On Control

I haven’t really been able to write, not a word, not because i am too sad or too complacent or whatever. there’s a strange place i need to be in my head to write that has waited until today to make its way back to me. maybe it’s a good thing, my lack of writing, maybe it means im becoming less obsessive but i worry it also means i’ve forgotten how to care, and that feels important.

There’s a set of instincts that leads me to do many things, and writing has often been the practice that comes after I’ve already done the thing and is often driven by the question of whyd I do that? sort of an antidote to regret.

There’s a strange place i need to be in. In life, there are strange places you visit, revisit, places you never really leave no matter how far away you go. places that can hate you, places that can love you. It’s not really clear which is more dangerous. You stagnate in the loved place, you have to leave it, atleast once before it becomes you. You languish in the hated place and you have to leave it before you become it. You can and will often do go back, but nothing’s the same anymore, it’s a different person who left it, a different person who enters it, and the place is not the same anymore, you are not the same anymore. Sometimes you shrug off the place and sometimes you don’t but then again to be defining oneself by the lack of it is simultaneously acknowledge its power.

Sometimes the biggest kindness one can do is to preserve a place with compassion, in memory. I do not visit these places in my heart anymore, but the people I have lived alongside, their portraits are still there, framed in rich brown wood, smiling, always smiling.

You need to accept what you feel but sometime accepting what you really feel is inconvenient. Inconvenient especially if you’ve built an entire life on the feeling you believe you’re supposed to have. there can be extreme costs to integrating. There’s this line in Murakami “You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.” right. people are diff from me, they feel diff things, value diff things, have diff fears.

People endup doing ultimately what they want to do. feeling how they want to feel (or how they are feeling), they think how they want to think, they will do the things they believe they need to do, whether or not those are things they should do. and they will only change when they’re ready to change. it doesn’t matter if they’re wrong and we’re right. it doesn’t matter if they are hurting themselves. it doesn’t matter if we could help them only if they’d listen to us, or let us in.

When you feel things are slipping, you start clutching tightly. but then as you clutch you also eliminate that possibility of letting events happen naturally. Imposing one’s will on any given situation eliminates doing anything constructive about that situation. it blocks access to your higher self, it blocks other people’s ability to grow, it blocks from you enjoying people or events.

It’s an illusion. it doesn’t work. Controlling. We cannot control alcoholism. we cannot control anyone’s compulsive behaviors. we cannot (and have no business trying to) control anyone’s emotions, thoughts, or choices. we cannot control the outcome of events. We cannot control life... some of us can barely control ourselves... you might get in your own way, chewing through yourself like an animal chewing off its own leg to get free. free.

It is selfish and it’s bad to try to help people and you should stop it... there’s a difference between control and care yk, you’re confusing it. v.easy to escape from accountability for one’s own lives by taking on responsibility for other people’s actions. because they need us, because they tell us they need us, because they are self-harming or making questionable decisions, because they might be lonely or struggling or sad, because their suffering makes other people around us suffer, because we love them so dearly, because we need them, in our lives, because we want, very sincerely, for them to be happy. it’s all very good & noble yes. it’s also generally a way to not confront the question of what we ourselves want and need

You may abandon yourself, but then those certain elements of said self tend to and will eventually surface in amazingly inopportune ways. no it’s not self-control. it’s consistently and forcefully negating needs that Absolutely Refuse to be negated. and if you don’t take care of your Parts, your Parts will take care of you. And you may not like their methods.

It’s an interesting thing I have observed recently. I have friend, she is so incredibly capable but she consistently chooses to be in dynamics where her competence is just... not useful. I realized I have my own version of this. ig many of us do. it’s a strange paradox. you know you’re able so you take on difficulty, and you can’t quite make the connection that you’ve consciously chosen to be in a situation where you have little to no leverage. a certain type of high-functioning person is irresistibly drawn to making themselves artificially low-functioning. We all choose the ways we are trapped and the ways we are free, mirages and oases look similar for a reason.

In the novel that im working on, that im not really working on, there’s this character complains to her friend about the difficulty of ever finding it when you can’t really prove definitively that it exists. Her friend replies that it prolly exists, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find it. and ofc, finding it doesn’t mean you’ll keep it. I guess that’s how certain things in life are, there are no guarantees about finding it, no guarantees about losing it. The best you can do, is just live it.

Alive,
Kay.

p.s. - sometimes I feel like I am Sun Tzu but if he was a white emo girl and ghosting her therapist.