Introduction
I don’t read as much as I should. It’s something that i’ve felt disappointed in myself over. Yet, I’ve come to absorb the idea that I’m playing a part for the silent observer in my head. The same silent observer in everyones head.
Executive control is something that seems alien to me, in the sense that it acts in the most unexpected and unusual ways. The same control hurls me out of bed in the morning to do HIIT, while the very same control decides to let all my hobbies, routines, and alike fade away. It’s curious, confusing, just eerie really. I don’t get it.
No, this isn’t writing about how my problems, or the alike are the fault of some third party. Some unregarded entity. It’s still me. Me.
This piece is a way to see if I can find something both I and the silent observer can agree upon. Though, I won’t really know if it will. I can hope.
I don’t expect this to be viewed as anything other than something that appears to be like crashing out. I think that’s the mode of activity for this.
Health
I seem to be at some crossroads here. I’m 26 now. What becomes of me, my body, and other aspects - it happens now. The feeling of the activation energy required here, seems to be pointing at what I describe as a lack of immediate understanding of the outcomes of the present. What is pressing? What do I need to confront? How can I start to take care of myself more?
I seem to let things, slide. Let them become stable. Find peace with them. I don’t really understand why this, or that happens. I just find ways to move forward.
Why don’t I go to the gym anymore? Why did I slip up on my routine? Why does food avoidance still linger ever so softly?
My aspirations for you:
- I’d like if you took better care of your body.
- I’d like if you learned how to make better food choices.
- I’d like if you took care of your ailments better.
- I’d like if you stopped living as if they weren’t there, until they aren’t there.
I’d like if you stopped avoiding these things, for some chance that you’d discover something dire and lose your desire for the future. You’re afraid to start, because you’re too scared of failing. Too scared of thinking that you’re doomed. You’ve felt defeated before you’ve started. Why?
This - this isn’t how you show love for yourself. This is destructive.
Mind
You were gifted the most precious of instruments. Years of endless time alone, curious about the world. You read, you played for days with lego, you found interest in things that no one ever told you to. You were treated as an adult, as the adults towered over you.
Now, it feels as if you’ve lost sight of that. You’ve become complacent. Where did that hunger disappear to? Why did you let it?
Don’t be mistaken. You did let it. You must catch up.
You pushed yourself so far, that you don’t even recognize who you were before all of this. It’s almost pure foreign entertainment when you manage to drag a memory from your past life into the now. You don’t even get recognized as Irish anymore. The voice inside your head, it sounds like all the voices outside of it too.
My aspirations for you:
- Become kinder again.
- Become more curious again.
- Learn how to be friendly again.
- Find the smile that those old photos of you never left go.
- Find ways to start enjoying things again, even whilst you constantly find ways to panic about every ailment, crisis, or whatnot.
I’d like if you found who this new person you’ve turned into is. It seems that you and him are not really familiar. You both look back to who you were before this, to try find some commonality. You need to converge again.
Career
You’ve been lost, and found. You followed misguided attempts from those around you to steer you to something they wanted to impression on you. They did it with kindness, but without regard for their own intentions. Maybe they were lost as well?
Regardless, you transitioned from just finishing a law degree, to throwing yourself 8,000km away to pursue software engineering. You honestly didn’t think you could, but you did. You held on.
But, it seems that we’re lost again. You started in AI, you fell off. Why?
You used to wake up every morning and practice calculus, because you felt so isolated from your dream. You wanted something that for one reason or another - education didn’t provide for you at the time. You felt so alone without knowledge. You found enough of it again to continue.
We’re here now. The same junction. The same feeling that you are being a reference point for juxtaposition, as someone to be juxtaposed against. You are losing ground. You haven’t lost.
My aspirations for you:
- Give yourself permission to forgive yourself, for not being present in learning when it was plentiful and free.
- Forgive yourself for not being kind to your own attention difficulties.
- Give time to yourself, to develop - sharpen even, new knowledge.
- Be okay with feeling dumb again. It’s something that you are totally aware of feeling in the far past.
- Figure out what it is that interests you, you know that the genesis for this isn’t forced - but just unguided right now.
I’d really like if you stopped stealing time from learning new things, and giving it to things that are inherently destructive and poison for your future. Be that people, dopaminergically manipulating online content, indulgences - whatever.
Love
Let’s be real. You had shots on target. Real, no bullshit shots.
You didn’t realize there was something amazing in front of you, each and every time. You were so clueless. As much as it pains me to say, I want to forgive you for this.
Let me ask you something, honestly. Like, what is it that you really want? I know, I see you drift into things you have zero intention of continuing. You and everyone else in this generation of mine is lonely, so I get it.
You’ve gotten better, though still I have concerns of - your avoidance. It’s almost like a deep dark valley that you have to be within, with a new person for a little while. And then - out of nowhere, you start to feel it again. Why can’t you learn to trust yourself, and new opportunities - again? Why do you need to rob yourself of something nice, because you haven’t learned how to forgive and trust yourself again. Saying it twice was really important for me to get across here.
