stories and express myself, but I ultimately lost the illusion of storytelling after having seen every event and becoming far too good at the game as a game – on the level of manipulating mechanics, etc., to resist losing the roleplaying element pretty quickly. Some combination of my dependence on other peoples’ vehicles for storytelling and endless (and often simultaneous) consumption of content ‘noise’ led me to lose basic human parts of myself like boredom, creativity, and awe. I didn’t understand that I couldn’t find a solution to this problem by forging deeper into the internet; I had thoughts like ‘why can’t I find thoughtful ‘content’ about the things I really love?” and ‘what I’m looking for isn’t online,’ yet I continued to uncritically consume so much of the internet that it (and video games) became my ‘base state,’ so to speak. If I weren’t in the bath I would be playing a video game while listening (“listening”) to a Youtube video, and there was no reprieve or peace. The key was/is to TURN AROUND, to stop forging deeper into the internet and becoming more stuck and displaced from my humanity. I think on a number of levels we need to ‘turn around,’ (turn around from investors to workers and citizens, turn around from demagogues and towards the public, etc.) so get used to seeing that phrase in my writing; it is the most succinct expression of my current belief system.