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I was listening to a video essay by The Thought Spot that resonated with me. It always bothered me that when major things in my life happen, I tend to dwell on them for a long time. I'm repetitive. I have a sort of emotional echolalia, and in time, I became very sensitive to the fact that my style of processing grief and emotions posed a burden to the people around me. That is why I made this site. In time I started to worry about the channel I used for this processing. It's accessible to me, and better than burning a few GPUs just to get AI to enable my bad habits. But at the corner of my mind, though this is small web, it is still web. It is public and anyone can scrutinize, judge, and mentally castigate me.

I started to fret, too. Am I a good digital neighbor? Am I being performative? Is my repetitiveness grating on people's nerves? Am I hiding my faults and only exposing another mask? Am I doing mansplaining, neurodivergent edition? In science, it is a well known fact that any subject we observe will change just by the mere fact that we are observing it. I kept getting stuck on the idea that there must be some unadulterated version of myself, deep inside. One that will only emerge if I could just take off the layers of paint that covered her through the years.

But now, listening to Irene's video essay, I feel something becoming clearer. I need to stop berating myself for being repetitive and just repeat it all until I feel better. The truth is, I don't experience life wholesale. Day by day, my mind is frantically trying to put together the full picture. It's a bit like looking at a very detailed and vast piece of art. You will, at first blush, recognize it at a high level. You might remember it though the years. But you can't fully understand the nuance of every brush stroke unless you visit the painting, and visit it often. Letting your eye map out every shade, light, value, texture. When the bad things happened in my life. I grieved them. But I couldn't move on because I could not in one fell swoop process that pain in a way that taught me how to live moving forward.

I think that's my my fantasies always linger on this theoretical future, where I can be a hermit. Where I can lay my head down when the sun sets, and open my eyes as it rises. Where everything is ever changing, but in a predictable and natural way. Days slipping one after the next, forming weeks, seasons. A rhythm that in its very chaos and silence could in time show me what I need to do to find peace. I grieve a lot, and I complain a lot because I know what I need and I know this is not the correct time in my life to pursue that. I do remember the times that I did and the instinct I had to protect myself. And though hearing my friends call me moody, or boring, or odd cut me, somehow I knew to just try my best with how I was, not what I wish I were. But know I have responsibilities and this little space is indeed my biggest refuge. It's not the little cottage with a tiny herb garden and long walks and hot cups of tea. But it's mine.