One Year

I had to renew hosting and domains for hearsay.tech today.

Time feels long. When I think back to starting this gemlog, it feels like... ages ago. A different epoch. Even when time goes fast, it goes slow in many ways. Sometimes I get to the end of the week and am slightly surprised it's Friday, but when I look back at Monday, I feel the gulf.

Going through the motions of renewal poked a reflective part of me, and I thought back to how I felt about the last 12 months.

There were some gradual but large changes this year.

I gained energy that I didn't expect to have.

Several big life events happened, many of them difficult, but I felt like it was just OK. A colleague of mine commented in May: "You are being emotionally DDOSed, I don't how you are coping." But it didn't feel like I was coping; it just felt like I was living.

I started feeling a positive sense that disorder is everywhere. I see so many behaviours around me that are attributed to "success," and there is often so much insanity in them that I feel like a member of a different species. But this also makes me feel better; I just feel like part of the messed-up club, rather than an outlier. It's one thing to intellectually be open to something, and another to actually feel it. I genuinely feel like I belong square in the middle of the mess.

I also think it's easy to use outlier status to convince oneself that you're superior, and I do sense that in myself sometimes. But, that superiority voice has got a big red flashing light attached. "Warning. These thoughts have been flagged as 'delusional.'"

I only recently noticed how strong a 'judgement voice' is running in my head all the time. It's just there now, chattering away. (I mean, not right now. But it is awfully chatty most of the time.) It used to be me, but now it feels like this separate thing; someone I'll never get rid of, but it's ok. They're welcome to stick around as long as they pay the rent. That voice has done me and others a lot of harm, but what can I really do about it except be grateful that it seems to have found its own space.

I don't feel the need to write here that much anymore. I had a lot of pent up desire to shout things out into space when I took my first footsteps out of Hell. My version of the underworld didn't have any sort of portal or demarcation to indicate that I was out; things just got easier, less dire. So when I first starting writing here, I was somewhere in between eternal suffering and Midgard, the land of Earthly problems. Now, when I have creative thoughts, it just seems so much more enjoyable to talk to people about them, rather than plaster them on the internet.

Some things still want to be written, for clarity more than anything. But most days, I'm OK with things being muddy.

I'll still be here, on and off. But I look at the backlog of posts I'd planned, and I can't say I care much to write them anymore. I don't even know who I'd be talking to other than myself, and that person is just to happy be alive for now. No additional complexities are required.

Keep on living, folks. We all have time.