When I was sixteen I became increasingly confident in my aesthetic choices and inclinations; what I liked looking at, listening to and reading. There was a clarity of self that I was proud of and found essential to the artistic work that I did or planned on doing. There was a peace and a confidence I enjoyed relentlessly and even bragged about (mostly to myself, may I note). When I turned 21 I realized how much of this pristine view I had lost. And, in a way, how much of myself I had lost, too. For a while I judged myself on my losing this innate part of me, which I felt aided me in everything I created. I have since begun the long and painful process of mourning this loss and accepting it as a blessing. Embracing the fact that I don't have to subscribe to a specific aesthetic which may have once defined me but no longer does is in a sense an aesthetic choice in itself. I have begun accepting I don't have to subscribe to an artistic path like I don't subscribe to a specific religion, sexual orientation or even gender identity. The freedom that comes with this realization and embrace is difficult and painful, despite the fact that I do believe it is a form of freedom.
This year has been a struggle in countless ways, and in ways that I find difficult to put into words. My mental health has been at its most strained as has been my love for what I do. I constantly have to remind myself that from struggle often stem the most beautiful and rewarding experiences, even art. I remind myself that pain is power and knowledge, and that identity struggle is a part of human life. And yet. And yet I keep thinking of eighteen year old me, secure in her ability even in times of stress; her will to go on because her vision is bound to be realized. I think of her and I think of me and the disconnect is so evident that I don't know how I will ever reach a point of security and love like that again. And I know what I should be thinking, how I should be reacting to change. I should be and in a way am proud of who I'm becoming and the path that I'm taking on. But the insecurity that comes in creating work that isn't a full representation of what I want to be or living a life full of anxieties I have no control over is exhausting at best and threatening at worst.
Here's to completing a full circle, jumping down and reaching the floor bloody and filled with scars but alive. Here's to future me waking up and living and continuing on making the world around me feel like it could be mine. Here's to me wrapping my wounds in the scraps that surrounding me and climbing back up towards the light. Here's to life.
What has life been like lately? My bland attempts at cataloging my work and experiences have resulted in my trying merely to "remember" certain events, occurrences, and emotions that I've lived through as of late. It's obviously not what I intended. When I consistently and frequently record things I've done, read, listened to, and watched, I feel really productive and it usually turns out to be an inspiring and motivating experience. But doing things frequently, or even consistently, feels like such an obligation that I end up not acting on it. But if it's so beneficial?!?!?! Why wouldn't I WANT to do it?!?! Consistency is so hard. And yet I KNOW that it's the basis for any kind of success I wish to attain.
But today I started looking back at the various methods of cataloguing that I DO keep updated, simply because they are truly easy to do so and also don't require much depth or effort on my part. Those tend to be Goodreads, which I obsessively update because I love keeping track of whatever it is I am reading (false sense of productivity, to be perfectly honest); Instagram, especially so since I began the #100happydays challenge, which I'm almost done with (this is a true test to my consistency abilities, and proves I CAN be consistent - haven't missed a day); and, finally, although less thoroughly, I've been keeping up with Pinterest, because it allows me to organize absolutely ANYTHING I want to, and speaks really closely to the perfectionist in me. So I guess I can be consistent, no? This should be enough proof. And yet, I realize that none of these things are really meaningful, in the way I'd like them to be.
I wish for more tactile experiences, sentimental and hands-on creative processes that take time and effort which allow me to value my work in relation to my life more. Outside of school and classwork, my own work is limited to birthday gifts for people and terrible doodles in scraps of paper. I wish I would force myself outside of the technological and, while useful, limiting world I've fallen into. I guess it's as easy as starting. But that's kind of the worst part - starting. Nothing's scarier for me than failure, hard work and time spent completely wasted on unsuccessful projects… I guess just the idea of doing something less than perfect makes me unable to proceed, and I wish that weren't the case.
Today, I went through my Youtube 'Favorites' playlist, which features an array of beautiful, meaningful, and tearjerking songs. They do catalogue my life at different times and I like to come back to it every so often to feel the pangs of emotion that come with remembering. Music is the best way to feel nostalgia, isn't it? You don't have to force your eyes to look at or read something, you can lie down and be in complete darkness, and still the emotions would be as strong as they were at that moment. And that playlist was the one that triggered all of this, and that reminded me of the necessity of cataloguing. Nostalgia IS useful, beautiful, introspective and an amazing creative outlet, despite the dangers of becoming "addicted to it". But, if the promise of future wonderful nostalgia is enough to puss me to catalogue and work, for MYSELF, that's enough. We all want to have a leave a legacy, even if it's for our future selves… even if it's for the dirt that will swallow it. Having a legacy isn't entirely about the person who finds it, but about the magnificent discharge of emotions which occurs in the process of creating it.
