|2 minute read|
I have a timer set for 15 minutes because I want to write, but I don't know what about. So I figured I’d write about anything, whatever was swirling in my mind, brave enough to step forward. Through my fingers, clicking the keyboard. My backspace button is broken. So is the number 9. Stuck down, not clicking back up. My computer is whirring. Text messages coming through, notifications that I forgot to turn off. He’s wondering how my day was going and I told him I was getting my hair done. Do you think that's too personal? Sometimes behind the pages of my words I feel a facade. But maybe protection is more of an appropriate word. A shield that I create. Yet it seems almost a double negative, using my personal, guarded thoughts as a bubble around me. Interesting to think about. I don’t know if this freewrite is a good idea, but I seem to have no other choices. My thoughts, my feelings, are so scattered that it seems hard to corral them into one focus these days. The tragedy of being human is not being able to do it all.
New paragraph and the idea is fragments. We are all fragments of our past, fragments of our ideas, fragments of our minds. But I picture patchwork, collecting slips of cloth, rough, dull, silk, sewing each of them together creating a blanket of all that we are so far. I collect fragments of people; one who used to drive me to the store, one who used to hold my hand in secret, one who used to live 5 minutes away from me. Do we ever let this go? I feel doomed to use my emotional experiences as my muses forever. But is this not artistic expression? For you are the only one who can form the words to describe your life, your experiences, your lasting thoughts. The world can never be saturated enough with personal insights. Tell me about your life, and I’ll hold it in the palm of my hand.
I never got into fantasy books for that reason. If it couldn't happen to me, I had no interest. I find the discoveries, the back doors of the real world, more intriguing. Perhaps that is why I will always be thinking of the book Normal People. The horror of it is the realness of the situation. How gut-wrenching is it to experience human emotions, real feelings that move you so much you want to puke, or cry, or scream. The horror of being human.
Mold in my mimosa. Or maybe I'm drinking my third cup of coffee. I could be lying in all of these, you know. Manufacturing ideas that fit within the general minds of the public. Tailoring myself to what I think everyone would like. But what a disservice to myself that would be. My problem with social media these days is the nonexistent authenticity. Selling bits of yourself to the world, no privacy. I think about filming skincare routines or makeup routines, but I love watching a video or listening to music and laughing at myself instead. Talking to myself. Being with myself. Broadcasting the moments in which you can be alone. It feels wrong to me.
Perhaps you made it this far or perhaps you haven't. I guess I'll keep it short in case it's the latter. But I wonder what you think when you read something like this. How absurd it is to know that everyone is a string of all of their thoughts, that someone you pass on the street is thinking a million things that you can’t even begin to address. The complexity of being a human.
I guess this is a reason why I started this blog in the first palace. To start to dissect and question and wonder about the intricacies of existing as we are. And I guess no matter if you reached the end or not, sometimes we don’t make sense, and I feel like we never really need to. Obviously I don’t. But I'm starting to feel better. A stream of consciousness I didn't know I needed. A brain dump I can use to free up space in my mind. We are only human, we can only hold on to so much nonsense.
see what I did there,
natalie <3
