What's up what's upppppp? This month has felt long as fuck, and I’m writing this while in quite a bit of pain- not to start things off on such a sour note lol sorry. Everything WAS fine, I just had to get one last procedure done on my foot (the one that I broke last year) and I’m back in a boot unable to walk very well for the next few days, feeling just the slightest bit defeated since I worked all month in physical therapy to get my mobility back. This feels like a step back, but I have high hopes that from here I’m slingshotting forward.
My mental health has honestly been all over the place recently. All month, no matter how great things have been in my life and how grateful I’ve felt, everything’s been tinted with a loneliness I can’t quite understand or move beyond. If I think about it, it’s always been there, it’s what’s fueled my art up until now. But for some reason these days, I am now expecting to be understood when before I didn’t necessarily ask that of anyone- I was content fantasizing about being understood. Part of me even liked that yearning feeling. I’m sick of it now, I don’t want to long for things I want to have them. The more I’m settling into being present in my life and risking vulnerability, the more I’m realizing there’s something missing. I communicate what’s on my heart, but there’s no guarantee at all that I’ll be heard the way I’m asking to be heard, all those layers to a single word absorbed and processed correctly by another soul. That’s where the risk comes in I guess.
Books have been my saving grace these past few weeks. Reading things born from imaginations that aren’t mine but that hold passages of my own truth in them are quite literally saving my life right now. I’ve started reading two at a time, one fiction one non fiction, depending on what I’m in the mood for, trying my best to let it be a substitute for being on my phone or in situations where I feel dismissed.
Maybe this could be considered withdrawal, but I feel too fragile for the world at the moment. I just need some time. It will all be okay. These feelings are just as important as any. They remind me how truly alive I am, and what a range of experience I have access to.
‘Til next month,
Ash
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