Recently I got into a humorous spat with one of my closest friends of many years, who had no idea this blog existed. I could tell her feelings were hurt to some extent - why didn’t I think that was a thing worth telling, don’t you want your friends to be able to support you? And I do! I love my friends! But I don’t know how to tell my friends what I’m doing. Talking about my writing mostly feels like talking to brick walls - my closest friends do not give nearly as much care to the topics that I write about as I do and that is perfectly fine, they get paid much more than me to do much more important work than me. They do know I find the idea of having to market myself in any way, shape or form a challenge at best and a torture at worst. I hate copying and posting links on social media platforms, agonizing over the perfect sentence fragment to accompany said link, and sitting on my hands waiting for numbers to start going up after the hard work has been tossed into the void. Eventually I suppose this resistance to self promotion bled into my day to day life - I nearly burst into tears when a friend told (a slightly inebriated) me that it upset her to watch me refuse to give myself enough credit for the progress that I’ve made.

I find the disingenuous nature of promotion unrealistic to my personality. Reading Clare's piece about marketing oneself made me realize that some part of me holds some deep shame in attempting to be doing anything online anymore. I’ve been more or less Posting since 2018 and it never gets easier when I try to force it - peaks and valleys of output on this very blog likely give you some idea how good I am at writing when I feel like I’m just doing it to be Posting Regularly for Consistent Views.

When talking to a friend about this anxiety I jokingly quoted a line from Trap that’s stuck with me since I saw the film for the first time. In the scene, Cooper is befuddled at the realization he’d never considered how someone might escape from an upstairs room in his own home, that he had isolated the part of his brain that thinks through his process of killing from his family’s dwelling. You can see this uncertainty in how he’s supposed to navigate this particular space throughout the film’s third act as foil Lady Raven works to prevent his next killing, and you can see a genuine befuddlement in Hartnett’s eyes as he finally declares that he “never let the two lives touch.”

I had a similar moment occur to me after recently graduating from grad school. I spent the last year feeling more isolated from my cohort due to changes in my schedule, more exhausted due to the responsibilities I spent the last year juggling. Immediately before graduation I got this sinking feeling that a big part of my life was ending and I wouldn’t be able to carry much of it forward with me. We’ll see how that goes, I suppose. Now that the grand performance is over, the next big step is eluding me. I have a great idea for a book that a torturous creative writing class minced out of me, is that what I do next? I’m able to dedicate more time to this blog, is that what I do next? Jake and I are recording regularly for the first time ever (check it out!), is that what I do next? I’m waiting to hear back from applications I sent into schools for PhD programs, is that what I do next? Whenever I find myself in one place for too long I inevitably start spiraling with regard to what the hell I’m supposed to be doing.

I’ve never gone through the hoops of being diagnosed but there’s little doubt in my mind I contain some kind of neurodivergence, and this undiagnosed state of being means I’ve needed to create a lot of home remedies for things I don’t really know how to treat. Watching Cooper talk about the steps he takes to isolate and only minimally satisfy his murderous tendencies feels like watching a functional addict, a functional sociopath, show us his methodology. Cooper contains urges that go beyond anything socially acceptable of course, but his own perception that he’s got everything figured out through his process of compartmentalization resonated with me in a way that I never expected. Bifurcating different parts of my identity in different online and local spaces makes me feel like I move between different personas in my day to day, personas that aren’t compatible with each other yet are all necessary to continue to function as myself. This inability I felt for so long to let more than one side of myself be seen at any given time has been a detriment that’s lately hit its fever pitch. I’m working in my personal life to be more forward about all the ways that I spend my time. One life is enough to deal with.