ED4AW - Find a Vacation Everyday

 

Hello and welcome to my blog, where each day for a week I write about something.

This week I will be writing about finding a vacation every day. I have had this topic on my mind to write about for a little while. It was a toss up between this topic, and recognising my progress in certain areas of my life.

But this evening I was pondering... why am I always switched on? Out of sight out of mind does not apply to me. Everything is in close proximity all the time, I don't know why. 

I did some art therapy. Lots of red, very chaotic. 

The art therapy technique I use invites you to ask your art some questions. Here is some of the response:

My whole life has just been dividing up and managing blocks of petrified chaos. I am in the business of anticipating and managing chaos and I am very good at it. There's a bit of it in every single thing I do, and when I come across it I have to isolate it and monitor it like a virus. 

I am in the business, and am my own boss, and need to give myself some time off. Each day for a week I will be finding a vacation every day.

23/03/2026, Day 1 - Putting the “Holy” in Holiday

Letting go and letting loose is not something I am good at; I will have to learn to be good at it for the purpose of this blog. But acknowledging this is powerful. 

I think what makes holidays sacred, is that they provide the opportunity to “try on” a new life. What if we were all the things we tell ourselves we should be? What if we imagined it for one day? No one can say anything because it’s a holiday. Why not? 

This requires  type of fluidity. I suppose fluidity is sacred. Not holding on too tight to anything about ourselves requires sitting in a sacred space, apparently.

This week I’m trying to create that space for myself. 

I suppose finding a vacation everyday finding little pockets where you can try on life as your ideal self, without holding back, without any doubts, without questioning it. Don’t question it. 

24/03/2026, Day 1 - Being a Grown Up is Not All it's Cracked Up to Be

This is still hard, I still can't really switch my brain off. Idle time still feels like a crime and very uncomfortable. 

Dump from my phone:

It's about access, accessing ideas we wouldn't normally be in close quarters to. That's what happens on holiday right?

The biggest thing that bothers me is that I don't feel legit, I don't feel like a legitimate adult and I don't feel like I've "made it" anywhere... and I'm so hard on myself about it. 

Holiday is about being in closer quarters than we normally would with something. What is that I want in closer reach? The thing where the holiday reminds me that it was never too far in the first place?

I said to myself "other people don't have the answers; that is adulthood".

If I'm trying to be on holiday, I can't use the same brain that anticipates issues and judges myself harshly. Holiday is happening in a different headspace, and this distinction requires being intentional. It might feel uncomfortable at first, but the most important thing is to start. 

Vacations mean being open minded and venturing into unfamiliar territory, sometimes. 

I am doing the "handling sadness" course on Headspace. Once you get past the beginner's section of the course, it's all about using visualisation to keep your mind more fluid. 

The course teacher describes what makes it hard to come out of sadness is that we've often been there for a long time, and things feel stuck.

This fluidity kind of reminds me of what I said about holidays: "accessing ideas we wouldn't normally be in close quarters to".

I don't try and immediately address that stuck feeling, I think acknowledging it's there in the first instance is really powerful.

Always being switched on and ready to solve something, I thought about how when I was a kid I didn't do that as much.

We didn't think as far ahead when we were younger, the problems we wanted to solve weren't as big.

We didn't think so highly of what we could achieve and that was probably a good thing. 

Less was enough. 

I thought about how on one of my school books I stuck on album covers I liked and that was enough, more than enough. It was fantastic, I am still familiar with the feeling of how happy it made me.

This got me thinking about how I might want to make a collage.

I found this video from my favourite online art therapist How to Uncover Your Inner Symbol: a Jungian Art Therapy Exercise

I won't go into the whole detail of the process but it resulted in a drawing where the themes were feeling formless, shapeless, not at home in my body, not secure in my body, but seeking softness, safety, sanctuary, familiarity. 

The YouTube channel linked above also has some writing exercises you can do with a piece of art so I'm going to do some of that here. I've chosen the one where different aspects of the art are in dialogue with eachother. 

The art consisted of a figure with concentric circles around it. 

Figure: Can you see me?

Circles: Yes, for sure. Why do you ask?

Figure: I just don't feel like something people can see and recognise easily.

Circles: Something about you feels unstable, so I can see why you'd think that but we can see you.

Figure: Okay you can see me but I still feel like you're out of reach somehow, what gives?

Circles: Everything you come across will have an "unreachable" quality, that is the nature of life.

Figure: It's fucking unbearable. 

Circles: It's okay to say that... sorry. 

Figure: I want something stable and firm.

Circles: Or... we develop a better relationship with that fluidity.

Figure: It doesn't make me feel good about myself, at all. 

Circles: Why not?

Figure: I'm not anyone, I'm not anyone real. I'm like the reflection of an actual person in a river.

Circles: It seems you don't have a good relationship with that fluidity. Everything feels like ether. Nothing feels solid and stable.

Figure: I just want safety, security, something solid. I had to be adaptable and fluid to survive but that's left me without a solid core, I fear.

Circles: But I don't feel like this means you aren't real, or you have nothing solid. I just think it means you do this in flux; you're in motion. Solid, fluid, solid, fluid. Not all of you, mainly the parts people see.

Figure: Well, it seems like this isn't good enough for me, or something is still missing. 

Circles: I don't know, what do you actually want?

