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In truth there is no clearer way for me to express how lost I feel sometimes, than describing my current situation with a metaphor that doesn’t pin down a single understanding of what I am going through.

***

I write this under stress and pressure.

My last blog post, On half-developed thoughts, was a struggle to write. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to focus on non-academic things in the middle of academics. Growing up, education was everything to me, and anything that I perceived as a threat to my grades was hastily avoided.

Over time, I’ve learnt how to balance it all. But this course has made me regress in a way I did not expect. However I am aware that what I label as regression in this moment may eventually turn out to be adjacent to growth, somehow.

In On half-developed thoughts, I was recording the beginning of a mental unravel. Since then I have been building new systems for productivity, and developing avenues of thought to help me adjust to what life currently requires (things that I have never experienced before).

I was concerned with not fully developing thoughts because developing them is what anchors me. I am obsessed with figuring out and understanding myself, so when I was robbed of the time I needed to do that, I felt like I was falling apart.

Now I am telling myself that that was not me falling apart, but in fact old parts of myself falling away.

New clay is being added in their place and a new self is being moulded in the process.

It has become easier to describe my life with metaphors and that’s because I don’t know what is going on. I like metaphors because they are vagueness and uncertainty disguised as the beautiful and abstract. In truth there is no clearer way for me to express how lost I feel sometimes, than describing my current situation with a metaphor that doesn’t pin down a single understanding of what I am going through.

I’m filming content for a YouTube video that I’d like to upload when my course is over. Hopefully, it well-documents the past six months. In the video, I hope to insert readings of the blog posts I will be writing in the upcoming weeks.

Some will say that I am back and some would not have noticed at all. But here I am.

Stay tuned for Postponing my pleasures.

When everything feels contrived and depthless, I believe it’s a call to focus on the sheer unremarkability of life and yourself as an individual.

***

My life looks very different today in comparison with last year. Those words could have come from your mouth. You’ve experienced a lot of change in the last year too.

Sometimes I look out of the window during a lecture, or spend more time than I’d like to admit scrolling through memories and (insert year ago) todays. I watch videos I filmed at uni and I laugh at how young I looked in sixth form. I look back at myself now knowing that I knew so little. Of course, that’s the way life goes.

Time poverty

Every once in a while we become obsessed with time. We come to realisations about it that open our eyes and we want to share it with people. That’s a phase I’m in right now.

I have been thinking about the past, especially now that life is requiring more of me every single day.

Despite them having the same quantitative value, some seconds mean more than others.

I recently saw a TikTok where a woman explained time poverty, which in a nutshell, is having too many things to do and not enough time to do them – or at least what feels like not enough time. I’ll leave it at that.

Pressure

I’m finding it hard to keep up – every week I think things will be less pressurised and easier to deal with. But they all end up as tasking and demanding as each other.

I’m being tugged in different directions by education, relationships, ambitions, my faith, my self-perception, how I feel about my body and the way I look…

Many are threatening my peace of mind and I have already lost the battle a few times.

Writing

I haven’t written a post in a month or so but it feels longer than that, because so much has been crammed into that short horizon of time.

Really, I only write blog posts when I’ve realised something and can articulate it in a way that I’m proud of, and that people can relate to.

But I’ve recently been thrown into the deep end. And the absence of time has means I’ve been less capable of processing and forming my thoughts. I have been waiting for something to come to life but my realisations have been stunted.

This is the most I’ve written in a while.

To be real

A year ago I was finishing 3rd year.

And looking back I still had no solid idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Ironically, if you asked me I would have given an answer that sounded like I knew what I was planning (pandemic considered).

I’m good at bullshitting my way through life. I‘ve been an advocate for faking it till I make it for many years, and I still am. Yet I grow in awe of how this can coexist with striving to remain who you truly are in any and every moment.

I saw a tweet some months ago saying that you know you’re real when you’re not trying to show that you are. You just ‘be’. That’s all.

That’s what I’m trying to do now. When everything feels contrived and depthless, I believe it’s a call to focus on oneself and the sheer unremarkability of life and yourself as an individual.

I have enjoyed that so much. I used to care a lot about upholding perceptions of myself. If someone thought I was interesting I wanted to remain interesting to them.

But now I am happy to become bland in their eyes. If that’s the ebb and flow of my existence then that’s what I should put across to the world, while paying little to no attention to it at all.

To conclude

Is there value in putting effort into things, and creating art with your living? Yes. But it should be authentic. And if you don’t feel like portraying a certain image of yourself, be okay with not doing so and portraying who you are right now with no care for it.

I say that for myself.

These are some half-developed realisations I’ve come to recently. I will have more over time so perhaps I should be okay with not having every thought turn into a perfectly articulated realisation in my eyes.

Psalms 73:25-26

*this reads like a diary entry