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The Journaling of Bullard 288
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Today I woke up before the sun and I spent my time reading in the dark, reading anything I can. Old journal entries, reviews of my favourite books, essays written by girls I've never met, and I think about how badly I need a hobby that doesn't involve consuming words.
I'm thinking about this quote from Eileen. “Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.”
I think about these words a lot, they echo around my mind in mornings like these when I’m able to watch the sneakiness of light growing behind my window blinds, the way it eventually spills into my bedroom like overflowing molten gold. My blankets are tangled in the shape of me, my book is strewn about haphazardly from falling asleep reading. I like looking at the cracks in the spine and the fold in the pages, signs of my existence tainted on something tangible, something that will outlive me. Everyday, I look forward to my morning coffee, I seep in the rich bitterness of this very human elixir. I understand now of the sweetness of mundane life if only I choose to pay attention, and I wish that I can always be this mindful everyday of the things I have and the things I do. I want to experience more of my life the same way I experience this coffee, consciously, and with gratitude. I want to experience mundanity like an alien who’s been banished from his home planet and sought refuge on earth in a human disguise, experiencing everything for the first time, with open eyes and pure curiosity.
So, this is how I have been spending my days. I drink iced black coffee, I eat words, I peel mandarins, I play solitaire and study chess openings, and I scribble on my journal until the tip of my pen wears down and my handwriting is a cryptic alien code that only I can decipher. I'm writing a lot because I'm trying my best not to get too caught up in my own head. I’ve learned that sensitivity is a good thing. I care for people deeply and I experience joy with overwhelming intensity, but then again I experience sadness and shame with the same level of intensity, and sometimes I am too soft for that. With writing everything I’m feeling, I can observe these feelings as a neutral outsider. I like to pick apart my emotions and compartmentalize them, I’m an archivist in the library of my own psyche. I’m obsessed with understanding myself better by intellectualizing my feelings, raw and unprocessed, like dissecting an alien specimen, taking out an organ and slowly turning it around to see it clearly under the light. I’m not perfect at this, but when I sense the brewing of a negative feeling and this familiar twist in my gut, I will try to fight for control over my emotions so that it won’t linger. The first step is to confess what it exactly is that I’m feeling and the next is to categorize it into one of two groups: primary emotions, which are the raw emotions felt in direct response to something that just happened, or secondary emotions, the emotions that are felt about another emotion. The funny thing about emotions is that their intensity is as erratic as fire in unpredictable weather. Primary emotions cannot be felt for more than 90 seconds at a time, but I have moments of such emotions being so intense that they overtake me and I lose mental clarity. On the contrary, I’ve had secondary emotions that I leave alone because they’re tiny and don’t bother me that much in the moment, but they will continue to trail after me like a pestering ghost, only to grow more bothersome. So, whenever I feel bad, I will take a step back and try to analyze my feelings. If I realize that it’s just a primary emotion, I will simply accept it and let myself feel the feelings out. If it’s a secondary emotion, I will deal with it by continuing to write.
I realize now that my anxieties and secondary emotions are mainly due to confusion, and keeping this all locked up inside my skull will just lead me to spiral. I'm trying this thing where if I feel confused about something, I will write about it blindly with no clear end goal. It doesn't matter to me what it is I'm saying in the moment, sometimes I can't even see anything but the blur of my hands moving, the violet ink of my pen. So long as I empty out my thoughts onto something external and separate from my body, the truth starts to take form to me like a person emerging from a landscape of mist.
I like that when I write, words will remind me of other words, and these words will remind me of pieces of information I learned and kept stored away in the crevices of my mind. Right now I’m thinking about the Extended Mind hypothesis and the question of where exactly the mind ends and the world begins. Just briefly going over this topic, while it may be easy to say that the boundary of the mind is the skull, this hypothesis raises that our mind is not confined solely to the brain but that it actually transcends beyond the human body and reaches out into the world through making use of external tools to perform better, cognitively. It’s like doing math without a pen and paper, where our mind’s capacity is limited and juggling symbols in the pitch blackness makes us prone to mistakes. So we use this tool that exists outside of our body to offload information, and in doing so, this tool intertwines with and becomes part of our mental processes. That must mean that the tools we use are also part of our minds. I like this idea because it means that my journal is a part of my mind, almost an extension of me like a connected limb. I use it as a tool to help me navigate confusion over feelings of shame and anger and guilt, and I also like to copy fragments of information I’ve gathered from books and articles, unloading them like furniture in an extra storage unit. The comforting thing about it is that I can always go back to it and be reminded of things that I would have otherwise forgotten, all those important pieces of information I swore I wouldn’t forget but end up getting lost in the labyrinth of my mind. It’s as if some of my thinking is stored in this journal, taking the form of words, scribbles, and silly metaphors. It brings me solace to know that when I’m dead, a part of my mind will continue to live on in this earth.
