I spend a lot of time observing everything and everyone. There is a desire to understand the over arching gesture. More than just fixating on individual actions. This demands additional data. Everything is experienced and stored away for me to make sense of it later.

Sometimes I spend so much time observing everything outside of me, I forget to look at myself. What is my body even doing? What is she/it up to? How does she/it engage with the world? Sometimes I spend so much time looking away I don’t realize just how much chaos has emerged from all its dark corners.

My notebook says “WORK AND ROMANCE ARE HOW I ABANDON MYSELF.” I wrote this a while back after eating a weed edible in my old bedroom. The lights were turned low, I lit a grocery store rose scented candle and had tarot cards laid out in front of me. There was another page from that same night that said “I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO READ THE CARDS THE WHOLE TIME," and "I ONLY FORGOT I AM A WITCH."

I think that work and any kind of intimate relationship (not just romance) are how I abandon myself. And when I settle into that type of holding pattern I end up losing my sense of feeling capable and my ability to take care of myself. It's an act of refusal.

Friendship in Ridgewood has been very about relying on each other and that has been a really healthy exploration for me in general. I've grown up with clear understanding that I'm able to take care of the family once the patriarch becomes too old or dies. Additionally I’ve always been told not to tell anyone anything, and that I can only trust family members and no one else. Blood is on the inside. Blood is thicker than water. It's all water under bridge if it's Blood that harmed you.

The idea that needing anyone is sign of weakness and that weakness is shameful and no one must learn of your shameful weakness is pervasive in my family and South Asian culture. It also becomes an unhelpful concept when the foundations of the family itself has eroded away and the formula of who to trust becomes obsolete. You always have to have people you can trust, and the act is an exercise. It's a hard earned skill when you were supposed to just automatically trust people based on genetics and marriage certificates.

With all of this learned unhealthy self-reliance, I can swing into the equal and opposite insanity of not feeling capable of anything at all, and needing rely on everyone I know to somehow make me feel better. Growing up I was not taught to care about my emotions beyond carrying the weight and keeping it to myself. If I slip into depressive spiral-y states for sufficiently long then I can easily abandon the healthy coping mechanisms I learned from the years of therapy. It's not an impossible problem for me, it's just a reality that requires additional care on my part. I do have confidence in my abilities to be a healthy person - especially when I'm like not worrying about what people think of me obsessively.

But yeah, if I slip too much, I really do end abandoning myself. I turn to my childhood survival strategy which is to indirectly push people to care for me. I have this cute poster which is highly cringe, but I'll share it here since I wet the bed while I was sleeping the other night and told everyone about it. It says "CARE ABOUT BEING LIKED BY YOURSELF" And the image is like this blurry person doing parachute-stuff over sand dunes. Which now that I type that out, I realize this whole paragraph should be erased.

Side note on wetting the bed

I have these dreams when I have to pee where I head to the toilet to pee. But then I stop myself because I know it's a dream and I wake up. This time things were different. I was just so in the dream. I was already experiencing waking life (I wasn't) and decided to go through with it.

Anyways

Anyways.

Art Making

Dedicating meaningful time to art making happened because I was called to it, and I stuck with it because of how it very tangibly forced me to contend with my emotions and taught me to care for my wounded parts. Also I'll never forget when Jamie Branch (RIP) told me in an instagram DM that I should spend less money on rent and more money on studio which led me to finding this weird tiny room on prospect park east after my breakup for 850 bucks, and then suddenly having money for a studio. It was temporary.

Making art was so good for me that it didn’t matter that I was losing money doing it in NYC, willing to pay for my own travel on tour, and was navigating more uncertainty than I ever have in my life. It was amazing to cultivate a sense of possibility and to learn how to dream and build a world for myself. I think uncertainty is a lot like boredom. It's like being alone in the desert and seeing what emerges from within you.

But really I'm writing about how I need to take care of myself and how I can’t take my disciplines, like art, for granted. They exist for real reasons and have a direct impact on how I show up in the world, my self-esteem, and sense of well-being. I always end up forgetting how the disciplines got there, but forgetting happens because the discipline is working.

Without these practices life can be really fucking dark for me. I wish it wasn’t like that, but it is, and it's not something I can choose. I can only choose how I show up to it. I have to be my own light. Which reminds me of my deadname which "represents light, hope, and guidance, often associated with dispelling darkness or ignorance."

I am born out of my past. I am born out of my deadname. Even as I evolve as a person, or legally change my name, or make updates to my body, there is no way that my past can be made into an abstract concept. Everyone's past is a concrete inescapable truth.

A conversation with friends the other night reminded me that I had done ayahuasca some years ago before moving to NYC. There was a point in my life where I constantly sought out experiences like that. Silent meditations, or big acid trips, or backpacking in the PNW on a big dose of shrooms. Surrounding myself by all sorts of wonderful freaky people who are trying to sort something out inside themselves. I've met so many people this way, from startup founder types to recovered heroine addicts and people convinced they're going to become enlightened through meditation. Those experiences often end and you just kind of look at your life a little differently. Life is kind of like that, too. Like you don't need to do drugs or go on a meditation retreat (though these are all great ideas). Like sometimes the tidal force of life will just pull you down and hold you in deepwater until you learn to look at yourself.

Moon