part one, probably. My therapist suggested that I try to write down all the things that are troubling me or that I can’t seem to get out of my mind. This was a while ago, but I’m feeling overwhelmed enough to give it a shot now.

• Like a month ago, I saw some post where Trent Reznor was talking about current hard times, and one of the things he said was that everyone should listen to David Bowie and “don’t be too hard on yourself.” Which, for whatever reason, was somehow the most unexpected thing of this year, for me. Trent Reznor encouraging me to give myself a break.
• It’s been less than a year since G**** died, and L**** is so sick. I don’t know how long she has left, and we’re getting to the time when I’m going to start wondering if taking her to the vet constantly and trying to keep her going is really what’s best for her.
• in any practical sense, I think we’ve already forgotten that Joe Biden very well might have sexually assaulted someone, and at the very least he has some troubling attitudes (if not behaviors) about that stuff. It popped into my mind this afternoon, and I realized that I hadn’t thought about it in weeks. Not that there isn’t anything else important going on, but I don’t know what to do with that. It’s probably going to be enough, for most people (probably including me), that he’s better than Donald Trump. Which is bleak, bleak stuff.
• i am reaching the end of my graduate program, and I’m kind of wondering why I bothered with it. I’m more in debt, I passed up the chance for an ongoing lecturer position (though who knows if that would be stable now), and, for the most part, I gained very few new experiences from the program. I’m not going to be a writer, and I never thought I was, but it feels like even my modest expectations will be left unmet.
• I wouldn’t say that I romanticize upheaval and unrest, but I’ve long believed that change, through the system itself, is impossible. So it’s disheartening, maybe, to know that all the protests and uncertainty is, to a significant degree, making me really uncomfortable, and I have to admit that a not-insignificant part of me just wants things to go back to ‘normal.’ But, in this case, I will take Trent Reznor’s advice, and try to not be too hard on myself. I still, more than anything else, think that all this stuff is good, that it’s necessary. ‘Normal’ is deeply, thoroughly fucked up, and it’s depressing that we’re so desperate to back to it. People like me deserve to feel uncomfortable, and it’s an eminently worthy trade if it means that things can get better for more vulnerable people, because ‘normal’ for them doesn’t mean ‘safe,’ like it does for me. In this sense, 2020 could be a great year.
• But it won’t be. 2020 will just be another lost opportunity to take care of each other and make the world better.
• I hate this dog we live with so, so much. It challenges my whole idea of myself, and I feel terribly guilty about it, but it’s true. It’s not her fault, but she’s  despicable. I’m not cruel to her or anything, but I’m also afraid that she knows how much I can’t stand her, which she doesn’t deserve.
• Worse, though, is L****. She’s been staying at the vet for the last two nights (because she stopped eating and they’re trying to figure that out), and it’s been so quiet. I adore her, and I hate how relieved I am with her gone.
• I have a friend who is, by her own admission, a lot. She’s just constant drama and feelings, spraying all over the place like a firehose that someone lost their grip on. I’m not like that, to a fault. I hold all of my feelings in, to the extent that I don’t even recognize that I’m having them a lot of times. But, when they do come, it’s kind of a lot. I don’t know what to do, and it seems like no one else does, either. When I share with people, I get the impression that it’s like they don’t know what to say, like my stuff is radioactive. Maybe it’s because I can’t name or experience my feelings properly, because if I can’t feel my feelings in a healthy way, how can anyone else help me with them? It’s like I’m alone. I’m with my feelings, but I’m not really with them, because I can’t understand them. Like we’re living in different apartments, right next to each other, and the assholes are blasting music at all hours of the day. And the walls are thin. But I still can’t make out any of the words.
• When people read my writing about the alt-right, incels, white nationalists, etc., the question keeps coming up: why are you interested in these people? Sometimes the other question comes up: why do you choose not to condemn them? They’re fair questions, and I have some regular answers: I’m interested in subcultures and masculinity; I think it’s important to try to understand these groups and to interrogate ourselves in terms of how we might be like them, rather than condemning them and feeling secure in the knowledge that we’re not them, so we’re good; I think it’s uninteresting to condemn them, rather than trying to look at something new; and so on. These answers are true, but I’m wondering lately, if they are a deflection. Am I interested in these groups simply because they’re objectionable, broken people who are so misshapen that they are (rightly) cast out of and reviled by mainstream, properly functioning people? And is the root of my interest, the real thing that I have in common with them, that I am similarly not fit to be near real people? Do I refuse to condemn them because it would feel like condemning myself? Am I actually sympathetic to them? Am I trying to find their, like, humanity, because  if they’re not worthy of sympathy, them neither am I? Whatever is wrong with me, am I afraid that I’m as unlikable as some nazis? If so, then what the hell am I supposed to do with that?
• I found myself wishing that the world was less complicated this afternoon. Usually, I positively revel in the complexity and ambiguity, because I find it comforting and exciting. But I just wanted things to be easy. I don’t know what that’s about, either. I’m not sleeping well.
• I wish I knew what Trent Reznor would say about all this.
• To be continued, probably~

