2023-02-15 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Wednesday 🗓 Date: February 15, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 13 – Feb 19, 2023

Well well well. If it isn’t my arch nemesis (myself). My brain has been very fuzzy lately. I didn’t feel like going to YUZ last night and instead just slept a lot. I think I’m just too tired. I’m still in my weird trap of thinking a lot about writing but not actually writing the thing. Journaling is still good — it feels a bit like the whole purification process in meditation — but it’s woefully insufficient given that my self-esteem is still predicated on being productive, which sucks ass.

Speaking of which, I’m also getting super distracted by work things this morning. I kinda want to lean into it, because I’m going to be somewhat disappearing this afternoon to hang with Dan, but I don’t really like my tendencies to wake up and immediately hop on slack.

Alright fuckos, I’ve wasted much of the last half-hour or so checking in on slack and half-working, time to lock in and write a bunch of shit. I’ve mistyped just about every other word on here because my fingers are cold and typing is hard, so I’m going to try and just blow through this without breaking the backspace key.

One of the things I was thinking about was the idea of legibility and the differences between internal and external legibility. What I mean by “legibility” is the way in which our lives “make sense” or “have meaning” for ourselves and others. For me, this has always come back to this question of “how do we ensure we have a life well-lived?” At least for me, I often think about this in the context of appearing “interesting” — how do I go on adventures, accomplish things, and so on, and how do I make sure other people know that. That’s obviously a pretty stupid attempt, but it’s something core to many anxieties. Finding ways to make ourselves legible is important in a social hierarchy. I remember going to a therapist a while back, and she always asked me what I would do if nobody else were around. And my answers were fun! They were full of exploring, curiosity, and wonder, but they were that way simply because I didn’t have to come back and “show my work,” I didn’t have to explain what I found. In my anxiety about that, I simply didn’t even begin to do the things I found interesting because they weren’t going to be legible to others.

But then again — how does that really differ from what makes life legible to ourselves? Internal legibility is a bit of a different variation on “a life well-lived.” It’s a well-lived in the sense that it’s lived skillfully, not necessarily thoroughly or maximally. It’s about presence and awareness, at least for me. Of course, living skillfully often does mean living thoroughly and “accomplishing” (with big air-quotes) enough that we feel satisfied.

As I’m writing this, sometimes I continue to feel like not living maximally is a matter of fear, or a matter of learned helplessness or something of that shape.

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

Of course, not hurting anyone feels weird. Is that actually the goal? I don’t fucking know. Damn.

I guess it’s possible to do that without totally sacrificing the self, but it feels like practically that’s not true. It depends a bit on your definition of “hurt” — if someone is holding you back and you push away from them, that may hurt them, but they also may need that pain to grow.

So back to what I was hoping to write about: what are some of the mismatches in ways we make ourselves legible to others and the ways we make ourselves legible to ourselves? Being legible to others often feels destructive internally, that we have to sacrifice something for it; I think I originally wrote about this with respect to careers, that having a Real Job and being responsible and making money and so on. But then there’s the little bits of legibility:

https://twitter.com/isabelunraveled/status/1625544697690062848

…

https://twitter.com/isabelunraveled/status/1625544703125995533

Like, that’s beautiful. It made my heart swell when I read it. That’s where I want to go. There’s that moment in The Name of the Wind where Elodin describes what love is, how it’s the discussions of trivial things, the weather, the dirt on our shoes, the way we respond to the most minute details, that gives rise to love; that love is the secret language underneath all of that.

I’ve said this so many times, but I know that my worry is that I need to be writing “about” something instead of building up the world and just inhabiting it and seeing what comes out. That’s hard. It’s fun, but I want to be organized, but I also hate organization. I’m just a little stuck.

I think I might want to put aside my weird, multi-layered, multi-dimensional storytelling kick for a bit here. I don’t know if I’m feeling good about it as a viable ark that’s not just totally derivative of Tomohiko Morimi, and I also don’t know if it’s sufficiently interesting for what I want to feel my way into. The “portal” niche is pretty intriguing, and I’ve thought about it a reasonable amount.

A minor thing I really liked from Tatami Galaxy (which is present in Night is Short, Walk on Girl but to a lesser extent) is the idea of the old student called a “master,” but the master of what is unknown. I don’t know why I find that so funny, but I do. I think a character being introduced to The Master who is somewhat nonsensical but takes them on an interesting quest would be a bit of a fun sort of romp. You could meet all the weird followers of the “cult” (which I think should be clearly not a real/dangerous cult) along the way. Of course, the MC would probably do all of this after something traumatic — the death of a parent, their wife leaving them, (the death of their wife, even,) or the loss of their job. That sounds fun — let’s start there.

(Heh, I think it’s so funny that I put something else aside and then just immediately go “here’s a fun story idea” instead of hand-wringing for forever.)

Okay, I’m a few hundred words short, but it’s about time to get started on work in earnest, so we’ll chat more tomorrow. Good night, I love you. You’re not inferior to anyone. I’ll see you in the morning.