Long time no write:

Scanning through my wordvomits, it looks like I didn’t publish posts for turning 30 and 31. This is slightly surprising to me, and slightly upsetting, but also I feel a certain relief at realizing that this might also be part of why I feel somewhat disoriented, listless, confused. I suppose I haven’t written much longform about the pandemic. I must have tweeted about it from time to time, I’m sure. But it feels kind of silly that I didn’t write longform, considering that… historically, if you look at people’s diaries, memoirs, etc, some of the most valuable stuff is whatever they wrote during times of crisis, war and so on. But… at the same time, I don’t want my projects to feel so utilitarian. I want to just do whatever I feel like doing. Whatever. We are where we are. I forgive my past self for doing whatever he did. I’m sure he had a lot on his mind, I’m sure he did the best he could’ve given his context, and I love him, and I thank him for getting me here, where I can do better now.

Introspect, Tattoo, Nonsmoking

So. It’s 2022. I turned 32 a couple of weeks ago. What’s up? Well, the major things that happened were… I finally published Introspect, which is a book that I’ve been working on for years. You could say that all 800+ of my wordvomits have contributed towards Introspect. The blogposts that I wrote before it. I then got a tattoo of a classical labyrinth on my neck and collarbone area, to commemorate it. And then I (mostly) quit smoking. I haven’t bought a pack of cigarettes since about March 2022. And… I wrote a bunch of notes about that, titled Uninstalling Copes.

I wasn’t really planning on quitting smoking per se… well, most smokers are usually carrying the thought of “yea I’ll probably quit someday”, right? And when writing Introspect, I strove to be as honest and accurate about everything I know about self-knowledge, and then I got to a section about coping mechanisms and old patterns of behavior that no longer serve us well… and to write that I figured I had to investigate my own behaviors, my own smoking, and it did more or less persuade me that I ought to quit smoking sometime. And then most critically, my wife asked me if I would quit – I remember getting a hot flash of anger when she asked, sort of like when Bilbo was reluctant to give the ring to Frodo – but then it sort of became clearer that, yeah, I’m getting older, this smoking thing isn’t ideal, and having written a book… blah blah so I stopped. And it was so unpleasant – I go into this in detail in Uninstalling Copes, I truly despaired – and the amazing thing is, when I tweeted about that, people started DMing me that it helped them quit or want to quit or try to quit their own copes, too. It’s really about reconceptualizing your relationship with your cope, and recognizing that the cope must’ve been load-bearing in some way if it were so persistent and entrenched, and so if you’re serious about uninstalling a cope, you have to redistribute the loads it was bearing.

I feel like I’m not done with that, that I have to continue to redistribute the loads if I want to live a healthier, happier life that’s bigger, more abundant, more expanded, more free. One of the things that’s been stressing me out is that I feel stupider since quitting smoking. It was really bad the first couple of weeks or so, it’s not so bad now, but it’s not quite the same either. I’m not as as sharp as I used to be. I struggle with reading sometimes. And I think… I used to use cigarettes as punctuation, as scaffolding, it was how I marked the progress of my days, it was how I rewarded myself. And without that reward structure I just feel empty. And now that I type this out again, I’m reminded of how I used to seek rewards from blogging about local politics, from posting on Facebook and getting Likes, from arguing with my friends in the groupchat, and how when I made the decision to walk away from that, even though it seemed intellectually like the Good and Right Decision, emotionally it felt like a kind of death. Abandonment. Cold. Isolation. Like nothing mattered.

Depression

When I look back on my life there are a handful of incidents and phases that really stand out as pivotal, defining. Getting mocked on an internet forum at 9. Getting kicked out of the Gifted Education Program at 13 and dealing with the fallout of that. Getting kicked out of the first band that I played in, and subsequently mocked by my band members. Being mocked in other contexts. Struggling to connect romantically with anyone. My second band falling apart. My girlfriend (now wife) estranging herself from her disapproving family to be with me. Several painful and scary experiences. I feel like as I get older I have more time and space to think about these things and to revisit them, process them… recently I realized that I do get “triggered” emotionally when I feel misunderstood, and that it likely dates back to my early childhood where being misunderstood seemed like a precursor to very painful experiences. I have a lot of rewiring, reconceptualizing to do.

But wait I haven’t gotten to the thing that I wanted to talk about – the coldness, I guess. The coldness of being away from the warmth of ritual, even bad rituals, can be alienating, isolating, feel like abandonment. And going off cigarettes has given me another taste of that. And it’s just reminding me of that scene in Terranigma… the hero’s journey is lonely, but the hero’s secret is that he was profoundly lonely to begin with.

Anyway, happy belated 32nd birthday, Visa. Let’s keep going.