a 23-year-old's messed up headspace

piecing together fragments of journal entries

unknown artist

I. “Ants narrate and the rain erases” - Mahmoud Darwish

I’ve been in a weird, nebulous state for a few months now. Some part of me wants to break through the barrier and evolve into my next form. But I can’t. Is the membrane too thick, or am I too weak? Either way, I don’t feel in control. Perhaps I am simply not aware, present, developed enough to see what has always been in front of me. 

I’m afraid I will never reach it, and it’s the fact that I feel so close that makes it all the more painful. The feeling is akin to an Olympian falling short of gold by a millisecond. I deserve it, yet, clearly I have not yet earned it. The demons that used to haunt me have been replaced by angels I cannot understand. I often miss the simplicity of negative emotions. 

My future state is most clear to me when I am drifting off to sleep and losing consciousness; when my thoughts twinkle faintly, like stars do in corners of my eye in the night sky. As soon as I focus on them, they disappear. There’s substance there that I can’t taste.

The only solace I can find amidst all this discomfort is the understanding that I’ve grown immensely this past year. I feel so much more comfortable in my identity and the work I produce. I believe I am finally striving to be authentic in my writing. This wasn’t the case when I first started—when I was fixated on asserting my niche and being perceived as a credible and good writer. I’ve realized that I simply want to be a storyteller who is relatable to others, and writing is a means to that end.

I find myself in this unique realm where, at the tender age of 23, I already know I will never be a corporate superstar, nor will I become the next Kafka. My perspective comes from acknowledging my limited talent; my certainty comes from rejecting full commitment to any singular path. There are too many talented people in this world for me to just coast to the top. But despite how sparsely populated this space I’ve carved out for myself is, I think there is still something out there for me.

I’m sure people at work don’t understand why I spend so much time on my little side projects, just as more established writers and poets may find my work grossly shallow. And because of that, I relapse quite often. I worry about my job title and the status that comes with it; I stress about whether my subscriber count is growing. I compare myself to others all the time and it makes me feel like shit.

What I have gotten better at is pulling myself out of these sorts of funks when I fall into them. I realize now that this toxic, self-destructive mentality is inevitable. “Don’t compare yourself to others” is the worst advice I’ve heard. How can I avoid the very concept that built our social, political, economic systems? It is through comparison to others that we understand our place in the world, it is through comparison that we learn what is worth spending our time doing.

II. “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” - Alan W. Watts

Who would’ve imagined how gross, manual, disgusting starting something new would be? 

Isn’t it beautiful?

I’ve always believed in myself, but in the wishy-washy way that our parents and teachers and coaches encourage us to stay positive and never stop dreaming. A form of belief that can be feigned and requires external validation to keep alive.

But for the first time in my life, I actually want to believe in myself. Not because it makes me feel cozy in the tummy, but because I see so much value in it, that I would rather die than doubt myself. I apologize for the extreme rhetoric, but yes, this is a matter of life and death—it’s that important to me.

I’ve learned this year that to believe in yourself, you must first be yourself. Sounds deceptively simple, but how could you possibly expect to be a good self-advocate when you don’t even understand who you are vouching for and why? There probably will never be a need to, but everyone should be capable of talking about themselves for hours upon hours on end; talk about your favorite foods, all the places you want to visit in the world, your biggest dreams and worst nightmares. Do not regurgitate your algorithm back to me. Tell me who you really are.

As someone largely characterized by apathy in my college years, finding the answers to all these questions has required a lot of soul searching. I’m still a work in progress; partly why I feel suffocated—why I hate being in this nebulous state that I mentioned in the beginning—is because I feel tension in assuming what I believe is my next form. I don’t feel completely myself.

III. “Once I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.” - Nikos Kazantzakis

I’ve lived in DC for just over a year now. The city has provided me with a playground to grow in, and in return, I’ve given away shards of my sanity.

Parting ways with some of my mind’s rubble has felt good, but sometimes the city is greedy and asks for more than I am willing to offer. I am small and the city is unrelenting so I must give. On those days where I am depleted, I must work overtime to preserve myself while simultaneously functioning as an adult being with an adult job and adult responsibilities. 

I hope no one is alarmed by this, because, quite frankly, my mental health is the best it’s been in years. The main reason why I feel good is because I have reason to feel optimistic about my future. Forgive my superiority complex for a moment, but I’ve earned it. I feel as though I have a leg up on my peers because I have simply lost the ability to be complacent with things.

I ask myself, who is more pathetic? He who accepts his everyday, mundane life? Or he who deeply despises it, yet finds himself unable to take the steps to build out of it?

Frequently I talk with peers my age and I listen to the same excuses I used to have—how there just isn’t enough time, or how one can only have so much energy, or that the market for what they want to do is saturated. Upon hearing this, I do everything I can in the moment to convince them that it’s worth taking the risk, that they must listen to their heart and prioritize starting as soon as possible. 

At the same time, I feel a dark sense of satisfaction, because I know that they never will. And this becomes yet another datapoint for me—the reality that young people are paralyzed by the abundance of their options.

While I’m not necessarily a competitive person, I look around and realize that my competition is slim. I feel optimistic because I believe that as long as I follow my slow build, I will fulfill all my dreams.

If I cannot believe that, then I see no point in living.

The reality is, we are already getting older in the not-so-good-way, in the way that manifests as complacency. Oh, to be young, naive, and cocky! Favored by fortune, it’s our right to feel all three of those things, so please, be them deeply!

No matter your circumstance, life is an all-you-can-eat buffet. By being alive, you’ve already paid for what you see. If you take too much, people might judge you. If you eat too much, you’ll get fat, but it’s okay, just take Ozempic.

I would rather take more than too little.

IV. "If I asked you to name all the things you love, how long would it take to name yourself?" -Anonymous

I don’t really know how to close out this piece, so I will leave you all with a series of quotes that I have pinned on my notes app. They are aptly titled Quotes that haunt me:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Netochka Nezvanova

“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”

Sylvia Plath, Bell Jar

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age. There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence

“The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic, which have no effect at close quarters, but must be looked at from a distance in order to discern their beauty. So that to obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. We accept the present as something that is only temporary, and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim. So that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life — that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. And so it may be said of man in general that, befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death.”

Jack Raines, The Cost of Apathy

“The point of life is to live, and living isn’t a spectator sport.

Living means taking risks, pursuing your interests, embarrassing yourself, attempting difficult things, setting ambitious goals, trying, failing, and trying again. Living means pushing your mind and body to their limits, just to see what you’re capable of. Living means fighting back against the inertial forces that draw all of us toward the apathetic life. Living means being the protagonist of your own story, not a passenger whose outcomes are at the mercy of their environment.

The irony of modern life is that those of us with the means to really, truly live, who can afford to take risks and strike out on our own and blaze our own paths, are the least likely to do it, because we are seduced by the comforts of the apathetic life, and we don’t have to go above and beyond to make ends meet. So we continue existing, not living, and the clock keeps ticking.

The most dangerous aspect of the apathetic lifestyle is that you don’t notice the time you’re wasting while you spend your days scrolling TikTok or Instagram, firing off the occasional email while absorbing whatever slop the algorithm pushes to your timeline. It’s only 10, 20, and 30 years later, when the time is gone, that you think, “Shit, maybe I should have done more with my life.""

instagram: @wry.mood

podcast: spotify / apple

goodreads: what i’m reading / what i’ve read