kill1bill1

[kill1bill1]

Realizing now that I can quickly morph self-improvement into something ugly. When life is uncertain, I turn to things that are certain: Calories in and calories out. Progressive overload. Things that I can control: My appearance. So much control that it becomes obsession. It becomes a game, how can I be better so that people can perceive me this way? How can I shed my old self and bury her forever?

What does it mean to me to actually self-improve? Do I actually understand the nature of it? If my improvement is tied to external validation, do I really, truly, want it?

For the longest time I've thought of this journey of practicing self-improvement as the route to a destination, an end goal of sorts. I'll finally achieve what I want to achieve when I have attained mental clarity after a hundred hours of meditation, after I've reached this body fat percentage, after I've gained the confidence to go out into the world and actually start a life.

I've been so busy living in my head preparing and preparing. But preparing for what? The future remains uncertain no matter how much I prepare. And in this pursuit to become what I think is the better version of me, I feel like I've lost myself.

I think the only way out is pure, radical acceptance of the present. There is no “aha” moment where everything just clicks, there is just the string of moment to moment like sand slipping from fingers and the awareness of something inarticulable that emerges. Being truly okay with where you are and not seeing the dream of the future as an escape, because your "future self" does not exist. True inner freedom is understanding wholeheartedly that all you have is your present self and what matters is the values that guide your present actions.

[kill1bill1]

Today I woke up before the sun and I spent my time reading in the dark, reading anything I can. Old journal entries, reviews of my favourite books, essays written by girls I've never met, and I think about how badly I need a hobby that doesn't involve consuming words.

I'm thinking about this quote from Eileen: “Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.”

I think about these words a lot, they echo around my mind in mornings like these when I’m able to watch the sneakiness of light growing behind my window blinds, the way it eventually spills into my bedroom like overflowing molten gold. My blankets are tangled in the shape of me, my book is strewn about haphazardly from falling asleep reading. I like looking at the cracks in the spine and the fold in the pages, signs of my existence tainted on something tangible, something that will outlive me. Everyday, I look forward to making coffee, drinking this bitter elixir. I like rituals, I like the certainty of tomorrow's coffee. I understand now of the sweetness of mundane life if only I choose to pay attention, and I wish that I can always be this mindful everyday of the things I have and the things I do.

So, this is how I have been spending my days. I drink iced black coffee, I eat words, I peel mandarins, I play solitaire and I scribble on my journal until the tip of my pen wears down and my handwriting is a cryptic alien code that only I can decipher. I'm writing a lot because I'm trying my best not to get too caught up in my own head. I’ve learned that sensitivity is a good thing. I care for people deeply and I experience joy with overwhelming intensity, but then again I experience sadness and shame with the same level of intensity, and sometimes it's too heavy and I don't want to shoulder it. With writing everything I’m feeling, I can observe these feelings as a neutral outsider. I like to pick apart my emotions and compartmentalize them, I’m an archivist in the library of my own psyche. I’m obsessed with understanding myself better by intellectualizing my feelings, raw and unprocessed, like dissecting an alien specimen, taking out an organ and slowly turning it around to see it clearly under the light.

I’m not perfect at this, but when I sense the brewing of a negative feeling and this familiar twist in my gut, I will try to fight for control over my emotions so that it won’t continue to nib at me. The first step is to confess what it exactly is that I’m feeling and the next is to categorize it into one of two groups: primary emotions, which are the raw emotions felt in direct response to something that just happened, or secondary emotions, the emotions that are felt about another emotion. Emotions are a funny thing. Primary emotions cannot be felt for more than 90 seconds at a time, but I have moments of such emotions being so intense that they overtake me and I lose mental clarity. On the contrary, I’ve had secondary emotions that I leave alone because they’re tiny and don’t bother me that much in the moment, but they will continue to trail after me like a pestering ghost, only to grow more bothersome. So, whenever I feel bad, I will take a step back and try to analyze my feelings. If I realize that it’s just a primary emotion, I will simply accept it and let myself feel the feelings out. If it’s a secondary emotion, I will deal with it by continuing to write.

I realize now that my anxieties and secondary emotions are mainly due to confusion, and keeping this all locked up inside my skull will just lead me to spiral. I'm trying this thing where if I feel confused about something, I will write about it blindly with no clear end goal. It doesn't matter to me what it is I'm saying in the moment, sometimes I can't even see anything but the blur of my hands moving, the violet ink of my pen. So long as I empty out my thoughts onto something external and separate from my body, the truth starts to take form to me like a person emerging from a landscape of mist.

I took a Cognitive Science class and something that I think about often is the Extended Mind hypothesis and the question of where exactly the mind ends and the world begins. While it may be easy to say that the boundary of the mind is the skull, this hypothesis raises that our mind is not confined solely to the brain but that it actually transcends beyond the human body and reaches out into the world through making use of external tools to perform better, cognitively. It’s like doing math without a pen and paper, where our mind’s capacity is limited and juggling symbols in the blackness makes us prone to mistakes. So we use this tool that exists outside of our body to offload information, and in doing so, this tool intertwines with and becomes part of our mental processes. That must mean that the tools we use are also part of our minds. I like this idea because it means that my journal is a part of my mind, almost an extension of me like a connected limb. I use it as a tool to help me navigate confusion over feelings of shame and anger and guilt, and I also like to copy fragments of information I’ve gathered from books and articles, unloading them like furniture in an extra storage unit. The comforting thing about it is that I can always go back to it and be reminded of things that I would have otherwise forgotten, all those important pieces of information I swore I wouldn’t forget but end up getting lost in the labyrinth of my mind. It’s as if some of my thinking is stored in this journal, taking the form of words and scribbles. It brings me solace to know that when I’m dead, a part of my mind will continue to live on in this earth.

[kill1bill1]

There is so much sky here, all violent blue and heavy on my heart. I’m laying on the grass and I rest my eyes, and all I focus on is sound. I hear the birds singing their sweet songs as they chase each other through the air. I hear their melody getting swept up by the cool breeze that rustles through the leaves, tickles my cheeks, whispers in my hair. I hear the gentle song of the nearby stream, the flutter of wings, the dance of flowers, and I swear I could hear the distant little footsteps of a thousand marching ants. Most of all, I hear the breathing of the meadow, alive and everywhere. I want to lay here forever, to feel the green curling around my limbs and pull me back into the earth. I would like it, I think.

[kill1bill1]

Nobody will ever truly understand you completely and if you dont work to understand yourself you will not achieve the things you were meant to achieve.