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thought i'd jot down a few thoughts while re-reading my journals from high school...so many things that i am shocked to read because they remind me so much of my thought patterns now... i obviously knew that the way i am know was abstractly influenced by my childhood/young adulthood, but for some reason i hadn't put two and two together like this... it's so easily mappable... i wonder if i had actually gone to therapy when i should have, at like age 13, if it would have been easier to unlearn these obsessive negative thought patterns... instead of waiting 5 years without any real intervention and only then starting to work through them...
i had such a complicated relationship to authenticity when i was younger, and i guess i still have that. i had this innate fear of being a poser, of being 'fake' (whatever that means) that now i kind of just feel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about...like, there's no real distinction between doing something that you genuinely like and doing something because you want to be a person who does that thing...both are real? maybe that was more of a distinction in high school, where i felt that everyone just did things to be x way, and i wanted to be free from that, and be authentic and be myself, but also was plagued by what society would think of me, what people at my school would think of me, what men would think of me...
i thought it was a personal failing to be inauthentic, to do things to appear a certain way...in some respects i still feel that is true, wrt wokeness, or being cultured, or being smart...pretension is obviously still a turn off when it turns into snobbery, but maybe there's something kind of honest about it too...reminds me of conversations i've had with chris...
it's so painfully obvious that i was just too smart for my own good... and to be so smart coupled with extreme mental illness just means there is no way out...i would get stuck in these loops where i couldn't tell whether i was just depressed or whether i was faking my own depression for the attention, and then i resented myself for being so attention-seeking, despite the fact that literally no one knew anything i was going through...🥴 i remember it being so difficult for me to make sense of my thoughts, and to figure out which voice i should trust, which was legitimate, and which was the goblin brain, telling me i deserved to die... i felt absolutely crazy, and rightfully so, how was i supposed to know at 14 that i was supposed to only trust the good things coming out of my brain, and not the bad things, and that they were discernibly different, and not my fault? to feel like your brain is an unsafe place to be is so immensely tiring, and difficult to deal with, i have so much appreciation for my 14 year old self who somehow managed to come out of it all alive...
despite all the undiagnosed mental illness seeping out of these journals, i find it so admirable that i had such a capacity for wonder, for positivity, for imagination, for authenticity and raw emotion... i so desperately wanted this kind of imaginary life that i did not lead, an imaginary life that i saw on TV and read about in books, and felt so deeply rewarded when i felt that some of that imaginary life came true IRL, had such an appreciation and gratitude for it...i think deep down i probably was a really sweet kid, if only someone had given me the chance...
i keep asking myself in these journals – 'am i doing this for the story?' as if doing it for the story makes it somehow illegitimate, as if doing it for the story is somehow inherently unlikable, who cares if i was doing it for the story? the story'll be fuckin good! i'm living my whole ass life for the story! (ok, that's not true, but you know what i mean)
i had such a tenuous relationship with my own identity, and i guess that has continued till now, i really felt that way earlier this year. i was constantly second guessing whether i was doing something because it was me or because it was this fake person i was trying to be... i wonder if the drugs helped me get out of that a little bit...in retrospect i guess i have so much more selfhood now than i ever had, whatever i do is because i want to do it, even if i want to do it because the person i want to be would do it, and that's totally fine by me...
life is just about becoming the person you want to be anyway, isn't it?
or maybe life is about being 'me'...still haven't figured that one out yet 🧐
quote from when i was 14 – "i can't put my foot down and say, 'this is me.'... i don't even know who the fuck i am." almost as if i wrote this at 21, a whole 1/3 of my life later, in the depths of my existential crisis that somehow i assumed was ahistorical, without precedent, not part of linear time...what was i thinking? i have always struggled with this...
talking about starving myself – "if i don't lose weight this way i will take a knife and cut it all off myself." where were all the people in my life that were supposed to help me not feel this way? i think it is such a grave injustice that we can just let literal children feel this way about themselves...with no one around...whose job was it to make me feel okay? "i just want to pluck out my teeth with a wrench and shred the skin from my face and tear out my eyes and throw them at people... everything is a motherfucking lie"...