What about talking about some times when you weren’t able to control it. What are some examples of times when your feelings overwhelmed you?

like what happened; what made me feel so strongly?

Start with that, but I want you to focus on the feelings themselves.

well, when G**** died is an easy one.

Okay, let’s focus on that.

he was my best pal, so i knew it was going to be hard when he went. i would make jokes about it sometimes, to R******, saying how i would basically be incapacitated by it when i lost him. actually, as bad as it was, it wasn’t nearly as bad as when M****  passed away; probably because M**** was the first one that i lost, and he was so sick for so long, and i had to take care of him. with G****, it was so fast, just shock was the dominant reaction.

What about your feelings, though? Describe how you felt.

at first, it was just numbness, like i said, because of the shock.

Don’t analyze it and try to explain why you felt the way you felt— just describe the feeling.

this is the thing, though; the place where i always get confused. how do i talk about the feeling without analyzing it?

Stay on describing the feeling. Focus on having the feeling, allowing yourself to experience it, rather than immediate invalidating it by dissecting it and explaining it away.

i am having it, though. this is one of the things that i don’t get. i don’t doubt that what you’re saying makes sense— i know you know what you’re talking about, and i certainly know that i’m the one with the problem —but how can it be that i’m not ‘allowing myself to experience the feeling’? it’s not like like i’m pretending that there is no feeling. i’m identifying it, i’m acknowledging it. i’m taking it seriously, right, by trying to understand it. i’m not trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist, so how am i invalidating the feeling? i hope that this doesn’t come across as aggressive, but i’m honestly confused about this.

I understand what you’re saying. I think— 

i feel like i’ve tried to make you explain this before, actually. sorry about that.

It’s okay. It’s an important distinction. 

that’s cool, at least.

The difference is in how you are experiencing the feeling, how you’re handling it. Maybe ‘invalidating’ is a poor word choice, but what I mean is that, when you have these feelings, you don’t allow yourself to just feel them. Your instinct is to immediately move into analysis, to try to analyze them, understand them, critique them. And this invalidates them, in a way, as feelings. You don’t let yourself feel your feelings, because you’re too eager to move into intellectualizing them. It’s a safer relationship to your emotions than letting yourself feel them.

but i feel like i do feel them— what am i analyzing?

That’s the thing though— you’re treating your emotions, primarily, as artifacts to be analyzed. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

fuck you, bitch. how can i move forward if i don’t understand my feelings? isn’t that the kind of thing most people go to therapy for; to get help understanding their emotions?

Of course it’s not bad to try to understand your feelings, but it’s also not good to use analysis to avoid really experiencing your feelings. 

i promise i’m not being difficult when i say this— i’m not trying to be difficult when i say this —but how do i ‘experience my feelings’? (again, i feel like i’ve asked this before.) do i just sit and think, like, ‘I’M SAD’ really intensely, or smash stuff, if i’m angry? because that’s just being stuck in place, right? fuck you, bitch.

No, it’s more about sitting with the feeling, experiencing it; not feeling like you need to move into understanding it, but letting yourself have the feeling. 

well, it’s not like, when i start analyzing feelings, they just go away. i still have the feeling.

Right, but you’ve stopped interacting with it as a feeling, because you’ve switched into intellectualizing it. It exists in the abstract now, more than the concrete.

but it’s a feeling— it was never concrete.

