perhaps writing is no easy thing for me now. sometimes a sentence leaves me before i know what shape it has taken. i write because i need somewhere to put the things i cannot say clearly in conversation, but once they are outside of me, they start to feel less private than i imagined.
actually, this blog post has been giving me a lot of inspiration lately. the idea that nobody really cares about your blog sounds a little cruel at first, but after staring at it for a while, i almost felt relieved. somehow the indifference began to feel like a quiet kind of permission.
still, i do not know why, whenever night arrives, my mind always begins to overflow, whether what comes out looks optimistic or pessimistic to other people. originally this post should have been written at 1 am last night. then i stopped halfway and looked at the screen for a while. maybe i was suddenly unsure whether every thought that appears in the dark should really be carried into the next day. so i decided to try in daylight instead. maybe something that looks a little more like a proper piece of writing.
unfortunately, the daytime version of me might truly have no idea how to write. maybe it has something to do with the weather, the environment, or things like that. on a bright, sun burning day like today, it feels even worse. perhaps i have spent too much time staying in a dark room. i am becoming more and more afraid of seeing daylight. it does not give me energy. it only leaves my mind blank, and makes me lose the will to do anything at all.
luckily, i had already thought of a few topics last night.
one of them is hypocrisy, although the word sounds a little too heavy. it makes the whole thing feel like i am standing somewhere higher and pointing at people. i do not really want that position. i have no clean seat here either. probably no one does. some forms of hypocrisy are so common that they stop looking like hypocrisy at all. they become air. they become manners. they become the default way people pass through things they cannot understand.
people like to say they are open minded, compassionate, accepting, all those clean words. and maybe they mean it. i do not think most people are lying on purpose. they can accept pain when the pain has a shape they already recognize. they can accept difference when the difference is still cute enough, coherent enough, close enough to a story about growth, courage, recovery, identity, or some other word that can be placed nicely on a shelf.
once suffering loses its acceptable shape, once it becomes strange, embarrassing, repetitive, frightening, or impossible to translate into ordinary language, the love becomes very thin. maybe still there. just thin. thin like paper held up to the sun.
i keep thinking about something from years ago. someone i used to know once told me about a teacher who had seemed completely ordinary at first. for a short time this person entered the classroom, taught lessons, answered questions, and existed inside the shared agreement called normal. then something became visible. maybe something broke. maybe it had been there all along and only crossed the line where other people could finally see it.
messages began to arrive. warnings, disasters, signals, places about to explode, impossible things said with absolute seriousness. after that, the person was no longer simply a teacher in the conversation. the person became a strange story. something you mention at dinner. something that makes people pause, laugh nervously, widen their eyes, then move on to the next topic.
and the worst part is that i do not think anyone was trying to be cruel. there was no dramatic evil there. no one needed to hold a knife. a table was enough. a meal was enough. a phone, a few remembered messages, a sentence beginning with you know what happened, and suddenly a person’s collapse could be folded into something small enough to pass around.
this is the part that makes me tired. when something has not happened inside your own body, you cannot really know it. you can know the words. you can read the description. you can say that sounds awful, and maybe you really mean it. the gravity stays on the other side. the room does not tilt for you. the variables keep their names. reality does not become wet paper in your hands.
so even without malice, a person with that kind of experience can easily become an anecdote. a dinner topic. a private joke. a warning sign. a weird thing that happened near someone else. since no one meant harm, no one feels responsible for the shape the story takes. that is where my disappointment comes from. i do not need every human being to be secretly evil for this world to feel cold. a lot of cruelty only needs distance.
i saw someone write about reality breaking, and that phrase stayed with me. their wound is theirs, and mine is mine. still, i understood the direction of it. that moment when the ordinary world keeps standing there, tables, roads, phones, daylight, other people, and yet something in the mapping has gone wrong. everything is still named. the names simply stop touching the thing.
that is why the people psychiatry tries to name are so often treated as if the name is the whole person. a label becomes a little box, and the box becomes a way for others to stop imagining. people say illness, disorder, episode, symptom, function, recovery, risk. all useful words, maybe. all necessary in the right places. none of them can carry the loneliness of becoming unreadable to others while still being painfully awake inside yourself.
and outside the clinical room, the name becomes even cheaper. ordinary people do not read a manual as a tool. they read it like a verdict. sometimes it feels as if the dsm has become a kind of bible for people who want certainty without imagination, and psychiatrists get pushed into the role of priests by accident, or by social need. maybe no one asked for that worship. once the book gives a word, the word can be mistaken for the soul.
this is why i do not trust the comfort people take from categories. categories move. the holy text of one decade can become an embarrassment in another. in dsm i, homosexuality was placed under sociopathic personality disturbance, and in dsm ii it was placed under sexual deviation. then in 1973 the manual changed. the same professional world that once gave people a pathological name later issued an official position saying that homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities. if someone wants the plain historical version, there is a useful review of how homosexuality got into and out of the dsm. so what exactly was the truth before the change. where did the truth go after it. how many people had to live inside a name that later became a historical mistake.
names can help. a diagnosis may help someone get treatment, language, money, protection, an explanation. the danger begins when the name finishes the person. in the hands of the public, it can become a way to stop listening. it can become a polite technology for removing the human being from the human being. once that happens, stigma does not look like hatred anymore. it looks like expertise repeated by people who never had to feel the thing they are describing.
for a long time i thought everything could still be filed under the old familiar words people use when they hear depression: sadness, anxiety, exhaustion, the usual vocabulary people at least pretend to understand. then something changed shape. i do not even know how to say it without sounding either too dramatic or too clinical. some problems did not exactly get better. they disappeared like a stage light going out, and behind them there was something colder, flatter, more permanent, less like a storm and more like the weather system under the whole map.