HAHA found such a cute poem about san francisco...it's sweet to read about how much i vested in this city by the bay, now just a place i live and work, and back then it was such a dream for me, a representation of what it would look like and feel like to 'get out' of the suburbs...it's so cute to read about how some random thing will happen, like moshing at warped tour in 2012, and then im like "this is the greatest day of my entire life" haha
"everyone is just trying to feel sorry for themselves"... i feel like this was more true in high school than now, maybe teenagers are inherently more attention-seeking, maybe that's the whole bit, the economy of attention in high school... i think that's why i had such an intense revulsion to looking like i wanted attention/sympathy...everyone in high school was just playing oppression olympics all the time and i wanted no part of it, i thought it was moronic and crass. despite the fact that objectively speaking i think i would have been a pretty strong contender...there was some sense of 'acceptable' problems – not sleeping because you were studying, getting a bad grade, those were 'acceptable' problems that merited sympathy at the lunch table...physical abuse, self-harm, intense shame? unacceptable...don't bring it up!
it makes me so sad to read the kinds of things i've written about myself...i had the world's most uncharitable view of myself, and for what? why? who told me i had to hate myself so much...it makes sense now why the other day my therapist asked me to name 5 things i liked about myself and i went briefly silent...as if anything i thought of would only be sometimes true, or open to interpretation, or an outright lie...i said i thought i was smart, and creative, and empathetic, and passionate, and fun-loving...and when i said it i felt it was true, and then i felt resent that i couldn't hold on to those as aspects of my selfhood, and that just as soon as i said the words they floated away...
going back to school for sophomore year now... "i hate everyone and if i watched them burn i wouldn't feel a thing. except maybe [redacted] and [redacted]. the rest of them can go to hell."
i always had a thing about october, i always hated it uniquely...i wrote "october is grief. october is when everything really started going wrong. that's why i can't listen to any song from october without feeling sick." little did i know... 🧐
christmas bores me, i feel no attachment to it and it feels like just any other day except worse because you can't get coffee
yesterday i talked to my grandma and she told me some things about my ancestors... she said her grandparents were from a village called Muradabad and they were farmers(? need to get the translation) and probably they did not wear shoes... i told her it would have been real interesting for me to meet them, me with 30, 40 pairs of shoes, all different kinds of shoes, a life so completely different...
the missionaries took her parents from the village and taught them English and educated them and converted them to Christianity, and then her parents were teachers, and apparently they would all get together on the holidays...
i asked if my dad knew her parents and she said yes they met, they didn't die until my dad was 6ish... my grandpa died of heart failure apparently...
i told my grandma that when i go to india i will go to muradabad (where she has never been) to see where her grandparents used to walk without shoes... she said the people there live in mud houses and the ground is also mud and i said 'no carpet?' and she laughed and was like there aren't even rocks let alone carpet...
then we talked about elephants because i thought it was funny that they just walk around on the street there and she said in india anyone can just purchase random animals like elephants and bears... i was like why do the elephants just walk around on the street and she's like how else is someone supposed to get their elephant anywhere... she said they get intoxicated by the smell of alcohol and can go crazy and mess up people's houses... she says people in the villages put their children on bears because they think it is auspicious...
i haven't thought in a while about how covid fucked up our whole plan to go to india but feels sort of cosmically unjust... but who am i to complain when thousands of people are dying every day... at least i get to be alive... or something...
i feel ill and i cant find my ketamine / listening to wwwings and elliott smith and feeling sullen and misunderstood / life is really one hell of a ride...
im high and yoga today made me think about unpleasantness, or unpleasant experiences – I feel like whenever I am in a flow (lol) I'm totally zoned in, im not waiting for the unpleasantness of exercise to end or worried about it, the unpleasantness if any is just part and parcel of the whole experience, and anyway, its good for you, it makes you strong, and that reminded me of what it was like on shrooms, and not feeling the anxiety or the worry about the unpleasantness, just feeling the unpleasantness, and somehow by feeling the unpleasantness it made all the unpleasantness go away, as if the initial unpleasantness was just the fear of unpleasantness itself... im sure it was physically unpleasant, but there was no judgment of it, there was no worry about it, it just was, and there was some trust and faith maybe that it would not be, but was, but mostly I wasn't even thinking of the future, it was such a present experience and actually maybe it freed me from a lot. the worry about the unpleasantness...it took me basically the whole of quarantine to figure that out, why I had such a bad trip in march... and then I saw it everywhere, in the way I took trips, in the way I was afraid of shots, fearing my grandma dying, in the way I kept chickening out of skating off a curb, in the way I feel anxiety about everything... I remember being scared while tripping to even acknowledge the thought, whenever I went there I felt like I was going crazy, but now it seems so commonplace and obvious... the thing is never so unpleasant as the fear of the thing... and if you can just find a way to put away that fear, everything is okay... I can handle the thing...I can handle every thing... it is the fear of the thing I cannot handle...