You’re right. What I mean is, the feeling is no longer allowed to just be, because it’s become an object of inquiry. Its existence is only important inasmuch as it helps you identify causes and understand other things. It’s more forensic evidence than emotion.

well, that’s kind of cool, tbh ngl. but i kind of see what you mean.

And it’s important that you feel your feelings. You become stuck on them if you don’t allow yourself to fully experience them. 

ugh. but how do you do that? i feel like we just keep coming back to this part, over and over and over, and you keep trying to explain it, but i don’t get it. how do you just feel a feeling? how do you, like, turn your brain off and not think about it at all?

It’s not about ‘turning your brain off.’ You focus on simply experiencing the emotion, noticing how it’s making you feel physically. What kinds of sensations are you having in what parts of your body?

but you don’t try to understand that.

You just allow it to be, and you pay attention to it.

all due respect, this is so fucking dumb. what do you do with that information?

Let’s just focus on trying to experience the emotions first. 

the only times i can remember feeling my emotions, physically, are the few times that i had a panic attack, but i don’t think that’s what you’re thinking of.

It can be, if that’s easier for you. 

but i feel like you’re thinking about smaller things, like the things that i fail to sufficiently ‘feel’ that build up and eventually lead to something like a panic attack, right?

How about this: when is the last time you were really upset? 

like, I cried?

It doesn’t have to be a time you cried.

i’m honestly not sure if i can think of anything besides that. which i suppose isn’t surprising, if what you’re saying is correct.

What do you mean?

well, if you’re saying that i refuse to engage with and actually feel my feelings, it makes sense that i can’t remember them, because i just intellectualize them and push them aside. so they don’t seem relevant, unless, you know, there’s some kind of freak-out or meltdown.

The fact that you characterize emotional displays as ‘freak-outs’ or ‘meltdowns’ is what I’m talking about: you devalue emotion, instinctively.

man fuck you, bitch.

See, you’re deflecting.

what about this, though: you keep wanting me to talk about stuff from when i was little, like “oh i lost the spelling bee and i was humiliated” or “a girl said something mean to me one time and now i’m 43 and i still can’t get over it,” like we’re going to find some magic explanation for why i’m such a loser by analyzing stuff that happened in the past. huh? what now?

It’s all a rich tapestry.

*leans back*

when the stay-at-home thing started, I felt uniquely equipped to handle it. My anxiety keeps me somewhat self-isolated at all times, and when my partner is out of town, my existence pretty much turns into a self-quarantine situation. I even try to make a game out of how many days I can go without having to leave the house for any reason. It’s just me and the animals. And, while, I’m always happy when my partner returns, I also always feel like I could keep going like this for as long as I needed to. I have sincerely thought that, if I were in Oldboy, I would handle the confinement way better than Dae-su. When the quarantine started, I made lame jokes about preparing for this moment my whole life.

So it’s difficult to admit that I’m not having a good time. To admit that, in fact, I’m having a bad time. It’s definitely other stuff, but it’s also the fact of being stuck inside the house all day, almost every day. School has ended for the semester, and my essay coaching job is gone, so it’s empty time. Even the protests, which are definitely worth leaving the house for, are not an option, because my partner isn’t healthy enough to take that risk. (And, to be fair, it’s not at all clear that I would have the nerve to be out there with all those people, regardless of the righteousness of the cause.) We have a big house, which surely helps, but still. I’m not sleeping hardly at all. And, somehow, it feels like everyone else is having a more fun, fulfilling  quarantine than me. I’m not sure how that works, but it feels true.

There are things to do. There’s dozens of books I own, that I’ve never read, that I can read. There’s a fall semester to plan for, which is actually something that should be prioritized, since I need to plan a curriculum that can move online more smoothly than the one I usually use. I should be writing stuff for my thesis project, since I’m entering the final year of my program. Or writing anything, really (this doesn’t count). I could be watching way more professional wrestling than I am. (I did find a great Japanese adult video message board that I’m enjoying lurking on, but stuff like that always feels more like a giant (and, in this case, more embarrassing than usual) waste of time until I figure out an angle to write about it.)

But there’s always things to do, and always excuses to put them off. If I think about it, honestly, this is what happens every time I am left alone or with no urgent obligations: when there’s nothing to do, I do nothing. I hate myself for it, but I don’t change. It’s always a long, continuous, low buzzing of a headache, and I keep feeding it nothing. Nothing is here to distract me from, like, me. 😳

Am I depressed? Possibly, but that’s not very interesting.

