[My actual, current] body politic
sleep, food and water
I don’t like how I respond to emotional pain. I had a tidying session on Tuesday — wait, no, yesterday — no, Monday — Jesus. It was on Monday and I can’t remember anything else. I realized how much of my writing was decomposing, it felt like. In my mind, I screamed.
*weeps*
“I don’t want my work to be decomposing!
I don’t want it to die!
I waited too long!”
The next few days might’ve gone to TV. I couldn’t believe I had files and files of unpublished work because I wanted so much to make a good first impression. Fuck!
Instead of tv I wish I wrote more, or at least just dealt with my feelings more directly. Everything feels hard right now. I don’t know what grieving is suppose to be like or what’s appropriate vs. indulgent…somehow these last few words feel like something foreign, like some airborn, white and male [exclusively as well as together] mess I ingested while sleeping. They feel foreign to my body and yet I can also feel how my insides have habituated themselves to accommodate such invasive ideas about what it means to human right.
It’s not good to smother your feelings with sedative things.
Rest is not sedation.
Apparently I clinch my teeth when I sleep.
I might resist sleep for the same reason I resist the creative space and sedate myself instead.
It’s all feminine. All water. All play, sponteneity, Improv. Rest…I want to stop filling my time with things. How do I loosen this attachment?
Sometimes I feel my stomach is holding me hostage, or like I’ve been holding it hostage by ignoring it all these years and it’s come back to get me. It’s 4 in the morning and I’m being woken up by acid reflux. What the fuck?
I ate 3 slices of cheese pizza, with onion for sweetness, at 5:30. Why is it still digesting at 4am the next day?
I’m having a real addiction issue with television, and a fight with my food, apparently. Probably no different than most of the internet-accessible world.
How can I create home in my emotional life? Even now I feel the tension of not having the television on, and anxious about the most recent acidic singe to my larynx.
I drown myself in noise and make myself sick so I don’t have to feel, or at least so I can feel something else. Always running and anxious, running and anxious. People spend their whole lives running from the emptiness, the quiet space where their truth is buried, crying that they wish they could slow down to excavate something real about themselves and this life, but they really don’t. They say they want truth, but they’re clung to their masks, addicted like me.
I have to get to a place where I’m not rushing to get away from my feelings. If I love my mother I’ll be grieving her forever. Just like the beginning of accepting my whole self will involve mourning the parts of me I let go dormant.
Presence and concentration are the things being asked of me, as measures of taking my relationship with my emotional life more seriously. This may be the first, if not the only way I understand politics, I promise.