Lately life has been nice and stressful and filled with good things but also moments of a lot of anxiety. It's always kind of like that, balanced, in a way. But the anxiety weighs more that anything else. When they say "What is heavier, a liter of water or a liter of oil?" and you're supposed to answer "They weigh the same! One liter!" I don't believe it. What weighs more, an hour of blinding anxiety or an hour of happy complacency with the world? Trust me, anxiety weighs more. Happy moments are an appreciated break after the bad ones, but they don't fix too much. But hey, you kind of feel this pride in having survived a panic attack, or a really bad day. You're alive, right? That's what I hold on to. Not drowning. Optimism isn't for irrational people, it's for people who really don't want to drown.
So, not so long ago I had a conversation with someone who decidedly told me that pessimism is for reasonable people. When confronted with this, at first I felt a little bit offended because I believe quite the opposite, but then I realized that people deal with their daily problems in different ways, so maybe looking at your life like a black hole you want to crawl into will make the good moments especially refreshing and beautiful. However, having no expectations of life, while potentially seeming a simpler way to deal with certain aspects of it, can turn on you and instead leave you with a lack of will and excitement that can make you the most unhappy person in the world. I've always had my moments of darkness and pessimism, and it's impossibly hard to let go of them, they're so attractive and easy to feel - pain, sadness, disenchantment, anger... selfishness. What's really commendable is climbing out. So I'll keep turning back to positivity and optimism when I fall in the black hole, no matter how hard it is. I read somewhere most of the time we feel angry, sad or anxious over mere thoughts, which exist only in your head. Isn't it strange? We sometimes let all of these moments and ideas control our minds and our lives when you're the one forcing them upon yourself?
I guess life is just one big fight against yourself, to learn how to think better and love better and to lose the egoism which is falling into your sadness with no intention of coming back out. You will probably fall every so often, but I guess trying to come out is a choice, an optimistic one, and a commendable one, no matter what the outcome is.
I don't know why I wrote this but I guess there must be a reason if I did. Just try to be happy.
Ever since I turned 20, the world looks different. I think I can appreciate things more because I have a new sense of anxiety for the future that I had never apprehended would come so fast. Suddenly my life is supposed to "start" because most successful young people start being precisely that at my age. I just left my teens. I am not ready to face an ambitious life.
So I've been conflicted. On one hand I thought it time to read those books that people have always said are essential to the "Twenty-something" population (see: The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera; The Catcher in The Rye, Salinger... etc.). All that intellectual/coming of age stuff that I've always liked, but apparently I was too young to really appreciate the full meaning of. So I decided to read The Bell Jar, because I've always had this feeling that I would love Sylvia Plath, but I never really knew when or where to start. She's best known for being a wonderful and tragic poet, but she wrote a novel which is based off of her life and I loved it. I can see how still-teen-me wouldn't have felt the same way I felt when reading it this month.
On the other hand, I've been tapping into my inner pre-teen and feeling a kind of Benjamin Button thing going on in my head. I'm a huge fan of One Direction. It's something I've learnt to love and express now I've turned 20. Just a month ago the fact that I liked this boy band whose fan base is made up in its majority of 13-year-old girls, made me pretty embarrassed and this didn't allow me to really ENJOY the beauty and phenomena of One Direction. Now I am basically an adult (and this may sound ironic considering the topic of discussion at hand, but I digress), I feel in full control of this love of mine and I've been expressing it everywhere I go: "If you don't cry with 'Story of My Life' there's something wrong with you" or "But 'I Would' is SO GOOD. Like lyrically great. They don't say "Love", THEY SPELL IT OUT" are some examples. I'm also having a Taylor Swift moment, but that's ever-present and comes and goes, so that's not a surprise (I am, however, obsessed with a song which you should probably listen and dance to, 'Holy Ground').
Maybe I'm just being my nostalgic self with this back and forth, but I think it's gotten a bit beyond that, and I've just become the perfect balance of "innocence" and "maturity" (those two words are so encompassing they have to be in quote marks because they aren't fully defining), and I'm enjoying both sides extremely. Who says I can't read Walt Whitman and then listen and sing along to the full Red album by Taylor Swift? Why are these things not supposed to correlate? I can't try to grow up cultivated AND have diverse music tastes?
It makes me angry when people criticise my love for things like One Direction, because, as far as I know, you don't really chose the things you like. That would be EXTREMELY useful, as I have a couple of classes I'd like to not fall asleep in. But, alas, that is not a thing that happens. And it's unfortunate, but you should acknowledge it and move on, and when someone tells you they had a really great time the other night dancing around to a Justin Bieber song, despite your own feelings for that boy, the person who's telling you the story had a really great time, so be happy for them.
