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I want to continue thinking about instability. Although I felt strikingly unstable several weeks ago, recently I've felt relatively stable; but the word "relatively" does a lot of work in the present case.
Last week I slept for around three or four hours every night. (One night, I didn't sleep at all.) Last Saturday afternoon I had a meeting with my writing group, and had slept so poorly the night before that I decided to have a caffeinated drink to help me feel more alert while they critiqued a long piece of prose and poetry which I had submitted to them. Unfortunately, I felt so poorly slept, and the caffeine made me feel so anxious, that I wandered around between shops for a few hours trying desperately to feel sane and comfortable. I felt several times as though I might pass out, or panic; I felt quite as though I were terribly hungover.
When I reflect on my overall well-being, I sometimes fear that I need to become healthier and more stable overall, not primarily because such a development seems good in itself, but because prospective romantic partners might find my health difficulties burdensome and unattractive, and persistent, long-term loneliness terrifies me. But I also think that even just to acknowledge this fear thickens it somewhat, makes its object all the more likely; so that I feel compelled to remind myself that, although my well-being is less stable than I would prefer, still in many ways I function very well, and steadily become better at maintaining and expanding that degree of function.
Since I last wrote, I think I've gained a little insight into what my crush thinks of me, but still only so little as to leave me in darkness. I mean that, although they certainly seem to think fairly well of me, and pay me certain kinds of reassuring compliments, I never feel clear as to whether they anticipate any romantic possibilities whatsoever; whereas I seem to think of nothing but.
I think I must have a very demure romantic imagination. The height of my fantasies consists in being made to feel loved and needed and wholeheartedly desired; every other aspect feels like a kind of costume. So long as the actors feel things fully, they may wear any clothing they like.
I have an impression that the possibility of genuine love often frightens people.
Something I try to explain to other people, although I feel as though I often fail, is that I come from a depressed family. Both of my parents and my one sibling all seem to me profoundly depressed. Their views of the world, of their lives, and of the value of life in general strike me as consistently morose and fatalistic. They very rarely express anything like hope or excitement for the future. This does not characterize how I feel about the future, but I find that spending a lot of time with my family makes it much more difficult for me to do away with the sense of despair and futility which sometimes comes over me. I spend a lot of time with my parents, naturally, since I still live with them. I consider myself largely responsible for my own emotional well-being, and confide very rarely in my family as to anything of particular importance to me. For instance, only my sibling knows that I even have a crush, and that seems the extent of it. I never tell any of them about the worst developments in my well-being, because I don't trust them to help me. I don't feel all that bad about this situation. If any other member of the family had to serve as this kind of buffer of reliably neutral attitude, I doubt that they would succeed.
I mention the above, not as a bid for pity, but rather for empathy, because I think it genuinely useful in understanding who I am and how I look at the world. For instance, I feel very insecure as to my own vitality, the strength of my soul, so to speak, because it feels insufficient to make my family happy, even though I rationally understand that this should never be the responsibility of a single person. In many ways, I feel as though my parents, my mother in particular, more or less unconsciously raised me to become something of a doormat. A general rule for some time in my house has been that other people's feelings (again, principally my mother's) rank above my own by default. I'm sure they would find this idea abhorrent, and would expressly deny it; and to a certain extent I feel sure that I exaggerate. But I have come up against the limits of familial empathy too many times, and too painfully, to doubt the causal centrality of the gist of what I've discussed.
Mentioning all this, at the risk of over-sharing, nevertheless seems to me like responsible philosophy, because to exclude such personal details as these could only produce an unhelpfully partial picture, especially in considering issues of particular importance to me, such as love and stability. If I develop and present to you such and such a view about the world, or about life in general, then it only seems fair that I supply, to any extent whatsoever, my context. I would never feel comfortable pretending to objective and unfeeling knowledge of important dimensions of life. Hannah Baer wrote in 'trans girl suicide museum' that she feels that people should write fewer essays conveying thoughts and more conveying feelings, and I suppose I must agree with her, since I write in that spirit. In any event, as much as I generally trust my intellect, I care far more for my own feelings, and especially for cultivating the kind of personhood which feels everything fully, and engages with the world as much on a feeling as a thinking basis. In the ideal case, someone reading these blog posts may find that some of their thoughts develop contiguously with my own, and that consequently what I write may give them some reassurance, consolation, or even inspiration as to the problems of their own personhood.