A Mess of Humanity [Writer's Journal]

snowmachine (64)in #writing • 7 years ago

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, "What a weird subjective experience you decided to have this time around - maybe we should just give up now and try again?" I try to incorporate the mess that is me into art, because otherwise, I am just a mess - a human with my viscera splayed out all across the earth, pantomiming how I think I should feel and juxtaposing different pieces of myself because I can't seem to get the symmetry right and being an all-out hypocrite in random directions. This is seen in its most obvious form on the Internet. I can see the trails of random blips of consciousness dotting an imperfect line - the thumbprints I leave on Twitter and Facebook, the google searches that only lonely people leave in the middle of the night, the youtube videos of girls in drag-inspired makeup with contour and highlight like a disco ball that I watch because it feels good to be able to see a human face that can't see me back.

And I feel the need to be surgical in my life without really understanding why - should I blame the magazines, Instagram lyfe, or my deep-seated hatred of the self? It's difficult to say - but from the beginning I determined that I was "not enough" and the solution was to become crystalline - skin draped over bones with no fat on them, writing like a robot who only understand emotions through books, tea instead of chips, constantly drinking but never drunk.

Of course, I failed. I set up the process from the beginning to fail. It doesn't help that I'm a combustible person, I bury things deep inside of me until they explode. I drip with palpable anxiety. I'm "so shy" and "so quiet." I write about how much I hurt but I answer comments with a smile, because I'll never let anyone in to the sticky mess that I write about in public. I write to say - I fucking dare you to come close, I fucking dare you! I wear my heart on the outside like it's both a warning and a shield. Sometimes I eat too much pizza because I get hungry! I gain an extra five pounds. Fat fills the frame, my skinny jeans are a bit tight, I hurt someone I love, I say something stupid that I didn't mean to, I take too long to write a book, or I write the book for the wrong reason. I see a plot hole and I want to jump into to commit suicide. Sometimes red lipstick gets on my teeth, I drink all of my flask in the bathroom of a party, flirt with the biggest asshole in the room, and the illusion is shattered.

Human beings aren't surgical, precise, machine-like. We're a delicate and roughshod composite of push-pull processes designed to keep us at homeostasis, push waste through the body, make sure that we stay sane even in awful conditions, . Nature doesn't stick to the careful lines - but fractal processes never do. The golden ratio only cares about maximization of energy with minimum effort - that's why the mascara drips down when I cry instead of holding fast to the eyelashes. Nature doesn't care for my waterproof imagination! It doesn't care that by my made-up, fantastical, ridiculous standards I am a mess - a globule of data leaving sticky sweet fingerprints across protocols that were built to incorporate imperfect movement. Reincarnation isn't going to make my spastic impulses a work of art.

A mess! I'm a mess, what a fucking lie - this was the design all along.