but how have I been handling it? I'm not totally sure tbh... maybe though yoga... finding the flow... through shrooms... not even having the wherewithal to address the anxiety, just being flooded by feeling and intensity... maybe through deliberately forcing myself into painful or unpleasant activities with a sense of curiosity and kind of perverse mirth... but some things I haven't been able to surmount... I still can't skate off a curb...
this weekend I slept over at Darren's and it was really nice, we listened to records and got drunk and talked a lot, and in the morning Jon made omelettes and we had some leftover latkes with coffee, and then we went to San Francisco to go record shopping, we went to a few stores and watched the sunset from Alamo sq park, and the yuppies there irked me but it was a beautiful sunset, like the one Aditi and I watched there back before we left for college, when we walked all the way to Hayes valley and back, and got wine drunk in my backyard and talked about what it would be like to move away, something we'd waited for for so long, and anyway the sunset in Alamo was perfect, kind of sad, in a beautiful way, and when we were driving there across the bay bridge around 2pm I thought about a lot of things sitting in the backseat, so many things I thought I'd write about later but now can't particularly remember, something about how every time I drive on the bay bridge it hearkens back to every single other time I have, playing hyphy in high school, driving back from oakland just a little too high, going into the city with my mom for errands, returning after a long trip...such a beautiful city, with so much history, and so much allure, it makes sense so many have flocked there for decades and decades, like I always say... i really live for those moments, I think, kind of an eye of the hurricane, where everything kind of slows to a stop for a little bit and feels real simple and nice, and I felt really grateful sitting in the back of Jon's car to have such good friends, to be having such a sweet sunday, to be able to enjoy myself 'during this time'....it's easy to feel a little bit of guilt but the guilt is a bit of a tired feeling, more im just appreciative and count my blessings, and know it is not always like this, but the fact that it's not makes it even more special, and anyway people are always gonna die and there will always be tragedy, you might as well close your eyes and feel the afternoon sun on your face, "the sun will shine in my back door someday"...
in Los Angeles we hotboxed my car outside our airbnb and listened to bloccd by dmvu and it felt like high school
in Lido we went to the party on saturday nights at the barracks and we had to catch the last ferry back to Venice but we had to pee so bad and the cool British girls and I sat on the edge of the harbor and peed into the water at 4am and I remember thinking I was too drunk to be scared of falling off the edge but if I fell it would really have been annoying and potentially fatal, the last ferry back to Venice was always interesting and walking drunk back to my apartment from the terminal on the cobblestone always felt important and grand, there was a cat there that used to live in the alley next to our apartment and I'd see it there drunk walking home in the middle of the night and id sit with it and pet it with the moon overhead
in Chicago we went to the g jones concert and darren and Louis got kicked out for pouring GBL and 2c or something in our drinks, and it was obvious Nikita and I were in on it but for whatever reason the guard kicked them out but let us stay, and in any case I was happy about that because it was one of the sickest shows of my life, and when I left the venue I told Conor and Nikita I felt like I was in a video game like I could just jump up on top of a building
in Berlin Catherine and I went to soda and took so many tequila shots and got a picture with the bartender and were rejected by some men but then dfmo'd others and then took a taxi home but Catherine was too drunk and so we stopped and walked half of the way home, and I think maybe we also bummed a cigarette outside before Andy left
in Berlin the bouncer asked Catherine who was playing griessmuehle and she said robin Tegel but they still let us in
in New York we went to an art party with my friend and all his friends felt urbane and cute and integrated and we did some acid outside on a whim then went to a club where they played jungle and acid house and I kept having to go outside because I couldn't breathe, and everything was red and we talked to some people outside who seemed like they danced every night, and zach and I talked about it and decided we couldn't do that, and it wasn't our project
it's not our project but chris and I always talk about doing the rave kid thing for a week, just to get it out of our system
in Los Angeles we went to the New Years rave and I felt animal and cool and it wasn't a 100% positive experience, tripping never is, but it was so much fun and I wonder why tripping in march wasn't like that, and instead was paranoia inducing, scary and chaotic, sense overload, anxiety and fear... I worried I was broken...but now I feel mostly fine...
I wonder if it would be nice to go to festivals with a group of girls...
in San Francisco I remember waking up and my best friend was locked in a room in my house with a guy who was never not a bad influence and they were completely non responsive, and we kept banging on the door and trying to wake them up and we could see them through the door from the patio and I remember thinking they were dead, both of them, and the sheer terror of it all still haunts me, and then finally somehow we kept trying to bust open the door and we were able to get in the room, and they woke up, and they were ok, and I was so late to my job in Oakland and I was so, so, so angry with them, and felt sad and confused and hurt and scared and went to my job and explained why I was late, and the guy who I worked with was so nice and told me if I ever wanted to talk he knew a whole lot about addiction, and besides he was voluntarily homeless for a little while in the haight...we hate that guy in bed with my best friend, last I heard he works at a gas station now, he got his teenage girlfriend addicted to black tar heroin, good riddance to him...I hope he is better now...
dream about dancing through golden amber arcades next to what maybe then was a school, first in italy maybe venice then in india (as if i know shit about what india is like), fancy tall stained glass windows dividing the inside and outside, really nice, so incredibly beautiful, felt like now or maybe i was in a storybook but then it became old, really old, some sort of atavistic dream where i felt like a young, exuberant little girl from like 400 BCE feeling an unadulterated joy, then i cried and cried maybe tears of joy and relief at how outside of time i felt...but i was me but also i was the girl, but somehow they were the same...
dream about my dad dying, i got to say goodbye, but the dying didn't end, it kept going and at some point i wished it would end, and i felt guilty and helpless...
my cousin and i keep going to the starbucks drive thru to get holiday drinks...she gets a venti iced white chocolate mocha with vanilla sweet cream cold foam and extra mocha drizzle (verbatim), and i got a medium chestnut praline latte with nonfat milk and no whip, it tasted stale and watery and not in the enjoyable way i've written about before, but kind of a travesty, a mockery of that kind of cup... i remember specifically meeting my best friend in that parking lot in high school and opening my trunk to show them my spray paint and then we snuck along the creek to the train tracks...i remember my tag was isis and that was before, you know, ISIS, and then later i thought, fuck...haha
i haven't been back there but have been meaning to...i wonder how much is still there...i wonder if kids still go out there these days...i wonder what those kids are like...suburban anomie...
i wonder what the common trait is of kids who do shit like that...thinking about me and chris...hey chris, wassup if you're reading this...lol
like this but the archways were thin glass, it was maybe late afternoon, and everything was glowing, like dustlight, when you can see motes floating lazily in the air...
god I love the Grateful Dead...you get dummy high and put on scarlet to fire Cornell 77 and tell me you dont feel it....
Nancy Pelosi & the grateful dead
how come there's no paper called 'history of the wook'? I think I might have to write that one
I JUST found out that Ken Kesey, stewart brand, and Ramon sender co-produced the trips festival... are you kidding me...it happened during Aquarius szn tho... just had to mention... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
okay...Ramon sender was in the bruderhof cult and somehow his daughter died there and he wrote this?
also im gonna go fully fucking insane if my wifi doesn't start working properly in the next 24 hours
my best friend used to say 'life is ruff'...
i decided today that i have to get out of here. it makes me sad that i can't be at home and enjoy it like a normal person. it's always fine for a little bit but then i start to feel like i'm in the lotus casino from percy jackson... where they go in and then they're trapped and can never leave...i wish more than anything i didn't feel that way, but i do.
my cousin is 16 and when i see her she looks sullen and pale. she's studying all the time and when i think of her in my head i think of someone older than me. it's bizarre for me to see what this place does to people her age. i wonder what people thought when they looked at me when i was 16. i wonder if how sullen i looked correlated to them with how smart i was, and the college i would get into, and the amount of money i would make when i was 23. all the joy and youth and exuberance is sucked out of her face. i don't see a 16 year old there anymore. it makes me sad.
when i go to the dentist she always remarks about the high school i went to, without fail. i wish she didn't think so highly of me.
i turned off all the lights in my room and did some yoga, i hit the bong cuz i was feeling small and went outside to stand in the rain. it felt unfriendly and cold, and from here i can hear the rush of 880, and my neighbors cut down their lemon tree and now instead of a dense growth in the corner theres just more purple hazy nighttime sky, and you can see some lights beyond where the tree used to be and it makes me feel naked and exposed. i remember sitting out on my stoop on sunday nights in high school and writing about how unhappy i was, then sneaking out to catch the sunset from the street. i remember we used to sit in the middle of the road to tempt fate because you can't see both ways.
