Recorded 10.29.2024, about a week or two before I wrote Welcome Back. I decided on top of the edited audio log, I would edit a vlog style video to go with it. You can watch or listen, it makes little difference to me. I wanted to capture the feeling I get whenever I watch and listen to vlogs.

This is the first video I’ve made in awhile that feels like an accurate portrayal of me and my life at the moment, or at least a moment in time.

Consider this a concept overture, canvas priming, other poetic ways of saying overview.

Thanks for listening/watching <3

Transcript:

Side note. I'm putting away the dishes, so there'll be a bit of clinging.

I've been thinking a lot about intention, and I've been thinking so much about f*****g everything, dude. It's becoming, like, unbearable how much I'm thinking all the time. And sometimes I'll have days where I kind of just break down, and by sometimes I mean every other day at this point. And I'm trying to accept that I'm kind of in a flux period.

For context, I'm not a crier. I'm not really a crier. I'm also not someone that I consider to be a very emotional person. I'm not like a robot or anything. I got over that era ages ago, but I definitely… I just realized what I just said, and it doesn't really make sense without context, but you're not getting any. But I also kind of am still someone who intellectualizes how I'm feeling. But I've also worked quite hard over the past year to stop doing that because it became so detrimental to me that I have started to have, like, a lot of physical symptoms of what happens when you pent up so much stuff. So I highly recommend not doing that unless you wanna have, like, unexplained stomach issues, issues with muscle tension, and all sorts of fun stuff that, like, isn't really easy to figure out and cure easily over time. Just take care of your brain.

And one of the best ways you can take care of your brain is just letting things out and whatnot. But the thing with me is that I hate that s**t so much. I hate it so, so, so, so much. It drives me crazy. So I'm kind of left in an impasse at the moment where there's a lot of things I want to change and do, but I also feel very stuck. But I also am so hyper-aware of every single word or thought coming out of me because I'm so overly aware of how powerful all of them are. And I'm someone who has gotten really good at training my brain to look at life a particular way because I'm someone who has struggled with that a lot in the past, with not having a lot of control over how I'm perceiving the world around me. That being said, it makes it hard to string thoughts together when you are someone who is too good at stringing your thoughts together, if that makes a lot of sense. Like, I've become someone who's very good at creating a narrative, which makes sense. I'm a writer.

It's what I do, ideally and eventually for a living. But right now, I can't really be the full author of my own story or at least not in the conscious way that I'm used to. I have a lot of subconscious processes that are at play right now, and I've been wanting to document them because that is the kind of artistic work I tend to do. If you look back, and I'd suggest that you don't. But if you look back at years years of my work that I have released publicly through blogs and podcast episodes and visuals and, honestly, music, if you're very astute and good at researching.

You'll notice that a lot of my work centers around kind of this process of existential inquiry and what I call bloodletting, which is my funny way of explaining the process of just letting all the feelings pour out in a way that almost feels nonsensical, but then rings very true and accurate. A lot of my more recent poetic work is like this. Right now, I can't do either of those because bloodletting, again, my term for it, is so much, and there's almost too much blood right now for me to be gushing in a way that I'm comfortable with. Because even when I am very open and honest with how I'm feeling, it's in a way that's still comfortable for me because I understand it, and I can curate the lens that's being put through. And, again, you create a very specific narrative around stuff in yourself and etcetera, etcetera.

Inversely, I can't existential scavenge with you because I don't know what's going on. But I'm so intrigued by what's happening, and I find it deeply fascinating that I wanna document it. And I've been struggling to figure out how. So this is another pursuit. I've been trying to figure out the best way to document how I've been feeling and what I've been experiencing, all the deep sense of frustration and confusion that's kind of sitting in my body all the time at the moment.

I have a feeling today is I'm gonna cry again. And if not today, probably tomorrow. I can hear it in my voice, and I can feel it in my eyes and in my body, just grief. There's this perpetual sense of grief, and I kinda feel like an open wound, and I also feel like a really gnarly scab. I feel like a hard shell, and I feel just so soft, and it's too much antithesis in one space.

Sometimes I sit in moments like these, and it genuinely feels like my life isn't real or that I am not myself. The terms into modern psychology for this are depersonalization and derealization.

(I'm sipping tea if you are interested in the clinking. It's a blend of herbs we had gotten for what was it? End of summer. We had an end of summer dinner party, and we had gotten herbs to smoke for it. It was very fun, and the tea is very good.)

But as I was saying, in modern psychology, the terms for this feeling are depersonalization, derealization, all under this umbrella of disassociation or dissociation, which I struggled with habitually for years now. But this feels very different than the dissociation that I'm used to because usually dissociation, I've come to understand, is my brain's way of protecting me from stress by kind of putting me in the space where I have to go autopilot, where as right now, it kind of just feels so deeply distressing. Like, I'm stuck in this box that is my life, and I can't break out of it.

And I also have to do self determination things of taking purposeful action and making purposeful changes or sticking to purposeful routines or values or whatever to where it feels simultaneously like nothing matters or holds real value that I'm giving it, and also everything matters and holds all the value. And I don't know how to hold both of these truths simultaneously. Again, antithesis. So much antithesis all bound into one perpetual feeling. And I imagine that you'll only get to hear maybe half a quarter of what this was.

And it probably won't be very long, but, I kind of need this. A lot of my art ends up coming back to when I need to do it, which is so funny because I was thinking the other day about the audience and performance, saying yesterday about this, in the line. And the best performances really only come out of not caring about your audience, which is so ironic. Antithesis. And right now, I'm kind of in in this place where I feel like someone needs to hear this.

And I feel like that person might just be me. I need to hear it, and I need to hear it documented and placed in a way that makes sense to me. And maybe listening back to this will help me feel seen or understood in some way.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe