It sucks to sprain your ankle on December 31st. You enter the night puffed up with reflections on the past year and ambitious intentions for the new year. Around you dance the different versions of yourself you’re building and it’s like they already exist. You’re drunk on optimism and anticipatory self-esteem. Premature exultation.

And then you’re on the couch icing your ankle with the bag of frozen peas that just spilt all over the floor and that your drunk boyfriend is, unsuccessfully, sweeping up with a broom. Some peas get on the couch and roll against your back, but the cold jolts barely register as you look up sprained ankle recovery times. Bummer.

It’s okay though, I just needed to get that moan out of my system. Sometimes it’s good to treat yourself like a child and let yourself have a little tantrum. You’ll run out of sympathy for yourself soon enough and, irked by your own melodrama, try out acceptance.

Really though, it is just a small readjustment of expectations. It might even be an opportunity to rebalance things a little, make time for things I usually don’t make time for. I did get the Hermit card in yesterday’s Tarot pull. Plus, let’s be real, I don’t need my ankles to hangboard. If I don’t hangboard, it’s because it’s boring and I hate it and I’m lazy.

Anyway, confined to the couch by my ankle, I felt like reflecting on the things floating around in my head these days.

I need to push myself harder to find the pleasure hidden in even the most mundane of tasks. It’s something you have to look for and then actively practice, keep alive, one you find it. Hangboarding, for example. Instead of thinking of it as boring and hard, try to also recognize all the pleasure inherent to doing something that is challenging, that makes you feel stronger and healthier, that contributes towards your goals. Viewing things through that lens requires effort though, and a stilness of mind.

Stop caring so much about upsetting or annoying people. I used to try and soothe my anxiety by telling myself that I am my worst critic. That worrying I’ve upset someone is just a hangover from a limbic system formed out of a primal desire to survive, naked and afraid before the elements. This year though, I’ve realized that it is much more empowering not to care in the first place, with the obvious caveat that you should always strive to be kind. You’re not always going to be everyone’s cup of tea and that’s okay. I’m sick of never rocking the boat, of hiding my weird or ugly bits because I’m scared they’ll be judged or rejected or misunderstood. I want to be political, and to be political I need to be less scared of breaking the rules. I want to round up, one by one, the expectations society places on me and kick my feet and hit my fists against them. It’s not lost on me that most people learn this lesson in their teens and then spend the rest of their lives growing out of it, but I never learned that lesson, and I want to grow into it.

Jan 6

I’m feeling restless. Recently, the words “I am constantly waiting for something to kick in” have been rattling around my brain. I’m pretty sure CJ took a photo of a graffiti with those words a long time ago, it must’ve been around the time we were in touch with each other - 2012? It’s funny that that sentence has stuck for so long. I haven’t thought about it for over a decade, and now it’s the perfect encapsulation of how I feel.

Sometimes it feels like you go through life accumulating words, storing them in your brain for the moment your lived experience imbues them with a meaning previously locked away from you. You, hungry for meaning but not wanting to admit to it, appraise the words in front of you and what they can bring you. Maybe you squint your eyes and exhale cigarette smoke, shrug your shoulders. Maybe you’re leaning against a wall. Your attitude is one of “impress me”, or “impress upon me something worth remembering”. If nothing clicks, you move on. The words think “you’re just not ready yet” and “just wait”.

I think that what I’m feeling is this overwhelming sense that nothing I do matters because it won’t amount to anything meaningful. And of course I know that there is something fundamentally wrong about that line of thinking. Maybe you shouldn’t want to amount to anything. Maybe the frustration I’m feeling is that I want to express myself but nothing I do feels good. I don’t think I’m a good writer or a good artist or even a good video editor. I think what I have is a very sentimental soul and maybe an eye for aesthetic, but what does any of that actually amount to? I don’t want fame or recognition but I want to look back at my life and think “yes. I was alive”. “I did not let the confines and routines and comforts of modern life pacify me into forgetting about the mind-bending mystery and wonder of being alive in this very fleeting moment.” I’m also struggling with finding “my story”. My voice. I struggle to draw a box around my experiences, feeling immediately confined by it. When I try to think of what I want to say, it’s like trying to grab a ghost. When I try to interpret the world around me and my unique lens on it (ugh), I feel inadequate and narcissistic and bored of myself. I don’t know how to write about anything other than myself, and I hate writing about myself. I want to tell stories but I don’t know what stories I want to tell. What I’m trying to do in response is slow down and be patient. Hone the skills that might help me express myself (drawing, writing, photography, video editing) by doing them regularly and without any pressure. I am trying to slow down and reflect more, so that I might find what I want to write about.

There is something brewing in my head around sex and power, and the ways I’ve contorted myself to society’s ideas of femininity and sexuality. But it needs a lot of thinking.