the rain was less nice than a few weeks ago in san francisco when zach and i took some shrooms on a whim and ran around outside. the wharf rat blues were not there tonight, there was only an eerie stillness that made me think of death.
my grandma is dying, both in the sense that she is actually dying and in the way that we are all, obviously, dying. i only feel the desire to spend time with her when she is feeling ill. i told her the other day that old people are supposed to be real chatty and tell their grandchildren stories about how it used to be way back when. she just gave me kind of a funny smile and continued to watch tv. i didn't really know what to make of it but i didn't ask again. i think she feels deeply sad that i don't spend enough time with her.
the only thing to do in fremont is go to peets and get coffee. i think it an amazing feat that we were able to find so much to occupy ourselves with in this suburban wasteland of a town. we must have been really desperate.
we used to go the walmart parking lot to listen to music in our cars and fuck around. my best friend rode a tricycle all around the walmart and the employees were chasing them trying to get them to stop. we bought $5 boys polos and ugly sunglasses and took pictures in the greenhouse department while it was dark outside and we had nowhere else to be.
all along i guess the vibe was kind of depraved. i feel it most acutely when i read my old journals, where i drew a cartoon character hanging from a noose when i was 13. seeing this disturbed me so much i put away the journal for a bit. aside from its prescience it really made me sad to think that i was ever so deeply messed up, with no one around.
aside some actually fairly intelligent musings on conformity and pretension for a 13 year old there were silly drawings, just me being 'random' i guess in the way that was trendy for kids at the time. it was funny to see how obviously immature i was in so many ways, but also so observant, cynical, and rebellious. it was also interesting that these entries provoked so many memories that i had completely forgotten about - for instance, when i wasn't allowed to go to the midnight premiere of the hunger games. its funny what kinds of things make it into these records.
i only finished the first full one, but there are probably 10-15 left. i think i thought it would be enjoyable to read them, or at least give me some peace, make some sense of time or memory, but truthfully i didn't expect them to be so disturbing. i think 13 year olds on the whole deserve to be more carefree and happy-go-lucky than i was. but then again, i don't remember anyone else being like that either...
the rain sounds beautiful from inside my room, but neither is my room beautiful to me right now nor is being outside in the rain. if i sit in here i can imagine it to be beautiful in contrast to my bedroom, without facing the reality that it isn't as nice as it sounds. i wonder how many other things i do that with.
sometimes i feel so old to be just 22, and sometimes i feel like i'm just a kid who can't do anything right. i'm always astounded by the talent with which i can screw up a perfectly normal social situation. i bluffed my way through college so hard that i convinced even myself that i'm confident, that i don't have even a flake of anxiety, that i'm normal, that i'm cool.
i feel like there's a war going on inside my head at all times. except briefly when we were in san francisco, and everything was ok for a little bit. sometimes i feel like i make problems out of nothing. i can't just be happy...
i value my friendships more than anything. i've been thinking about how my parents used to say derogatorily that i was 'obsessed with my friends' when i was in middle and high school, as if it were a bad thing to want to be accepted, to experience social life, to build meaningful relationships with people. the implication was always that my friends didn't care about me as much as i cared about them, and i think it sowed a seed in my brain that i carried with me to adulthood, a poison that makes itself visible only in the depths of my anxiety and despair.
i took a shower also in the dark, and remembered being scared of looking in the mirror in the dark when i was younger, because of bloody mary. i wasn't scared this time, though, and i thought about the emptiness inside me being the opposite of the sort of peace i felt on shrooms in san francisco. in some ways they feel very similar, in their stillness, in their all-knowingness, in their lucidity. but maybe in the most crucial way they feel different, one kind of nihilist and depraved, faithless and empty, hollow... the other sort of rich but not in an indulgent way, in a just enough way, and a contentness and fluidity that feels outside of time. something sort of beautiful, but maybe in a funny or odd way, and meaningful, but maybe in kind of a matter-of-fact way. i wondered how easy it would be to switch between them, or if it were possible at all, given how they feel within an inch of each other, just upside down.
Jacob's Ladder, Michael Willmann, 1691
Dance of Spring (Song of the Birds), Joseph Stella, 1924
Apotheosis of the Rose, Joseph Stella, 1926
Tree of My Life, Joseph Stella, 1919
exquisite!
