#152 - I Promise, I'm Trying

I watched a YouTube video about how to properly hold a pen earlier today.

It turns out, the reason my hand keeps cramping is because I grip my pen too tightly.

I've always had a heavy hand. At several schools the teachers discovered my propensity to crush my pencils against the paper and I would once again be assigned weird pencil grips that aimed to correct the claw, only to make the tool unwieldy and my handwriting worse.

My handwriting now is incredible and I'm very proud of it but apparently I had never quite figured out the grip thing. So I swallowed my pride and looked up some knowledge that feels overtly basic and silly to need, only to discover the remedy, which is going to be (ready for this) being mindful of my grip while holding a pen.

And it is already working and I fear stress related injuries to my hands more than anything else because I know that wrist ergonomics will make or break me.

So I'm also no longer going to be journaling my favorite way: on my stomach looking out my window. But I think I'm going to move my room around to remedy this and put the my second desk underneath the window for the winter. I have to move my bed because of where the heater is, but also because the heater is so hot it will require the windows to be open, which is by design because we figured out that fresh ventilation was key to health in the 1920's during the Spanish Influenza, but also because tenament landlords wanted their tennants to stop dying en masse and realized that the solution was air shafts. Which is why my railroad apartment has all these little fun cutouts in the middle room walls!

I used to move my room around all the fucking time in high school and college. If I could have been chopping up my hair instead, I would have, but it didn't grow that fast and I already dyed it once a month.

I love rearranging a room, and I still do but now I do it far less frequently because I'm not trying to exhibit some modicum of control over my life in a small space. I mean, I still live in a small space, but I've got the control stuff a little more...under control.

Not judging myself for going back to basics has been a thing ever since I learned how to breathe again. It still happens – the inital embarrasment of not already being perfect – but I'm able to get over it much quicker.

I think that's what maturity is: lessening your reactivity to things you don't want to do but will materially improve your life.

And not just your life, but your life in relationships to others.

Some of the most harrowing modern dialogue is around what we "owe" each other and the overtly encouraged selfishness to focus only on oneself and our needs.

Like everything in life, it's about balance. People who chronically underresource themselves do need to learn how to set healthy boundaries and put their own mask on first – but because on the internet we're talking to everyone all the time it gets flattened into these jovially phrased statements that being selfish is the best thing you can do for yourself and like – we're a comunal species it's literally not healthy to isolate all the time and we need to overcome pith and brevity in order to reinject nuance into discussions.

While I am truly so glad that we are far better at acknowledging that mental health is important, I loathe the phrase "bed rotting" and making jokes about spending entire days not doing anything.

I think it spawned from a genuine place on like livejournal and tumblr, where depressed people were trying to carve out a non-judgemental refuge and encourage themselves and each other through hard times. But long form blogs sounded more like "it's okay that you haven't showered in a few days, you don't need to feel ashamed of it but you need to figure out ways to stay feeling clean and hygienic on the days showers are too much" and viral tweets are a bit more, "it's okay to never shower because your depression is valid".

Hearing people on Love Island say, "Your feelings are valid." to each other right after one of them got brutally broken up with for another girl has rendered the term entirely meaningless. I mean it always was just kind of a statement. Not really any action words in there.

But I'm trying to take my feelings for what they are and stop assigning them larger meaning or narrative.

I wrote really personal essays for a while, and processing my feelings in public was certainly one way to go about making sense of what was happening, but I don't think its the way that I want to engage with anymore.

Which has made writing personal essays interesting, because I'm much more precious about what I'm willing to let the world know about me. I used to be comfortable with a level of vulnerability that was uhhhh notable. It didn't feel vulnerable at the time.

But I don't want to be up for consumption. It's not the judgement that ever bothered me – it's more that I feel protective of who I am now. I am far less willing to offer up my life as content than I used to be. Also because I never want people in my life to feel like they're content.

I never want someone to find out how I feel via writing. Personal essay is a messy genre full of messy people, and it can easily become one big subtweet if we let it.

It happened when I was younger and I never felt great about it – there's a cowardice to being unable to address someone but be willing to talk about it to the general public of the internet. That's the thing about tech – it's for no one and therefore, everyone. I tweet thoughts that don't feel important or specific enough for texts. (Almost like it was passing and probably didn't need to be captured.)

Life requires passion, which requires vulnerability. Living does. You have to make what you want, known, which creates the oppurtunity for others to comment on those desires and then we have to learn over and over again that others opinions matter far less than we give them credit for and we're the only ones living our lives.

It can be hard to put ourselves out there but we have to do it anyway.

(You mean i have to open myself up to others in order to create meaningful bonds and can't just rely on their persistence to break down my walls over and over again because healthy friendships are about reciprocity and not silent expectation setting based on previous unfulfilled needs?)

I don't want to be impersonal either. Maybe I'm still figuring it out but I also think my resistence to ever putting a genre on this newsletter is indicative of the fact that I am not ready to pin myself into One Thing or have a Cohesive Brand. This thing is called Smoke Show because I was going to get high and write about stuff I was watching. It then became a capsule of my miserable summer before a bad breakup, and then became a Goal Based Endeavor that was mostly practice and produced some cool shit but mostly was me yelling my thoughts and finding out some of them resonated.

But now there's a bunch of these things! And that's dope. Despite still figuring it out, I do think the best way to think through writing stuff is by writing.

It's just that writing is annoying and hard sometimes and easy and delightful and others and it's hard to power through the former in order to have something meaningful to put down by the time you get to the latter.

But maturity means doing it anyway.

So cheers to Seven Days of Effort 2/7!