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Lately I wonder what my future looks like writing in this space. I started in 2024. I was in a very low point emotionally. I knew that as much as I share here, part of the reason why I was in a bad place was that I only stayed close enough to 2 people at most that I can feel safe living my truth with in a direct way. As in, actually telling them how my day went in a truthful way. What I dream of, what makes me stressed, and not feel triggered or afraid that they will leave me because my life isn't calm and perfect. It's very scary to unmask.

Here, I don't need to fret about anything. One can say a personal journal is a better place for that purpose, except that instead of unmasking, I'd be holding my secrets even more tightly. I don't feel my secrets are worth so much as that. An anonymous blog seemed the easiest way to unmask, without the inherent fear.

But I worry too. I worry that I am too open with my history and reality. I worry that instead of this writing as processing purging me from pain, I am perpetuating. Or that pain comes faster than I can process here, putting me in a hamster wheel of angst, with no end in sight. I do not believe it would manifest bad luck as such. More, that focusing on sad feelings will ultimately blind me to beauty. That my online self is as one-dimensional as my real life self, but just in a different way.

I would consider my life a success if I can embrace both pain and beauty and not fixate on any one of them. I guess like the stoic, my deepest wish is to feel calm. That this horrid turbulance that rocks me every day can calm down, until the mundane worries inherent to living can make no more than the most imperceptible ripple. But writing hasn't gotten me there yet.

The past few years have been relentless, until even hearing the phone ring will make me panic that my daughter got a seizure, spit on a kid, got hurt. That my partner got hurt or fired. That HR will jump in on that fateful call and end the 17+ year tenure at my company. My partner went through it twice, and I remember hearing the conversation in the other room, my brain racing as to how we were going to make ends meet. I survived all the things that causes my deepest fears. But the ghost of them persist no matter how much or quickly I type.

But I do want this space to be more than a simple dumping ground of pain and confessions. Maybe a repository for recipes. Some shrines to fangirl over all the things I nerd out about. A grimoire of herbal tisanes to soothe everything. From a tired nervous system, to an overindulged tummy. Even a metaphorical garden to plant the words of those role models that I admire and hold deep in my heart. Frida Kahlo, Yayoi Kusama, Atsuko Okatsuka, Angela Y Davis, Sojourner Truth, bell hooks. I keep spinning ideas in my head lazily, never commiting to the effort while knowing I need those spaces as much as this nav item in my site.

Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.
– Yayoi Kusama