2023-02-08 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Wednesday 🗓 Date: February 8, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 6 – Feb 12, 2023

Good mooorniiinnnnggg, Chicago! I didn’t write a morning pages yesterday mostly because I needed to sleep. Alcohol sucks. I’ve talked about this before, no need to rehash it, but I’ve had alcohol both of the last two nights (and realistically will probably drink again tonight at dinner), and I feel markedly worse. It’s mild enough that I think I could chalk it up to placebo effect — not to mention the fact that I’m drinking a bit less caffeine than usual — but it’s still there.

Nevertheless, late last night I did have a really pleasant experience. A scene I was thinking of writing about was a young man going to visit the house of his recently-deceased aunt, only to discover that she’s a hoarder. I was tired from sitting at the bar all night, but then I sat in bed and just had that image come into my brain, and I just sat in it for a while. I could see the house, the flat brick building with the car park on the left side, the grassy lawn slightly declining towards the street, the grass burned yellow from the summer sun. The walkway leads up to the front door, the mail box up against the house rusting at the edges.

Anyways, you get the idea: I was literally seeing the whole thing unfold before me. It was like the whole thing was a dream, still blurry about the edges, but as I sat in it, the whole sight just unfolded before me. This sounds obvious in retrospect — of course consciously envisioning the world you’re building is helpful to portray it more accurately — but it’s something I struggled a bit with before. I think this is a bit of why I struggled a little with what I was talking about a few days ago, the struggle of not suspending disbelief on my own ideas. I think that’s largely because I wasn’t actually even giving myself the chance, that I wasn’t even attempting to get a felt sense for the worlds I was portraying. I also think this is one of the reasons I felt like struggling with more fantastical or surreal elements in my story designs. I struggled to even imagine seeing those things, much less actually dealing with them myself.

This whole process of revisiting stories over and over again is pretty fun though, I must say. It’s like planting little seeds over and over again and waiting patiently to see what comes up. It’s more than patience though — there’s watering them, pulling out weeds, and so on. There’s also some sense of improving the tools I’ve got, getting fertilizer and so on. But I also sense how this is also somewhat similar to my full-time job, how much of it is simply emotional regulation. But I have the freedom to do that, the freedom to put things down and walk away, to sit and experiment in this imaginal space the whole time. To daydream, to feel some sense of wonder at what unfolds in front of me. This feels like a good step. Talking about writing skills is sort of wishy-washy, but times like this one make me feel like I actually am unlocking something new.

Anyways, I think I’m about at time for today. I know it’s pretty short of the usual 1500 words, but hey, I’m on a work trip, we take what we can get here. Anyways, I’ll leave you, dear reader, with the sacred incantation: you’re not inferior to anyone. Good night, I love you. See you in the morning.