18 thoughts on desperation
Please enjoy this smorgasboard of half cooked thoughts, which is all I shall have to offer until barcelona cools down enough for me to regain my faculty for depth and nuance.
consider, for instance, this note that I wrote on my phone on Carrer d’Elisabets (one of the best Carrers, mind you) at precisely 14.07:
what I think I meant is that all things take on a brutish quality when driven by fear of the opposite thing. Those who fear their own company are destined to choose partners or friends or even hobbies out of desperation, and act brashly, often resulting in allowing themselves to be treated badly by said partner/ friend/ hobby. (if you think a hobby can’t treat you badly, I invite you to consider the film Whiplash, or many major religions)
I fear being sad. I fear people thinking of me as sad, not as experiencing the emotion of sadness but as having sadness emit from me like a stench, being sad as a concept, the way a film is sad or the history of the Irish potato famine is sad. It might seem strange that I fear this so much when almost nobody has ever had that opinion of me, in fact my reputation is largely that I am freakishly peppy. That the fear may be driving some of the pep is become increasingly clear, in the way that all rot eventually makes itself clear when the ceiling beams begin to give in and your house begins to fall down.
Now that I am getting healthier, I am noticng that I am allowed to be grumpier, moodier, even melancholy, without risking being written off as sad. very interesting to note that the more you resemble what is considered “normal”, the more you are allowed to be human. We do not want to see humanity reflected in the unfortunate.
this list is not going the way I intended it to
in other news: when I opened up this app to write this, this happened:
Speaking of desperation, I am once again trying to improve myself
this time it’s different, I tell myself
“I don’t want to go on a healing journey, you understand” I told my therapist, “I want to get clean. I want to be held accountable, practically, I want to get sober from my own nonsense.”
“It sounds like you want to be punished” she mused. “You are surprisingly resistant to the concept of self care for someone who has had to do so much of it. You seem like someone who values respect… You respect your idols, artists- you respect music… How about we accept for a moment that you might not love healing, but that you might learn to respect it?”
This advice was very impressive when first presented to me. Less so now that I know she is exclusively subscribed to Anthony Scaramucci’s substack.
the other night I had a wonderful conversation with my friends Musa and Mariam at an all women DJ night in Poble Sec. Mariam sat on one side of me, Musa on the other, behaving much like the proverbial devil and angel counselling you in different directions. “As long as you’re happy, it doesn’t matter how chaotic things are” said Mariam “as long as you can stop when things start to get uncomfortable”.
Musa said she didn’t know if she agreed.
“Is comfort your goal?” she wondered, looking quite peircingly into my eyes.
“You strike me as someone who seeks out discomfort, who enjoys growing from it.”
It occurred to me in that moment that this was true, and that it didn’t sound like the attitude of someone altogether adept at making things easy for themselves.
when I told this to my mum she told me that I, too, should become a DJ/ spoken word performer. I couldn’t explain that I can’t become a DJ-stroke-spoken word artists because I already live dangerously close, as a person, to that scene in girls where Marnie sings “you can be my white Kate Moss tonight”.
My fear of being Marnie from girls does not have the same chokehold on me that my fear of seeming sad does. Take for instance the fact that I have a youtube channel, and that I have started to sing songs during my vlogs, covers that I occasioannly choose because they in some way speak to the content of my life, à la the tv show Glee.
screenshot from my most recent vlog, posted today! To “put oneself out there creatively” is terrifying because it reeks of desperation. Interestingly, my creative life has felt less desperate lately. What I mean by that is that I am turning to my various forms of expression to wander back into myself, to calm down, to feel peace, to nurture the inner world. It no longer feels like exposing a raw would to the universe and risking infection. I am already too raw on a day to day basis, and writing is becoming a way to bolster myself. To keep my hands busy and stay sane. Write substacks not text messages, reads the neon sign in my brain.
No, my desperation is not in the need for creative validation but in that scenario which I referenced in point 13. A situation that is in fact extremely uncomfortable. A situation that is rapidly ceasing to make sense. A situation that I think about far too much to describe myself as my own centre of gravity any more. For all of my passions and intensity I don’t know that I have ever been so in orbit of another thing. To get back my gravitational pull, that is the only next move.
to share my innermost thoughts with the internet might seem vulgar (indeed, desperate) to some, but anyone who has ever had to work out how to rewire the gravitational pull of their life will know it is often not something gracefully or elegantly done.
once again I love everything you write, I am now examining my behavior in relation to my fears and whether the angles become brutish and square, and what messages my own desperation is trying to tell me... there is wisdom in this. it is helping. thank you