My aspirations for you:
- Stop wasting time in pairings that solve for our messed up generations emotional drive. Be kinder to your own use of that time.
- Learn to be more protective of yourself, from yourself. You need to learn how to stop self-sabotaging. So until then, yes.
- You’ve changed yourself enough to cover for things that are genuinely expected. Stop it from here on out, within reason - stop morphing to fit the pattern of the zeitgeist that doesn’t even know what the fuck it even wants to be anymore. Be okay with who you are, once you rediscover them.
- Focus on other things aside from dating. Open your heart a bit more, you don’t need to constantly be focusing on this.
- Find yourself some more friends.
I’d really like it if you stopped thinking of Love as something to be optimized. It’s something that should just be driven by pure happenstance, created by a more full - diversified life that you’ve to embark on creating.
Fear
Oh boy.
You don’t do well with this. Uncertainty that is. It always feels like you’re warning me that i’m on the edge of oblivion, and the emissaries of misery are about to start flooding.
From health anxieties, startup anxieties, everything is deadly and everything is going wrong. Though I do recall that this just became more pronounced when you moved to the US. Just interesting to note - did you give yourself time to regroup after such a big move? You really didn’t.
That’s what’s happening in your mind. A noisy alarm, good intentioned, ultimately noisy. What’s more is that you’ve recently become accustomed to the idea that the feeling of fear is completely devoid of the actual reason - but you seem hesitant to accept that.
You are conditioned to feel fear, caused by other fear - and you + your silent observer fills the space with whatever latent anxieties you have. It always seems that when it’s quiet, you find another thing to latch onto for a few weeks. Like a hot potato - you don’t learn how to properly reassure this alarm. It knows nothing but how its visceral affect on you is its sole contribution to your life. If you are in fear, it is doing it’s job - it thinks.
Even right now, as I sit here with weird miscellaneous dull abdominal pains inflicting the fear of death and zero-sum-games against myself - I wonder how I’ll ever get out of this cycle of fear ruining my quality of life.
My aspirations for you:
- It would be nice if you started accepting, to accept - does not imply agreement.
- To de-escalate the panic response.
- To be kinder to your dreams of the future.
- Not everything is fatal. But the simple act of your thoughts do not create reality. They’re not interwoven.
- To reduce these ailments where possible, with being more proactive for them.
So what is it going to be? Are you going to let yourself just be destroyed by the uncontrolled loop between me, you, and the observer?
Are you going to - maybe you; Look, maybe you need to give yourself permission to let go. You wrote in your journals about giving yourself, no - promising - yourself a break. That was over two years ago. You didn’t do that.
I hope that you do. I ask that you do.
Closure, Processing.
When I think back to an event that happened after I moved to the US. It feels exactly like the feeling you get, years later - seeing a message of a person you cared for, that you didn’t find the energy to reply to, with guilt and unexplained avoidance.
After awhile, it got easier to let it be left unattended to. So when you do think back to it, free of the consequences (relatively) of needing to make a decision or act upon it - it becomes deeply, intoxicatingly nostalgic. So these memories, they feel like they have this rich timelessness to them, as if thematically preserved - a memory that’s been carried with care all this time.
Why are you carrying them with such care? Does avoiding them preserve your inner narrative? Would unpacking them rupture what you think about the future, you?
I think in some ways, I’m carrying them because I don’t have the best ways to answer them. Like lego, I don’t want to open them until I can be sure that i’d have some length of time to properly spend time with them. There’s a deep sense within me, about wanting to avoid loss. I’m rather sentimental like that.
There’s a lot of things I’m not still okay about. From people I’ve shared an intimate bond with. To decisions of my parents. How I treat myself. Why I’m so difficult to become known to myself, and others. Why I didn’t have the right support growing up.
There’s a version of me that went in a different path. Had a different accent. Thought a different way.
I’m not him. I don’t want to be him. Yet, i’m not over him. Well, I mean me.
My aspirations for you:
- To not forget the entry point for beginning this closure. You seem to lose the start of this thread. It takes a moment like this to rediscover it. You’ll want it again some day.
- There’s a ghost of you, the someone that you weren’t. You seem okay with that. But you need to be sure.
- That you find the time to unbox these memories. To find the time to treat them with care, as you process them - in the same way that you’ve preserved them.
- Make peace with your past.
You’re me. And I am you.
I don’t know if both of us, or one of us changed. I know I changed anyway.
I changed into someone I wanted to be, and then someone I feel like i’m currently not. I want you to know that the choice is up to you and I. Are you going to allow me to slouch? Are you going to inject hysteria masked as helpfulness? Are you going to start working with me?
I don’t know if we are at odds. But I’d really like to be your friend in this. We’ve been at cross purposes for a long time.