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sketchbook stuff

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Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

- One hundred years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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When I walked through Vincent Van Gogh's exhibit in the Netherlands, I could somehow see myself in those pictures. Just like the little kid who he drew saying that he was a 'very good kid', just how he had a view of interconnectedness as well as disconnect in the painting of a peasant supper, just how he put his grief into art cause words didn't seem like they're enough, how he wrote letters to his brother and shared the messiest of feelings, how being so distraught with rejection from a friend he cut off his own ear, just how he was able to see himself through the myriad of colors and spent an immeasurable amount of time trying to see if he could actually see himself. When I was drawing my self-portrait I didn't initially know if I wanted to start with a smiling face of mine. Cause so many times in my life, even now, I sometimes don't recognize the smile on my face. It seems farcical, somehow trying my best to poorly put on a masquerade. But I thought, maybe that is an exercise in itself, and went ahead to start with this picture. I think my first portrait is not all too bad, and I know I'll do better!

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What I need to remember is that I lost who I thought I could call mine, though I perhaps never had them in the first place. This feeling of not belonging to anyone is not new at all, just like a pervading ghost, it settles down all around me, just like a ghost from the past it trickled into me through my bloodline. At this point, it is my task to question and stand up to my generational trauma. I can feel myself being weak, from the struggles of survival and fighting to see a different day. I don't even have the strength to stand, and the weight of the pen seems to stop my fingers from writing. But look around you, you have already changed your life! The effort you have put in, the tears that you bled, the way you broke yourself; is now letting you take a peek into the world through the cracks. Just from inside the bell jar, where you have lived your entire life, now you can actually smell the fresh air through the cracks. I'm sure your bruised knuckles are bleeding, but you now know that there is an outside, you can feel it in your lungs, you can feel it in your bones!

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Almost every single day, I need to remind my body that it doesn't need to be in the survival mode that I don't need to prove myself, that I can let my shoulders down and take a deep breath! Maybe this would have been slightly easier if there was another person to remind me of the same. Out of the constant cycles of hyperfixation, I end up being more tired than usual. I'll try my best to just let things be, that they needn't be perfect for me to go ahead, that it's okay to just be!

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Just finished this yesterday! I'm now getting into portraits.

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You know, when you have a small child with you, you listen to its cries, you listen to its words, its murmurs. You are so concerned you listen; you may be asleep, but the moment he cries you wake up. You are attentive all the time because the child is yours, you must care for it, you must love it, you must hold it. You are so tremendously attentive that even though you are asleep, you wake up. Now, with that same quality of attention, affection, care, you give to every movement of that child, could you watch the mirror which is your self?

- On Love and Loneliness, Jiddu Krishnamurti

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I know it has been a while, though this still resonates with me every single day. The moment I try to take away the self from my thoughts, the world becomes calmer and easier to manage!

Lately, I have been wondering about the state of being stuck. In a state where I look for reasons to be happy, always asking questions like why did someone hurt me, why am I lonely, why did my friend leave me - it's generally just about me.

But what if I try to make another person happy, I suddenly get the strength I thought I lacked. It can be to write a letter to your friend, or make a homeless person happy or text your loved one to see if they're okay. It somehow seems like the reason to make myself happy is not for myself, for some reason that never really worked for me. How about we try to be happy so that we are strong enough, capable enough to be there for our loved ones and bring about a smile on their face? At the end of the day, isn't that what we are looking for? It somehow seems like the lack of love is compensated by not seeking it, but by giving it to others in one way or the other. And the act of trying to love another person also fills our hole in our hearts!

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Rain tip taps on the window of my grief,

Letting it know that it is seen,

Letting it know that it is not alone,

By sharing its own tears.

Rain lets my grief peek into the world outside,

By wiping the tears off my face.

It lets me take a deep breath,

And let it out in the form of rain drops.