In my case, I usually gain people's respect in social situations which feature "nerdy" or "cultivated" or "rly so superr intellectual" boys, when the topic of either Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, comes up, because I'm a huge fan of both and these boys will appreciate a common, slightly eccentric passion like that (not that SW or LOTR is exceptionally weird at all, in fact I'm usually dumbstruck in these situations because SO MANY people like them that it shouldn't be an eccentricity in any case, but oh well.) It's great that I can always resort to these two topics to blend in and well in awkward moments. But, these people who are so "accepting" of you because you really enjoy Annie Hall, will be the worst when you express, politely, even, your problems with the film (500) Days of Summer. Don't even get me started if you include in your music favorites Led Zeppelin and Taylor Swift together. "Goodbye", they'll shout, mock-offended, "You are basically embarrassing yourself comparing the importance of Zeppelin with that little girl singing about her ex-boyfriends." The thing is, I'm done with being embarrassed. What is that word, even? It sound like pregnant in Spanish. I am not ashamed of having diverse hobbies and interests.
I had to bring this topic up because I've been thrown this idea in my face for too long. Liking or respecting someone solely on their musical/literary/cinematic interests seems so banal. I don't want to be an archetype of a Lord of the Rings fan. Because no one is. That's why it's called an archetype. It's an assumption and an exaggeration and I don't like it. If you're a die hard fan, great, if you kind of like it, great, if you don't care for it, GREAT. Hooray for being genuine. I don't want to be reduced to a concept, and it's become more and more clear after turning 20. I do want to dip my toes in the sea of "What Every Twenty-Something Should Do", because it's probably really enriching and interesting and a good chance to learn things. But if I want to simultaneously listen to "Don't Forget Where You Belong" by One Direction and love it, I'll do it. Fitting the mold is quite out of the question now I realize I'm twenty years old and don't truly fit in anywhere. Luckily you don't have to. If they tell you otherwise they are lying and are probably ashamed of some of their interests, too (they're probably die-hard Swifties and you won't know until you rock out to Red in front of them... just a thought.)
Hope you have a great day and wow, if you read this, imagine me blowing kisses to you because that's how I feel about you.
I was done with summer the day it started, to be honest, so it's been a rough couple of months for my cold heart. The only thing I like about this time of year is that I don't have classes, but that's quickly fixed because I've begun working for my retake exams in a couple of weeks. So right now I'm in a limbo between hating the weather and hating that I can't lay around watching movies and reading anymore in the coolness of my room. All of this I cover up with a shawl of fake positivity which is really just my undying excitement for Autumn. I cannot wait until I have leaves crunching under my feet and have to carry an umbrella just in case, and wearing hats and standing outside feeling the cold sneak under your coat and feeling glorious. At least I feel glorious. I'm an autumn child, you see, born in the beautiful month of October, so perhaps it's this that makes me so akin to the season.
Also, the beginning of the school year, however dreaded by academically-challenged characters such as myself, is actually a really exciting time. School shopping isn't what it used to be when you were ten, but it's still pretty neat. Starting things is one of my best abilities (continuing them, and *gasp* finishing them, is a whole other story), so starting a school year is really the epitome of 'beginnings'. Because, what's more of a start than a whole year of new classes, projects and information to drink up? I'm getting kind of stressed just by thinking about it. I should relax and think of things I want to buy, that always helps.
Without further ado, my Autumn Wishlist. I have dreams of all these items so I hope I'll be able to have them in my reach at some point. Thanks for reading! Do you share my feelings towards summer/autumn? I have a feeling it's an unpopular opinion... xx
Tomorrow I am travelling to the magical land of Asturias to visit my soul sister Marina. I have this really heavy feeling in my heart because I feel like I need to go for my mental health.
Yesterday I witnessed the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen. I live on the outskirts of Madrid and it's quiet and open and, since our apartment faces the West (more or less), I get to experience the beauty of the sun setting every day in the most beautiful way possible. I have an obsession with the sunset as seen from my house. I could watch it for hours and I wish we would live constantly with it in the background. It's so fleeting, it's like in a second it's changed and the sun is gone and you look elsewhere and it's suddenly dark when it had just been bright orange. When it's mildly cloudy, I lose it. I lose control over myself and I wish desperately (really) that I could fly into it.
Most of the time I take photos of it because I need to show the world its amazingness. People don't really care for it as strongly as I do, though. I don't know why, the sunset and the sky and the sky at sunset are things that make me go to a completely different state of mind. I kind of feel like I'm swimming, which is the closest thing I'll every do to flying...
These are some photos I took. I took 60 in total but some were not worth it (taking them from my window sitting on my desk is an extreme sport, I tell you), so here are a few. Also, listen to this song.
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