flattened by the breath of the world
February 5th, 2023
====================================
Have you ever been so full of words you can barely speak at all? Have
you ever had times where you have so many conflicting emotions you're
just numb?

I find myself in this place a lot.

Did something kinda out of character over the past couple of
days. Friday night we threw on an n95 and hopped a bus out to seaside
OR, because hotels right next to the beach are ridiculously cheap
right now because most people are not itching to go to the beach in
february when it's 40 degrees out and 30mph wind and rain pushes the
cold past your bones.

But I think it's glorious, y'know? Standing before the ocean on finely
ground monument to the cycle of death and birth, letting its breath
crush your spirit back into your body.

It's one of the first times I've taken an intentional break from
working in years, I think.

Maybe that's why I've been so impossibly sad during it all, feeling
highs and lows cycling rapidly and wishing I could sob but never quite
staying in any feeling long enough to let it all out.

The same way the wind presses the mist and cold deep into me, I think
the pandemic has put a new kind of depression into my bones. Well,
that and some of the trauma that's I've accumulated over the pandemic:
but a lot of that is the kind of thing I don't really like to talk
about even on gopherspace.

So, yes, I ended up challenging the agoraphobia by getting on a bus
and heading out here in an unfamiliar place, a place where I don't
know how/where to hide, and just walking and walking and walking in a
new space.

An ex once told me "I don't think you know how to be happy" and I've
been kind of haunted by that for years, because it's not like I'm
trying to be miserable tehre's just a lot of pain, a lot of hurt,
endless amounts of training and trauma getting detangled over the
course of my whole life.

I wasn't raised to have a future, I was raised to serve, sometimes I
feel acutely aware of that fact even as I am managing to create a
life. I feel ill-suited to it: like "imposter syndrome" but where what
you feel like you're faking isn't competence it's sentience.

I know that in order to feel less awful all the time I need to be a
little more selfish, a little more wanting, a little more
self-indulging. Because in order to feel like a person maybe first we
need to start treating this thing like it is a person. I have so many
interests, hobbies, things I want to accomplish and make.I basically
never actually let myself make the things I want, except for when
there's little events like genuary or tiny code christmas and even
then if there's anything that feels like it should take priority then
it does and I drop everything I want to be doing.

Do you know how many times I look in the mirror and tell myself that I
am not allowed to want, that I am not allowed to be, that I am
nothing?

What are some of the things I wish I let myself do? Art and music in a
dozen forms, really, and the mathematics to let me do them my way.

I love live-coding music and art like with Tidal and Hydra, but I
haven't really posted any of it in over a year now. I want to
get better at doing generative art in TIC-80 so I can start streaming
that too. I want to do computational photography. I want to get back
to my generative poetry projects, like the one I gave a talk to
rouguelike celebration about all the way back in 2020.

I want to finally finally finally let myself get to the hard work of
the categorical algebra of patterns in music and art. I can almost see
how the math would work and how it could let us formalize so many
things and let me make some really interesting tools for live-coding
and yet I've been wanting to do this for like over two years and still
haven't ever found the time. It feels like it's getting added to the
pile of things I just will realisticly never allow myself to have.

I know that's silly talk, because it's not like I believe in
determinism, I could make different choices at any time.

But do I even deserve to?