For My Boy

If you can hear the door creaking, that's me entering, and this is you reading while I stand here and act all of this out with my props, courtesy of your imagination. So what I've barged in today for - notice how I didn't knock - is a conversation, a versation con migo but that you can listen in on for the benefit of possibility. You might learn something. Back to me. I came here because I wanted to talk about things being wrong, in the way they feel, in the way the sets of dentures chomp analysis in between chewing on my cortex.

You see, dear imagination, I'm frustrated. Not in the sense that the moon is out and it's 14% bigger than any full moon this year and I'm sitting here and not watching it alight in the firmament. I'm frustrated because I'm frustrated. This is a mirror show, yeah. Since I came back from Romania I've had a period of relative bliss because I wasn't being hard on myself for things that weren't occurring to the norms established by Father Ego. Somehow, being out of my normal routine for three weeks reset some of the tumblers and they hadn't quite finished spinning from all that flying above clouds I was doing. I came back and didn't really absorb much, because normally absorption for me requires a passing through gates, kind of like those at the airport, except I tend to be much much stricter in my patdowns and x-raying. Flying in to my mental territory requires me to be scrutinous, but like immigration security systems in airports around the world, things slip through. And then they start rioting on my streets and I send out the riot police to calm things down and create order. Sometimes I'm harsh and destroy buildings. But this dandy process was turned on ??? mode and confused when I reset time zones. It made me feel more peaceful, and it was rare for the barriers to be down and for things to just pass on through. So I say I didn't absorb them because I don't know how much of them I did eventuate to process and hold as my own. Things just went on in and out somewhere else presumably - I wasn't watching the CCTV. I didn't feel the need to be self-conscious, because I felt somehow that it didn't matter if I didn't act a certain way here. The opinions the people I met in Romania formed would disappear soon enough after I left. They'd have no use for them when we were gone. 

Then when I came back to New Zealand, there was the resetting period, as I mentioned. Though soon enough, with my friends' attitudes and ways of being flickering once more on my screens, I felt the security system boot back up. Some of the parametres may have changed, but overall it was still shotgun-ready. I got the sense that whatever I do here matters more, and should be under more control, because I cannot simply escape from it as before. No wonder the boy in me feels alienated. It doesn't get to roam much anymore on streets with curfews and barricades in place.

I don't know what it is, exactly. But it scares me what people think. Not all people, just people in my life. Especially those I hold close. I try to be authentic towards them but somehow even that seems like it could be just a mask sometimes. What does authentic even mean. With the security system back up, it seems like authentic is a certain version of diplomatic immunity, or like a pass card. There's a certain amount of 'crazy' or 'awkward' I can be - a tolerable amount - before I feel critical and self-conscious about my fibrous body and behavior. 

Hmm this puts me back to that mind frame when it started. Looking at that picture, I was feeling low self-esteemed, and defined by what others thought of me. I acted a certain way, they reacted, I reacted to their reactions by making different chips, here there everywhere, to change the sculpture of me to something different - something acceptable. This was adolescence. Once that beautiful period of art was over, if I can even say it was over, I came to uni to learn and things. And the world grew bigger suddenly. The pressure got more intense and then less intense and then more intense and now I don't know. To change, I mean. To change, to be accepted.

Schtick: I'm not sure what is accepted, but the version of that concept that is plugged into my mainframe is virusing. I say that because I feel it changes. There are days when I feel whole, undefined, at peace, and I go to university and feel very free of being critical. Then there's days when I walk with my shadow on my back, it afraid to touch the ground behind me lest it burn on the concrete for not being good enough, acceptable enough. This comes from me, this criticism, this fire, starting in my heart, reaching a fever pitch, bringing me out the dark. The eccentrism and the uncontrolled qualities of hyperness and crazy and reactivity, these the security system doesn't want to identify as mine, to own them, even though I do them.