Its thunder silences the wails in my soul,

To let me know that I'm one with the world,

That I do belong,

And remind me that my grief can now be let out,

To be cleansed of dirt,

And let it jump around in the puddles,

Just like the little kid it once was!

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Brede realized that he had not been living life, but watching his life be lived. Like his own narrator, he would stitch discrete events into the story of his life. This was an instinct and had no benefit. A story demands qualification, invites criticism, splits into paragraphs and chapters. A story fashions expectation as calipers to measure life, scales to weigh incidents as fair or unfair, good or bad. A story asks to be told. A story can be edited. But most dangerously a story creates hope, hope for a happy ending.

- Acts of God, Kanan Gill

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This is one of those days, where it feels.. empty, for the lack of a better description. Empty in a way where everything around me somehow seems to be distant in the same way.

Through my window, I see an old lady trying to discard some recyclables at the end of the week. Somehow, it feels bizarre as if all I can do is just watch as if it is a scene in a movie. Maybe it's even distant than that. When I see my roommate trying to chat with his advisor over phone, even though it is happening right next to me, it feels as if it is something I cannot really touch, something which is just floating by.

When I think about my parents living in my home country trying to make about their day in the usual way, it somehow feels unrelatable. The place where I lived for the majority of my life, feels foreign. The city I currently live in, where I am a foreigner, which feels more like home only because I have been living around here for a little bit in the recent past. But, not really home per say.

Sometimes, I am not sure why I am feeling this. Being another day on the calendar, or just another random instance of bright sun on the outside, if all of it feels almost exactly the same, then what am I even feeling? To be in a state of trance, where I know I am awake, but still asleep and unable to touch anything on the outside. Maybe this is just a result of my depressive episode last night, just a return of the silence after the storm of emotions where the past comes back to haunt me.

During these moments, I tend to ask myself, what is the meaning of living a life at all? And, I think, I fail to answer this question. Maybe because I am still trying hard to tie everything into a grand story, rather than to seek the moment in itself. I do not know how not to judge a moment without transcribing the past onto the reel playing in the present. As Armin puts it in Shingeki No Kyojin, ".. that maybe I had been born to race Mikasa and Eren up the hill." Then maybe I was born to just be in the moment to call my friend a sucker, maybe I was born to play pool with a couple of friends I met, maybe I was born to share moments of safety with friends, however fleeting. There is perhaps no meaning in the entirety at all. My inability to accept the fleeting nature of those moments is what is so tormenting to me.

If my life is just filled with little moments, is there any point in trying to hold one of them responsible for my happiness in the current moment? Though for now, I still feel empty and I will try to my best to immerse myself in the next moment than to allow the emptiness to cover the world in grey.

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Just some pics from the recent past:

- Learned to play Go at the same bar I learned to play pool!

- a serene solo hike (well serene when I'm not spiraling)

- can of beer floating by, thrown into the lake, is it signifying my existence at times? Both peace and dissociation?

- cab ride back from a bar, now that I'm part of a pool league team :)

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When you're so tired but still can't go to bed...maybe because the excitement of being too happy felt unreal and now I need to get back to the real world by reminding myself of misery in its own way!! The fact that I perhaps don't deserve this eats me out, even though I guess I do. Little moments of dissociation kinda reel me in, where the happiness in making a shot on the pool table seems similar to feeling emotionally safe and belonged in real life, I tend to question, what is living all about? Am I starting with a crooked paradigm in the first place? Or maybe that this crooked paradigm is necessary in order to see life through the eyes of all the other crooked paradigms, or just other people!

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“Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I have accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.” ― Norah Ephron.

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My charcoal drawing! Sometimes the waves remind me of a world outside my own, the one which I cannot touch but just see from a distance. Another reminder of how out worldly I felt in the past!

Though, something it does remind me of is the feeling of being drowned, by my own emotions until all my thoughts go numb, when I can raise my hand to try and touch my faltering reflection underwater. In that deafening silence, I can let my eyes well up to remember the past moment that I needed to see, all over again!