Foreword: This is a collection of writing done in the summer of 2024. It is mostly unedited, and amateur, its a reflection on feelings of anxiety, identity, memory, and personal growth, exploring what it can feel like to continuously unfold/fold into increasingly complex versions of oneself. It takes itself too seriously in the end, an 18 year old trying to sound smart, feel smart. But its sweet. So TLDR its pretty personal. But also enough time has passed, it doesnt feel as personal as it once might have.

Flight. Light. Heavy. Drop

A short collection of words written on: on July 26th, August 27th, Oct 1 2024

It was the end. The end of everything I held dear. But now I hold other things. Often my hands are too heavy to carry–care more, and pockets need to be deeper. Keys, cigarettes, wallet, Passionfruit La Croix, vape, Ice Dirty Chai with Oat milk, Notebook, Pencil, Lighter, loose jewelry, iPod, and phone. Bag of holding. Little red purse, what used to be inside? Will it get folds, wrinkles, and scars? Will my face ever return to smoothness, or are bumps, texture, swelling, and pokey hair its natural state, the hormones present during puberty leveled it all out, and that was the one time I experienced smoothness. Simple. Calm Waves. Calm down–Deep breath.

At my work, this man comes in. He is blunt and rude and very socially aggressive/awkward. It must be my point of view as I am sure he sees himself as a man of common decency and full of kindness. Perspectives and false reflections that we perhaps thrust onto eachother. But yet, it still makes me feel uncomfortable, flustered, and triggered. He listens as I reread his order each time trying to make sure I didn't make mistakes, I know he can read his order on the other side of the POS but one time I made a mistake, and even though he didn't say anything very out of the ordinary I know he judged me. My body often enters a state of fight, flight, and fear. And I never know how to calm it. It is so disorienting, a dizzying cocktail that makes my hands shake, breath shallow, and mistakes made. It's frustrating and confusing how I can enter that state so quickly. I often dream of a simpler job, but what could I do that is simpler than selling/making coffee... Not much. I know I need to go back to school, but it's a lot. Feels like a lot I mean–lots of care. I remember being a kid with a heavy backpack and a large Baritone case when I was in my middle school band. When I set down the case and took off the backpack I often felt weightless, a moment of flight. I hope I will return to a moment of flight once more.

Light. I have had few (but enough) real jobs so I have been granted the ability to count them on the digits of my right hand. Each job has felt light, in the sense that each of them could be handled by almost anyone besides me. Simple jobs. Perhaps I do best falling into the patterns, shapes, and rhythms of already-designed cutouts. I slip in seamlessly. I want to believe I slip in seamlessly.

I write this to say, my first (1st, fərst) real job felt light. Felt easy enough, and felt shaped but shapeless, my first shift was the first night the restaurant was open to the public. It was, is, and will be for the foreseeable future an oyster bar. The building spoke to me, the food spoke to me, and more importantly, the people spoke to me. To return to the idea of shapelessness the roles of the job were not entirely laid out for me. I was a runner busser, so I guess I filled in the gaps between the Kitchen, Servers, and customers, I pretended to be each one to visualize ways to behave and modulate my ingrained innate being. In that way it was shapeless, I was not trained, yet I was expected to know what to do….

Expectations and social behaviors feel so complex to me. To be it is easiest to float away from my body. Mind disconnected. A bent antenna, a homemade radio with a crystal diode unable to pick up anything but whispers of my body and its relation to the nonliving objects around me.

Myself. I folded into the space around me. The people at this past job, my 1st job, unfolded me. A cootie catcher with a 100 (həndrəd) different fates, truths, lies, and mysteries under each flap. I became closest with two folks, a butch trans folk who shaped clay, cloth, and body, and a politically involved gentle giant who wrote poetry and was in grad school.

Each spent time talking to me and discussing my dreams, I asked them about their dreams, and now presently they are living them. I refolded. Back to square one, (wən).

I think I have a lot of feelings relating to the return to states of being. The return to a past self, past performance, past memory. I wonder if I had spent more time visualizing my future and less time returning to the past I would be still unfolded. Fates laid out, futures sprawled out, intertwined due to the faux woven nature of paper pulp, glue, and bleach that forms the paper reality of my written self.

Are dreams, a performance of an imagined meeting of past and future? An intersecting line of who I will and was to be.