God, I want to buy clothes online so bad. 😂

(Curtain opens; a white guy is standing at center stage, because, you know, where else would he be?)

a classmate in the creative nonfiction seminar this spring used the phrase ‘unabashed neuroses’ to describe my writing, and I still don’t know if it was supposed to be a shot. It’s probably fair though. so I guess I’m back on my bullshit~

i made one of those black box posts on instagram a couple days ago, and man was it an ordeal. I thought about it literally for hours before I finally did it, and I regret doing it roughly as much as I probably would if I hadn’t done it.

my thought process (heavily abridged):

• this is a meaningless gesture, it accomplishes nothing. it’s the very definition of virtue signaling.
• virtue signaling gets a bad rap. everyone virtue signals all the time, we just signal different virtues.
• still, this feels like close to a textbook example of the ‘bad’ virtue signaling that conservatives make their bad-faith claims about. it’s a fucking social media post and nothing more. it’s solely performance.
• but I don’t know, maybe it’s not. If nothing else, it does, at the very least, signal sympathy and empathy. It’s another voice.
• but that’s all it is: a signal. It achieves nothing material beyond identifying myself as someone who thought it would be cool to make the same social media post that everyone else was making.
• but it’s not like I’m on some big show-off shit. I have, maybe, ten real followers, and i rarely post. whatever I’m doing, it’s hard to imagine that I’m doing it for the clout.
• but if I have that few followers, what’s the point? What’s accomplished besides signaling to them?
• i can include the hashtag, so my voice is part of the larger chorus. Then it’s like, who would even notice me? I’d be one voices among a sea of them.
• but then, again, what am I doing? I’m just jumping on the Bandwagon of Whatever’s Most Convenient, and I’m making sure to mark The Least I Can Do so that there’s easily identifiable proof that I did it.
• also, I have no history of posting about this kind of thing, so it feels even less genuine. I made a post in my story taking a really brave stand in opposition to racism against Asians, but that’s it. All of my public posts are mostly pictures of animals with song lyrics or snippets of poetry that are varying degrees of ironic/cryptic. I’m literally just one day deciding to go in on this subject.
• but so what? It’s important, and if my motivation is sincere then who cares?
• well, because the post makes it about me in a real way. shouldn’t I just shut up and try to offer more material support?
• but I don’t have hardly any material support to offer. I’ve had to discontinue, for the moment, the support I offer to animal rights and welfare groups, and if I don’t have resources for that then I definitely don’t have resources for other struggles that, while I certainly believe in their importance, are simply not as important to me as animal rights.
• regardless, it makes me uncomfortable to think I’m participating in something that, regardless of its intentions, is probably going to mainly end up serving to soothe the egos of people like me rather than helping the people who need help.
• so what then— do nothing? regardless of my intentions, am I just engaging in nihilistic thinking that invalidates all pragmatic action and just ends with me convincing myself to do nothing.
• it’s also true that there’s no way to avoid being performative, especially on social media. everything we do is, at least partly, intended to act out a persona that we want to convince others— and ourselves —is the person we are.
• this leads to the uncomfortable fact that, at least in part, I don’t want to make the post because everyone else is doing it. I generally don’t make a big show of it (LOL!), but I don’t, as a general rule, take part in trends, fads, etc.; it’s just not the kind of thing I do (i.e., my regular ‘show’ is to not do these kinds of things).
• but this is a terrible reason to not show up, even in this tiny way, for such an important moment. It might be even more self-absorbed than the people making multiple cringeworthy posts going on and on about their frustration with other white people who just don’t get it, smugly luxuriating their own righteousness. Am I not just performing a different brand of smug righteousness?
• and so on and so forth from there.
• there’s a whole extended section about how my social phobia plays into all this, but it’s not worth recreating here.

i ended up making the post, but I didn’t include any text/hashtags. so I could feel good that I didn’t try to put on any ostentatious performance. but also so my less than a dozen followers were the only ones who saw it and it had no impact beyond, basically, taking a stand that told people who I already know agree with me that I agree with them. I think the post got five likes.

i don’t feel great about it. 😕

(Curtain closes)