sniff sniff

The last post here had been somewhere in the late aughts of February, which on paper is a mere 6 months if anyone is counting. In astronomy, the earth has made an almost staggering 700,000 kilometres around the sun -that's circling our island 14,000 times, running 2.4kms in NAPFA test 291,667 times, and circle the moon enough times for you to definitively conclude whether there really is a Chinese celestial being with the March Hare from Wonderland, or if the moon is really just cheese- and all this while I haven't materialised any of my fleeting thoughts into my digital pocketbook.

Much of this dryspell had really been this intense subscription to inadequacy, reading articles upon articles thinking

'I could write that,'

'hey, I'm sure a thought like that in its exact syntax crossed my mind,'

Yet turning up short when I decide to pen a story idea of my own.

The dark side of yore has slowly crept back in but I'm not sure if it's entirely a bad thing. Some days I still feel like that wimpy pensive kid everyone picks last when it comes to group projects, this sense of othering stemming from the inability to feel find rootedness and commensality with people, dates you go to because flaking is rude, asking rudimentary 'tell me about your worst dates' and other questions you ask because that's what cool people talk about, that's the 50 questions Refinery29, Buzzfeed and LoveLanguages.com says you should ask to know someone better, ask him about his weekend and find common topics. Sometimes I follow these guides, many times it comes out alot less perfunctorily than how it really should, because rule #13 dictates you need to listen and be genuinely curious. But I'm really not interested in wanting to know how extraordinary your yet another weekday is, knowing the wildest of my days can't even ignite a lambent glow to the shiny beacon that is your life, and probably the remaining 90% of people of my would-be misadventures.

Identity has become increasingly confounding to me these days, as holding down my own fort becomes a wavering affair, like a weathered street sign whose footing is overdue, always threatening to lose its balance at the slightest change of tides.

In psychology class years ago, identity is (over)simplified into two branches: the actual and ideal self. Of course under its roof a bevy of free weights that has much to do with stuff of self-image, actualisation and the like, but I'll leave you to slice the underbelly of how the brain works in your own time.

I digress.

On that vein, it suggests that identity and happiness goes in tandem, a binary that works in a black and white world like a beam balance, that the moment you tipple over and check off the shopping list of traits and things you need to mold a new and improved achilles heel, you can leave behind the once perfect disaster to step into a woke zeitgeist so you can live your best life. (How 2018 did that last sentence sound?)

Pardon my little soliloquy.

What I've been meaning to say is, I haven't been feeling a sense of rootedness, not knowing who I am anymore and on edge of losing control of things at a moment's notice. Not that it's new but there's this cloying intolerance that this is should've been a fleeting pastime of wasted youth and something to look back and giggle at how immature you once were, and not something you catch yourself fretting about. In the day, in social circles, there's a suit I wear - best described by the words confident, jovial, easygoing, tryhard, a quoteunquote faggot to the T. All this not a facade; a facade would be putting a str8 masculine front, but a distinct contrast to a more reticent, ached soul that teeters between the pains of existing and perennial curio with the what's in oblivion. Introversion and extroversion are not mutually exclusive, you should know by now, but on both ends, both characters, caricatures, selves feel awfully me and unlike me, as if even in a moment of solitary confinement I'd hate that version of me too.

I'm 22 and don't know what there is to life. Kylie, help.

- I'm starting to not like myself as much these days.