katharsis

Hello, I am alive.

Recently I’ve been rereading (yet again) old blog entries from college and came across this one from December 2010:

A Love for All Things Beautiful

sight, sound, and scent
color, coffee, and conversation
literature, lace, and love
picture, poetry, paper, and pen

ink and inspiration
time and truth and tattoo
pleasure and pain and piercing
swirl, smoke, and solitude

These are things that come to mind, along with images of flowers and grass growing wild in an open field. A simple life I have been longing to live. Something I feel I have been deprived of. There is a hunger growing inside me. A need, a longing to breathe an air some place else. A place with no concrete walls, no silver deserts of asphalt, no tall, fiber glass windows.

I want not only to see beauty, but to experience it. To hold it and preserve it. To create something out of it. To capture it and become one with it.

There is a fire burning in my hearth, warming up my made-up winter days. There is no fall in the land I come from, but dead trees stand proud, their roots buried in its earth, their branches reaching for its sky.

I, too, have a sky.

I long for something beautiful. Merely existing holds no meaning.

I long to be defined.

Some say people don’t really change, and I suppose this entry is a testament to that, because the things I apparently wanted nearly fourteen years ago are still the same as my desires at present.

Lately I’ve been trying to be more conscious of the things I consume. I haven’t been on Instagram for over a month (although I still occasionally post on my dog’s account just so the shelter we adopted her from could see that she is happy and healthy) and because of it I feel I’m healthier mentally. I should have quit a long time ago, but who has time for regret?

It’s summer now, but just like last year, it seems the arrival of the season has been pushed back yet again. I suppose this is how it will always be moving forward. Climate change deniers, care to explain why this is so?

Other than cutting back on social media usage, I’ve also been trying to buy less. I haven’t been succeeding on that front, but at least I’m making an effort, I suppose. For one, I no longer go to shopping malls for fun. Something I read on r/simpleliving changed my outlook on malls. It was something along the lines of ‘nothing you can buy from a mall will las you a lifetime’ and since then I haven’t had any desire to go window shopping. After all, what’s fun about walking around ogling at stuff you either don’t need or can’t afford? Or worse, both. I don’t even know why window shopping is something I spent precious time on. See? This is why one must always strive to be mindful of how one’s time is spent. Time is a limited resource, after all, even if it seems we have an infinite supply of it.

I turned thirty six years old this year. A scary number, for sure, especially because I still have not lost the weight I’ve been meaning to lose for about ten fucking years now, which means I still have not gotten pregnant. But, as always, I am still trying.

I’ve stopped taking ADHD medication over a year ago, and I honestly do not find the need for it. I feel like because I’ve lived so long without knowing for sure if I had it (and even forgetting I suspected it), I just learned to manage my symptoms—devising systems to help keep my shit intact. Of course, the official diagnosis still made a huge difference and since then I’ve only come up with more systems and processes to keep my life from falling apart.

The older I get, the more disdain I feel towards this broken system we’re forced to live within. It’s fucking exhausting and disheartening to watch the world deteriorate in the hands of the selfish and greedy.