I'm so tired of being known, of being understood. It's the most evil thing in the world. If I a have a goal here (and I don't), it's to hide in plain sight, putting everything of myself out there, obscured beyond any possible recognition. Not very realistic, I know. Everything leaks, no matter how carefully contained. However, I take it for granted that a series of failures can reproduce it's intended result as a process, just as a sequence of still images can reproduce motion. There's something to become, even though there's nothing to be. Becoming nothing is a process of unbeing.
I suffer from continuation sickness: I have failed again and again in my attempts to reach an end. Can silence and stillness be produced by means of continuous speech and motion? This is, I suppose, the basic question of this blog. I want to keep the inevitable suspended by means of recurrent interruption. Even one person can hold back the whole world; every dull body is vibrant and vital and wet just beneath the surface.
I'm not prepared for the potential consequences. I've walked into myself and through the garden where I was buried for many years, and I know very well there is no means of preparation available. Perhaps I can explore the possibilities here. More likely I'll simply tear myself even more thoroughly away from whoever I was supposed to be. I'm tired of pretending to be okay, pretending to have a name, a soul, an identity, pretending to know what's desirable about the things others want. I know in myself no desire for anything in particular. But anything is better than this life, this world, as it appears on the surface. If I want anything at all, I want what's hidden, and I want to be hidden too. I want to ruin every sense of certainty.
While setting my sights on knowledge and understanding, I am also making an enemy of the stuff through which these are articulated: language itself. Language turns me against myself, make me complicit in everything I attempt to resist, subverts my every attempt at clarifying my place in the world. It's not so much a mind virus as a biosocial factory, churning representational content from flesh with no regard for anything like humanity or well-being. Endlessly destructive, labyrinthine, filled with incomprehensible dangers behind every easily-understood corner. Language is a flood, but not of words. There's never enough words to carry all this language, so it's spilling out into everything.
Just like me, never enough of my mind to account for all of my body, never enough of my body to carry all of my mind. Everything is so heavy. And I feel so full of words sometimes, it's like I might suffocate or drown. I don't always have anything specific to say, just the need to get it out of me. Full of words. Typically I read to empty myself out. While it also works, writing never felt right as a means of relief. Even though I've written for myself my whole life, it doesn't work the same way reading does. I'm still stuck in the sense of being flooded and overwhelmed by everything.
Somewhat counterintuitively, the traps laid by language are harder to recognize and avoid the less you use words themselves. Words are weapons, tools for weaponizing language. If you can't or won't use them yourself, they can only be used that much more effectively against you. The first lesson in self-defense should be to arm yourself with language against language. Speak, be spoken for/over, or else be spoken through. Silence in itself is implicitly forbidden.
When I was a child, I always felt like I was slipping out from underneath myself, like a strange motion in a dream formed from half-remembered 90s cgi. I could fly out of myself, spill out from myself like a ghost, an emanation, like I was watching myself from the outside in. Pushed out by the weight of everything; expanding to fill my container. And as a result I always feel disoriented, as if space worked differently in rooms of different sizes. In a big room with lots of people, I lose track of myself, my sense of a physical center doesn't line up with my body. I can navigate, but not with any certainty, and I generally look very lost even when I know where I'm going.
It's a bit more stable now, but growing up, sometimes even stepping outside felt like leaving my body behind entirely. I'd forget where I was or what was happening around me. I'd throw temper tantrums and not remember, I wouldn't understand the punishment. Sometimes it felt like everyone got to just make up what was true, except for me. Other times it just felt like I was stupid, I couldn't understand anything, even when everyone seemed to think I was so smart. And I'm not smart. Never make the mistake of thinking that I know what I'm talking about. That would defeat the entire purpose of posting here.
Having to speak from a particular perspective, the perspective of "me," feels so much like betraying myself. I can't really squeeze myself into that compressed point of view. I know too much about myself, but also I'm missing some fundamental piece of self-knowledge. And keeping that self-knowledge away from me is the language by which it could be represented. When "I" and "me" are used on this website, they are always in some sense figures of speech, not literal statements of selfhood. This struggle takes place at the level where they mean nothing.