Jen just jen

full :: transparency
2019-07-12 04:49:38 (UTC)

I changed the diary name. it ..

I changed the diary name. it seemed fitting as I'm trying to enter a new season of life. Hoping this will make it stick.

I guess the old one reflected my resistance toward life. I'm trying to shift into just verbalizing more and then work toward acceptance. so yah we'll work it out as it goes.

I got a kink in my neck at the moment that's distracting me. But I've been sleeping all day and I feel like I could use some more sleep. Pms'ing, I guess.

in other news, my old bestie's birthday was today. I didn't realize till later on in the day that it was, which I decided was an achievement. Looking at her relative success and comparing it to mine is really a distraction from the growing I need to do. Always has been.

On a deeper level, I've still been thinking about that word transparency. It's a marvel to me when I think about all the places in my life it could be, where it's been absent and such. It's a real invitation to participate and change the way I see things. Just it can be hard to allow me to be something new again. the insidious negativity is self-condemning.

Thing is, I don't think of myself as a dishonest being, just I get rigid in my own consciousness and have trouble communicating when I get like that. I loosen up around people and routines that bring me safety. I haven't found that yet in a consistent way around my roommate here. I keep looking on to the next phase to really focus on her and me now. It's a part of my life I keep in denial. it really doesn't seem as big a thing as I make it to be. although it is.

just pressuring it removes my focus from being kind to myself and makes me rigid again. I just need a breakthrough of sorts. and a change of mind.

it's not just her though that this is about. It's about the many other things in my life. My struggle with academia, and the way it beats me up to not feel smart enough for focusing. I know that's something I can talk through when I'm willing to participate in the way my life makes me feel, I just disengage.

disengaging is a problem for me.

my mind is working in small circles here because it's late and I'm tired today. I couldn't say why except pms'ing.
I wish I had someone to talk to today.

I haven't really talked about the good habits I've participated in today. Taking a walk was really good for me, and after painting last night I felt great enough about myself to do that tasks I needed to. Then I came home and cooked for me.

on the way home I started crying listening to the album I used to listen to while dog-walking. I kept really thinking about all the time I spent with my dog, and what it really meant to me to have a friend to stand beside me when approaching life. He really was a dog of principle. I felt his happiness, his sadness, a lot of the time, and he introduced life to me in new ways, and validated my authentic feelings. People don't understand how you can get that much from a dog until you realize how good a friend dogs really are. He was more family than my family sometimes. Probably the only one with which I felt healthy with.

I kept thinking how life is brutal, taking him so young. But the way he was warm his whole life, despite everything. I'm not going to say it was all good times, because there's a good amount of grief for the times I know I took his presence for granted. The way it's woven in my family to pay attention to the distractions rather than the things that matter. It's making me want to take a lot more accountability for my life, and the way I treat others, in his passing, seeing how life isn't a promise everyday.

I cried, finally, because I felt safe to feel my own feelings. they felt valid- before I tried to tell myself I didn't deserve to let myself feel truly sad, to miss him and grieve him fully, because somehow I didn't give him everything he deserved of me in life. I may not have, but I did give him what I did, and it wasn't nothing. He stood by me and I stood by him and that was good. We went for walks almost every morning this year, and that time is something I'm cherishing with all my heart lately. We grew together and that's an honor in any capacity.

He was so good. He's better than this world.
and I miss him.

////

I should probably end this here, but there's another thing about transparency bothering me. I worry lately about how conversations I feel I ever have aren't touching even barely on the content of living. These conversations, they're led by social norms, insecurities, or just convention of vernacular that's entertaining. I wish things were more authentic in coming from a place of real feeling.

like, I'm thinking now of the aristocrats. There's a movie where there was real life lived, and conflict, and how they handled life was by engaging, and there's something different about that than the way people I know approach life. I suppose I'm feeling nostalgic.

I just feel so starved from things like gratitude for the lived experience. I feel like I need to cultivate these things within me truly.

I was listening to the Joe rogan podcast with Reggie watts last night, and at a point Joe rogan started talking about another interview he did with this man who he described to have been hilarious. he said for two hours straight, this guy could take any phrase and make it funny, working all angles and hitting them just right. He said this guy, this guy just had a way of being that was like an art.
I want to be art.

I know us humans can be. I know it's not an aesthetic thing. I've been thinking about how capitalism seems to have hijacked the aestheticism of artful living, and it angers me. There's so many more layers to that surface style that you can choose that have been lost to fast consumption. There's real living that can be incubated in our minds while we're alive. And I just feel like that's so impossible for me in this life being surrounded by enticing versions of reality that just aren't actually there in substance..(?)

I'm in a desert of personality (personhood) here.

I realized listening to that description of that man, that there are people like that I've known, living consciously is not lost in my generation. I've just always felt separated by a layer of forced classist insecurity. Like somehow those people I felt akin to, but lived life more openly about their personal style of approaching life, were just uninhibited by layers of internalized negativity about my capability for transparency or something.
And there is a slight friction there of misunderstanding why their absence of something I had was so profound in our lives. like it was confusing because I wanted to be the same, like them, but I was me, and it was different, lost in uncertainty.

And, this is branching off here, but I feel similarly about academia.

There's a lot to unpack here and I haven't even begun. I just wanted to leave a landmark here on a topic that felt fleeting but important.
I'll move along here because this is how I do and I'm sleepy

(there's an issue I have here with not taking the time for the things that matter and that's another issue of lack of gratitude for life, apathy, and a whole upheaval of principles but attending to that would possibly invite the same confusing mental structure change that made me feel I was developing schizophrenia and dropped out of college)
(ugh can somebody take a load off for me I don't know when to stop)




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