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a meditation on meditation
I've been thinking a lot about meditation and how the state of being we aspire to achieve through this practice is essentially a dog in a big backyard. "There is no thinking, there is nothing to figure out." (Sotce.) I really reallyyyy love that. Except, this idea is kind of flawed. Meditation brings us from a pre-rational state of mind to post-rational, and a dog has always been and will remain at pre-rational for the rest of its life. I can't fully say I know what it feels like to be either (a dog or someone coming out of meditation) because I feel like my mind is always buzzing about. If you split my head open, you will only find bees. I am always thinking, trying to grasp at thoughts and watching ideas slip through my fingers before I feel I've completed them enough to get them archived. I like to view my mind like a storage unit; a messy one, in deep need of cleaning. I often watch myself procrastinate and delay emotions, pushing them aside and telling myself I'd unpack them later. Now these emotions sit in a box, stacked under box after box after box, shoved away in the corners of my brain. I forget about them, but sometimes I get earthquakes and these boxes come spilling out all at once, and there is just so much mess made that it becomes too much for me to handle. Why do I do this? I want to learn to let things come and go like the Buddhist talk about, I want to be comfortable with letting emotions flow into and through me like streams of water.
My solution: meditation. I'm not the best at this, I will admit. I try my best to focus on my breathing, the sensations of what my limbs touch, the feel of my clothes draped on me, all things that I never notice. My body twitches, I feel like ghosts are tickling my skin. As hard as I try to stay in this state, murmurs of my thoughts start to creep in. I remember everything I haven't done, everything I have done. I'm not exactly sure who told me to do this but they said that to combat this, we should observe the thoughts that come and go like cars on a busy street, whizzing through and carrying passengers. When I think of meditation this way, I see myself from an external point of view, detached from the scene itself. I watch the cars pass me by but I don't force them out or make them disappear, I just observe them from a distance and eventually they will travel far enough that they blink out of sight. I like this way of thinking, but recently I've been visualizing something else. I've always loved swimming and I'm brought back to the times when I was a kid in a pool and I'm trying my hardest to stay down under the water. I empty all the air from my lungs, I focus on weighing myself down. The effort consumes my mind, I can't think of anything else but the feeling of water all around me. Alternatively, I also like to lay on my back on the surface of the water. I have my limbs all spread out and I try to be weightless like a dead man who's been pushed off a bridge. I stay as still as possible because the slightest movement can pull me down and I don't want to be swallowed by the water. All I feel is the tickle of splashes on my neck, the strange feeling of water outlining my body, the way the surface of the aqua looks like it carved me out. It’s like I’m halfway through a portal, split between two realms. I suppose this is a meditative state in it of itself. Anyway, when I'm meditating I picture myself on the ocean floor. I have sunken and it is not a struggle to stay here at this kind of depth. I'm looking up and all I see is the movement of water, the crystalline lines that make me think of cathedrals. I watch sunlight pierce through the blue and observe the rays dance on my skin and illuminate this strange alien world. In my mind, I can breathe here and nothing is heavy. I see my thoughts like bubbles instead of cars. This way, I know that they won't stop. They come out of me and I watch them rise, some large and some tiny, but they always go all the way up and pop in the surface, I like to watch them all the way through. I like this better because bubbles are temporary, cars are not. When they pop, it tells me that it's over. They are not mine to deal with anymore.
Will I ever know peace like a mindless dog in a backyard? I believe this is the closest I can get.
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There is so much sky here, all violent blue and heavy on my heart. I’m laying on the grass and I rest my eyes, and all I focus on is sound. I hear the birds singing their sweet songs as they chase each other through the air. I hear their melody getting swept up by the cool breeze that rustles through the leaves, tickles my cheeks, whispers in my hair. I hear the gentle song of the nearby stream, the flutter of wings, the dance of flowers, and I swear I could hear the distant little footsteps of a thousand marching ants. Most of all, I hear the breathing of the meadow, alive and everywhere. I want to lay here forever, to feel the green curling around my limbs and pull me back into the earth. I would like it, I think.
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For how much I think about the inevitability of loss, nothing could ever have prepared me for the heaviness of grief, the nastiness of losing. How will I survive this missing? What will I do with all this love I have with nowhere to go?
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I think of grief as this sick little goblin that follows you around with a hammer. Can’t elaborate at the moment.
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Nobody will ever truly understand you completely and if you dont work to understand yourself you will not achieve the things you were meant to achieve.
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