I suppose the momentum of writing is like maintaining a bicycle chain, if too much time passes the chain becomes rusty and it becomes a lot harder to get it going again. I think any act of creativity requires some sort of a reserve, a reserve that I have been lacking in the recent weeks. I have been ill before but I still found the desire to write, but this time around it wasn’t just the lack of health that hindered me, but I found my mind and perhaps my soul running empty.
I consider this website an extension of me, or a more accurate version of me even. I put up a lot of socially conditioned behaviour in real life, but it is on this website that I attempt to express as much depth and complexity as I possibly can. I wouldn’t be able to express verbally even 10% of the stuff I convey in my writing – it is of no wonder my partner often asks why I sound totally different in writing and in person, and this is a person who has encountered the most intimate of my thoughts.
That’s partially why I find it difficult to maintain in-person relationships. I feel like most people wouldn’t be able to truly know me unless they read me, and asking people to read me is just too much to ask for. And if they are not interacting with who I truly am, then who are they interacting with? I find this difficult to reconcile, especially because I can only interact with people when I am well, but such a huge part of me is the person who is deeply struggling with chronic illness. I am sad, angry, resentful and dark in many moments of my life but that’s not what people see, and even that I resent.
I am hence thankful to my partner – I have never understood how essential it is to have a witness until these recent years, or at least at this point in my life when everything seems so shaky and transient, how much it means to me that my ongoing existence is being witnessed. That all of this is real, someone is seeing my pain, my struggles. I think this is the outcome of feeling not being taken seriously my entire life.
One of the things I think about once in a while is the existence of this website once I am no longer around. I think it is a bit ironic for a person who is chronically suicidal to care about her website’s existence after she’s dead.
Websites shouldn’t have to go offline once their creators are dead, yet they mostly will unless they are hosted on a free service that will likely sustain long-term into the future (i.e. wordpress.com or github). I believe websites will be future archaeological artefacts. I hope there’s a website graveyard where I can house this before I die. I mean it is one thing for my writing to die, but my personal learning library could have value? This is contradicting my metaphysical values that everything is ultimately transient and meaningless so I have to meditate on this a bit more.
p.s. if you still somewhat wish to hear from me when I’m not publishing as expected, I’m frequently on instagram stories, unless I’m very sick.
p.s.s. maybe I’ll try to write shorter and more transient posts like this – I’ve tried a few times previously, but I tend to very unmindfully reset myself into a “I only want to write when I have a point to make” mode, which is fine if that’s what other people want, but that’s not I want. I wish to capture the impermanent bits of my existence.