I do them unconsciously, those things. Sometimes it's funny. And it's funny how most people who know me can identify me by those traits. Those traits that I don't want to own. Those traits that make the riot police in my mind come out to water gun bitching out of office building windows. The riot police are, of course, a defense mechanism. I'm pinning me against other sides of me that the initial me doesn't like, the initial me having an idealistic picture of "Cris" that doesn't align with the trajectory of the Sun. That's why when it gets closer, it burns the image. 

Now it could be that I have sent the riot police police to crush the riot police. Otherwords, I'm being critical of being critical. Because I've been critical too much and I already know it makes me feel analysed, scrutinised, patted-down and emotionally injured. So now this is an interesting turn of events. The police gets policed. I wonder why I am being so critical about myself.

I don't let loose. I've been asked what I want for my birthday, for example. I don't really want things, nothing I desperately need that I can think of at this stage. I don't want something I don't need, though. Who makes that call though. Anyway. I don't like this question because the way I have thought about it is that I don't often let go enough to feel birthday-associated emotions like surprise. I don't deal well with it, not because I can't be surprised, but because it heavily, in my mind, implies expectation. If I'm to be surprised, I have to have a certain reaction according the surprise-givers. And, from the way my mind and emotions work, I don't get surprised easily, nor do I have outpourings of affection at those times. I have my affection-floods at other, perhaps more arbitrary/PMS-variant times. So it worries me, this, because I feel expectation to act a certain way I don't necessarily feel. It's not like I don't want to be surprised, I just don't want to be made to react surprised. Because I can do it. I can fake it. But at this stage of growth, I kind of want it to be real, and that implies not thinking about it anymore, i.e. letting go.

To let loose and act how I really feel... don't think it'd always line up with the way society leans. I'm probably quite conformist on the outside, but on the inside, I realise a) I cannot force myself to be and b) I have absolutely no need to be. The boy inside me, the boy being one of my 'selves', needs love, love that he still seeks from someone else but I know I have to give, because I was the one that deprived him of it when I was younger. He doesn't need skin, or squeezing, he needs affection. Forgiveness. Allowing. Words that in the outside world can cause friction.

Courage. That is then what it takes, to be. To actually just be. Because it implies not playing the game, not having police or immigration staff, whether in my mind or outwardly. Life guides everything. Why is it that we think. Why is it that we can. It seems to get us confused. But it's cool nonetheless. So it boils down to vulnerability, and trust. Trusting that it's okay to be and acting silly and however, and not being scared it is tarnishing the image which critical-me wants to become but won't because it's paperthin and unwhole and a lie, because it is limited. Or maybe being scared is fine. It's emotion. So trusting life that I can act however and even though I feel scared that it might be affecting what others think of me, to know that that is not my concern to manipulate. Isn't that a thought! Here, I'm going to act this way, and it's going to contradict ideas and things. I don't know who you think I am, but you're going to think up something about me. And then I'm going to meet you another day and perhaps reinforce that idea, or maybe challenge it, chip at it with how I behave. Maybe I'll act different. And instead of me going home and wondering, Jesus, did I just act that way, what will he she they think about me, and sending out the police to crush the thoughts who were committing the crime of existing and manifesting outside of the nebulae/passing through immigration, I'll actually have the courage to leave it to you, if you want to think something about me.

And if you, you who is close to me, no longer love that which I act to be, and you no longer want to be in my vicinity and instead in my outskirts, you can go.

That is the courage. Not to be sculpted, be changed, but to let go and evolve. And yeah I'm a silly sausage. I act weird and paradoxically, sometimes questioningly, sometimes hurtfully, sometimes self-destructively, too-often judgmentally. The moon still orbits elliptically. I have these thoughts about myself trying to fit into the world. I don't quite know why I have the desire to belong, but it's there and I feel it. Love me! I say, but I really really need to be saying it to myself. To forgive that which I don't love, accept it. Maybe I shall grow to love it. Only, only because it is. Because it is. Because I can't run from it or throw it out of the imaginary office window to its death, because its death can only be my death. Because it is, and I am all that there is. This comes back to trust, so here I go, letting the nebula speak.