Heavy. I often wonder. Wonder if the four-drink rotation I’ve formed is sustainable. Passion Fruit La Croix, Coffee, Grape Celcius, and Organic Coconut Water. They swirl. Forming a carousel of minimal fun, they can only get so far away from their original state. Circling a center point, equally closer and further from their point of origin until they reach an in-between point. What is that point called? The point on a circle that is directly across from another, a linear opposite? A reflective symmetrical image?

As I wrote about before, we reflect and absorb false perspectives. We tend to carry–care for things that we shouldn’t. Shouldn’t want to care about or should not in the first place care about. Does that sound repetitive? Does that sound repetitive? Patterns surface, habits we have built to either protect offensively an internal perspective of self, or a pattern–a habit to conceal defensively an internal perspective of self. To conceal, preserve, or protect. How do we hold ourselves just as dear as we do with other non-us persons?

I imagine my internal self is a möbius strip, holding itself dear, but yet not knowing what it is holding since it can never find a flush, blunt, end of itself to identify the whole object as itself. The strip–self is a continuum, being somewhat categorizable due to the nature of continuums, but when it is categorized off, it lacks context.

When I say my internal self möbius can be (somewhat) categorized, I mean to say that each aspect, each nameable category of myself relates to another, and those larger relations can sometimes be acknowledged with a theme or name, but at the end of the day its an interwoven web. Spiders know what's up. I love the idea that everything is woven together. Material, nonmaterial, and whatever third option there no doubt is. Each aspect informs another, what flavor of ice cream you choose, what shoe you put on first, and that time you cheated on your 3rd grade multiplication test. Each informs the other, in small ways. Perhaps I am just reinventing–rediscovering consciousness. But who cares? Perhaps I should.

You know how if you cut directly down a möbius strip it creates a longer two-twist strip. More complex, larger, longer, and perhaps deeper. I think that is what happens with age to a self. It becomes thinner as well, we have the same amount of stuff in us, the same amount of surface area, just a new “fold”. Perhaps we arent aware of all the surface area available with-in/on of ourselves. But still, it is there. Perhaps just getting thinner, less visible, and reused.

I write all this to just say, I hope that my future self becomes a more complex, and as my friend Rowen would say, “cunty” version of my current self. And that this, (my current acts of concealing, protecting, preserving) makes me a yummy, fermented, probiotic version of myself when I unfold, unfurl, and unseal.

I guess I build different frameworks of self, instead of reading philosophy, due to the fact I love creating contradictions. Oxymorons, and so on.

When doing my scheduled mindless scrolling of the evening, instagram offers me a post, a red or blue pill style meme, except the pain that comes with growing or exist as you currently are. I don't understand, how this resonates with so many people yet why do we still often except the current state of being.

A film that almost perfectly embraces the messy message that meme explores is the 2013 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I remember watching in theaters when I was 8. I watched it with my Dad, it took my breath away. It spoke to me. Unfolded me. Opened the window and let light in.

When it was later and it finally had it’s DVD release we picked it up from Target, I believe that was the only film he and I ever bought new from a big box store. It spoke to us equally. A man discontent with his current life, stuck, then is given the opportunity to begin anew. I bet if I was given, if I gave myself time, a video essay could blossom from this… The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Good Place. Ect, each encapsulating a very similar tone of allowing yourself to live, experience, grow.

Drop microphone. Drop ideas. Drop my phone when I was on lunch break at Subway, and think it is a sign from G-d to stop eating Subway and to stop being constantly on my phone, but if that is the case he is not subtle. And I would like to think he would have some decency to be so.

Today at work the local pastor was talking about how in heaven, he imagined their might be government… Interesting. With more investigation spurred on by one of my coworkers I overheard that he meant more that their could, would, or will be order. That makes sense… But I believe order is inherently un-devine? Patterns are devine. Cycles are devine. But order, with all the baggage that comes with being orderly, does not seem devine. Order seems to be preoccupied with its own existence. To be orderly to continue to have order. Devine being seems more occupied with creation not preservation. Perhaps order creates, but I imagine it can not create more then it already knows. Disorder the same. Perhaps there is a secret third option that Heaven occupies… A transitory edge of chaos.

We occupy the world of inherent chaos, G-d is knowledgeable of order, and we the occupants of the world of chaos are tasked to walk the edge, imagine, and play, live with a foot in and out of either door. To do things differently, special, unique. And then transtion to a habitat that aligns with our “inlightened” state.