saying i failed to make new friends sounds too passive, as if i had simply been unlucky, as if the world forgot to send the right people to my door. the stranger part is that i also began to stop maintaining the roads that already existed. i stopped initiating. i stopped joining things. i stopped doing social activities. many people were fine, actually. the whole act of returning to the crowd started to feel like putting a body back into a place where the soul had already checked out.
the accounts are still there. the apps are still there. i just stopped opening them the way i used to. other people’s days are still flowing somewhere, meals, trips, jokes, small public proof that life keeps happening. i know all of that is still there, almost within reach. i simply no longer know what part of me is supposed to respond to it.
sometimes i open the door a little, look at the brightness, and close it again. no dramatic pain, no clean reason. only a sealed room, and a body that has learned to save its breath.
it felt like i could no longer enter their world. their world looked real enough, almost too real. too colored. too full of people who could still want things, enjoy things, miss each other, get angry, get excited, make plans, post photos, meet for meals, complain about work, fall in love with the next small object in front of them.
and there i was, reaching toward that colored place like a person behind glass. the glass was not even visible, which made it worse. my hand stopped somewhere between black and color. on the colored side, people moved with heat and noise and expression. on my side, things became grayscale, flat, quiet, almost without reward. a face doing what a face is supposed to do. a voice answering at the right time. a body performing the minimum gestures needed to pass as someone still present.
maybe this is why social life has become so exhausting. i did try. too many times, probably. i tried until trying itself became another empty mechanical act. at some point you begin to understand that the failure is more than meeting the wrong people. it is also about the interface. what they can receive from you is never quite the same as what exists inside you. what you can send is already reduced before it reaches them.
later i sent a sentence that was too heavy for a normal conversation. in my head it was only a clumsy way to describe the absence of pleasure, the missing inner response, the blankness that cannot be solved by cheering up. once it reached another person, it became alarm. of course it did. most people would hear it that way. from the outside, i probably would too.
then came the familiar language. time will take things away. things may get better. you just need more time. kind sentences, maybe. words thrown from the colored side. i knew it came from care, which somehow made the whole thing even harder to hold. i do not blame them. i just do not know what to do with words that arrive safely and never land anywhere inside me.
this is another strange thing about being understood. sometimes people do not reject you. they simply understand the version of you they can handle. the version that replies, jokes, explains, keeps enough shape to be recognized. the version that keeps the room light enough. the version that can be mistaken for a person who is basically like everyone else, only a little sadder, a little quieter, a little more online.
maybe that version is also real in some way. the idea of one pure true self hidden somewhere, waiting to be rescued, feels too clean. still, there is a person inside the shell who does not fully match the shell, and i do not know whether showing that person would bring relief or only damage the few connections still holding.
there are small corners of the internet where i have felt something closer to being found. full understanding is probably impossible. still, some people can at least recognize the shape of the distance. with them, the loneliness becomes less theatrical. it stops needing to prove itself. no one has to say, look, this is real, because everyone already knows some version of that sentence and is tired of saying it.
still, even there, companionship is fragile. i enjoy it. i treasure it. then i fear the expectation hidden inside treasuring. i fear that my inability to stay close will slowly ruin what i did not even know how to ask for. i fear being perceived through a body and a surface that do not explain me. i fear being accepted for the wrong version and rejected by the right one. i fear keeping the mask, and i fear losing what the mask has allowed me to keep.
so perhaps i return again and again to neutrality. no happiness, no despair, just a flat place where nothing asks too much of me. when the balance is disrupted, i wait for it to come back. when something becomes intimate, i wait for the distance to return. when someone gets too close to the inner room, i begin cleaning the doorway, hiding objects, dimming the lights, pretending the room was never there.
then i saw that prayer again.
god, grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, courage to change the things i can, and wisdom to know the difference.
it is a beautiful sentence. maybe too beautiful, which is always dangerous. because beautiful sentences can become shelters for very ugly habits. in the ideal version, serenity, courage, and wisdom should balance each other. accept what cannot be changed. change what can. know the difference. simple enough, almost offensively simple.
when this sentence passes through a distorted person, it can become something else. some people lack courage, so they overemphasize serenity. i think i am that way.
i have a talent for moving things into the category of what cannot be changed. quietly, almost politely. i take something that may still be movable, something that may only require pain, risk, repetition, humiliation, or effort, and i place it among the untouchable things. then i call it acceptance. i call it patience. i call it being realistic. i call it peace. listen to how mature i sound. listen to how calm. surely this is wisdom, right.
maybe patience is sometimes only fear with a cleaner name. maybe i am not reconciled with the situation. maybe i am afraid to touch it. maybe i do not love silence as much as i claim to. maybe i prefer a quiet room because a quiet room does not test whether i can still move.
some peace is closer to anesthesia. the body learns to expect nothing. the mind says, this is fine, because wanting otherwise would require a door, and the door would require a hand, and the hand would have to admit it is still capable of reaching.
i do not know where that leaves me. a motivational ending would be too convenient. recognizing avoidance does not mean i have already escaped it. maybe all i can say is that some of my serenity is real, and some of it is fear wearing the clothes of serenity. some of my quietness is truly mine, and some of it is only the shape left after too many failed attempts at being connected.
maybe this is why i still want to write here. writing does not fix anything. maybe nobody cares, and maybe that is the kindest condition under which a blog can exist. a place where the sentence does not have to become a performance. a place where i can put down a thought before it becomes a joke in someone else’s mouth.
or maybe it will still become that. maybe everything can become that once it leaves me. still, here, for a while, before it is translated wrong, before it becomes a story small enough to pass around, it was mine.