eat me henger

very rarely do i get any conversation about my writing method here. because very rarely do i actually know people that read this blog. and it's interesting to see how other seem to think i process my writing. or perhaps they're projecting how they would've done what i'm doing. how they would have concepts or lines prepared in advance. i don't have any of those. i'm not even sure whether i had that before. i just write not knowing the next word i'll be typing. there's the luxury of backspacing and reviewing whether i made grammatical errors or if there's gaps in the throughline. what i'm certain is that my writing is largely driven by emotions and a desire for free expression - so much so that i ignore standard sentence structure... partly because i didn't take my english grammar classes seriously. perhaps my emotions are too amorphous to be adequately contained by language. there are a lot of non-verbal communication lost with merely just wor...

i watch sofia coppola's lost in translation every now and then. if i can only watch one film in my entire life, i'll gladly give up every other film in history. it resonates with me differently every time i see it. at first, i appreciated the subtle filmmaking that was borderline boring for most people. i loved the slowness of it all. the narrative was understated. it didn't seem like anything was happening, but if a picture can paint a thousand words, then 24 frames per second can say a lot of things without the need for dialogue. at first i had liked lost in translation because i felt like i could be the director sofia coppola. as i've started getting into relationships, i understood the dynamic of couples eventually growing apart and feeling like the relationship is slowly dying. but somehow in that slow death, you find other people that spark life in you. there's no overt infidelity, just an honest recognition that you found someone that might convince you that ...

admiration seeks validation. i find it difficult to get a grasp of my self-worth. somewhere out there, proof of my capabilities are etched in history or implanted in people's memories, but they all seem so elusive that i can't seem to permanently put them together and package it as who i am. there are rare instances where i can write my resume for employment purposes, but other than that, i don't recall having to wholly prop myself up. but i know i'm good at something. perhaps better than others, even. there are indeed moments where i actually exert effort to be noteworthy. attention is a valuable currency, intangible as it may be. it becomes even more precious when it comes from people that matter, people i look up to. as i become more generous in appreciation, my list of people i admire has gotten longer. it is only appropriate to reciprocate the good they bring to the world by bringing good of my own to them. this isn't altruism, it's a transaction. after all...

i'm not a good storyteller. people around me have a lot to say about what they've gone through. some are fascinating, some are annoying. i know more about them than they know about me. oftentimes i'm just the listener, but that's not why i'm not a good storyteller. i understand the mechanics of setting up a premise, building up tension and delivering a conclusion - or at times, lack thereof. i'm a bad storyteller because i can barely recall any core memories. it's probably the drugs or concussions, but it's likely a result of severe self-hatred that i conditioned myself to detach from my past. oftentimes, i'm surprised of stories about me. i depend on what's left of my previous social circles to help build an image of myself. however, it not the complete picture. of course it skews positively because friends are my sample size. on the other hand, my enemies would certainly have a different story. i used to be glad i didn't have to remember th...

nowadays i'm less jealous. i feel either admiration or indifference. i used to not understand what it meant to be "happy for someone" cause i never really felt it. other people's gain felt like an insult to my inability to achieve as much as they did. i was afraid of the discomfort of not winning that i've grown paranoid and mistakenly saw innocuous displays of joy as harmful. but in reality, all harm came from my own irrational overthinking. perhaps it's an underlying self-centeredness that makes me think i'm the super important main character of my life story. but the more i let go of things i thought mattered because they felt desirable, the less i become attached to the strict dichotomy of "my benefit" or "my loss." wanting to feel good is necessary, but wanting it too much made me desperately selfish.  i've since learned to regard others as how i would've regarded myself. i look at a world a much larger interconnected colle...

i never had the humility to face my failures. perhaps it was some neurochemical birth defect that predisposed me to depression, but my habits had a lot to do with it. i didn't have a mentor to help me work towards any sense of normalcy. i was fumbling through life mistake after mistake. i wasn't learning from them because i kept doing something new and starting over again after every screw up. i didn't give myself a chance to rebuild from the rubble of my own undoing. i was preemptively hard on myself to prevent other people from hurting me. better to cause my own pain than to get it from others. it eliminates the suspense of not knowing how negatively i will be received. the monster i don't know is scarier than the monster i can conjure. that stunted my growth because we can only grow as much as the biggest monster we slay.