Figure: I do need feedback from the world that some of these solid states are recognisable. I'm looking for pockets of safety; I'm looking for resonance. When I don't get it, it makes me feel like the solid state didn't work, it makes me question all solid states, it makes me think I'm fluid to the point I mean nothing to anybody.

Circles: What will you do now?

Figure: I have to be kinder to myself about being fluid sometimes. I have to commit to staying strong in this kindness even when the world doesn't give me the feedback, the resonance, that I would like. I have to recognise it as a superpower. 

Finito

What's this got to do with being on vacation?

Maybe what I need a vacation to correct, is this poor relationship with fluidity. 

Maybe the version of my life I need to "try on", is acknowledging that this fluidity is a superpower, it has saved me. Acknowledging it's a good thing, not immediately panicking when I don't get the feedback and resonance from the world about it, because I know it is a good thing. 

Being compassionate about these nervous feelings, taking them seriously but not literally. 

Day 3, 25/03/2026 - Your Vacation Requires Boundaries

day 3 I'm feeding like a rat in a cage. 

I'm thinking again about how what a vacation, wanting rest and reprieve it's not that anyone else can do for me or give to me.

what has come to the surface over the past few days is the feeling which is triggering that need for rest and reprieve from an unstable and fluid sense of self. I want something I can grab onto for safety I want something that is recognised by the world. But life circumstances have that this just isn't something in my possession. I'm not necessarily ashamed about being fluid and adaptable, but it is painful and sometimes to realise, in a way I didn't amount to anything, or at least anything that reliably recognised by the outside world... Consistently recognised.

I'm learning over the last few days that I used to interpret that fluidity as the villain in my story Or the bad part of my story when really it's the unexpected hero.

1. thing I would recommend for anyone do an intuitive journaling like, with the accompaniment of images is just to have a look on Pinterest. Make a board for the topic you're writing about, search some keywords, and see what sort of images you are intuitively drawn to. when I was doing the art journaling exercise yesterday There was also a word association piece that went along with it. This world association is also what help me to understand that I am seeking a sense of safety and stability and familiarity and myself concept is a bit fluid, and sometimes that makes me feel like I'm not real and I don't have much to offer (But I know there is a flip side to this).

when I was searching on Pinterest for the word fluidity, a lot of the Images were of people being reflected in bodies of water or distorted by bodies of water. I also searched the sanctuary Because that came up the word association piece from the art journaling exercise, I was drawn to the warmer images relating to sanctuary. these 2. themes together made me realise some important things:

• The subject of the image wasn't distorted as it relates to fluidity, only how they are perceived by the world. The subject stays intact, it's a relational fluidity.
• Sanctuary and separateness for me, is full of energy. Warm, safe, sacred. There's nothing for me out there in the world, in terms of the type of sanctuary I really need and want. Part of me knows I don't need to go anywhere for it. 
• Between me and me, everything I have is right here. When things are up for consumption for the world, things get lost in translation. Value and meaning get mistranslated. 

I say all this to say, vacations have always been about boundaries and world building. In a sacred way, not in a way to isolate from the world, but more so in name of self-preservation. 

You create your own sacred space by getting good at withdrawing and leaving things alone or getting good at making this process easy. Holidays physically force us to do this. 

I'm thinking about boundaries, I'm thinking about fluidity and a sense of a lack of boundaries. I'm thinking about the how the screens don't make it easy.

I'm tired of the fucking screens, of course by default they would make us think that what we want is out there, playing hide and seek with us. At the end of the day if you're looking at the screen, you're looking for something and you're missing something. Finding a vacation everyday is challenging this.

I want something here, and real. I don't want to mentally reach beyond my locus of control. I'm trying to find vacations.

Day 4, 26/03/2026 - Reflection and Resonance

This day was winding and it felt like I was all over the place but covering a lot of ground.

The first thing I wrote in my iPhone notes is that I should be looking for myself in everything, or rather focusing on things I can see myself in.

The other day I was talking about how one of the things I feel the most insecure about is that I can't find my footing, can't find solid ground, sometimes it feels like I don't have a core. I think in response to that, I became fluid, I became dynamic. When it works it's great, when it doesn't, I feel completely illegitimate as a person; this feeling can bowl me over.

I should be seeking myself in everything, seeking that resonance. It is in everything, or it can be. Depending on what you focus on and what you're looking for. 

This is sanctuary, this means there isn't risk of being mistranslated... risk of being between two solid states for too long, being constantly in the transition, not feeling real. 

I'm kind of writing this retrospectively. Another thing I had down in my iPhone notes was "When you're on vacation, you're open to whatever the place you're visiting to offer."

Resonance is in everything even bad things. I'm only seeking out that resonance, made me think about what's privately mine, and what belongs to other people. 

Someone on Twitter mentioned Adler's "separation of tasks". 

It made me think "hey, these aren't my consequences, these aren't my repercussions, these aren't my TASKS."

If I'm on holiday, I need more separation please... and it really did help a lot.

So now I'm separated, it's me and me alone with my feelings whilst on vacation.

I have to deal with the prickly and inconvenient feelings of not having a solid footing, being perpetually transient, without looking outwards for an answer. This reminded me of another technique I came across online; Acceptance and Commitment Therapy What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT Therapy Explained)

This is obviously a technique for therapists, and this is just a video, but there was one thing I took form it that was really helpful.

ACT encourages you to come into full contact with your life and your feelings about your life, the good and the bad. 

She spoke about coming into contact with your pain in the short term, to avoid an accumulation of pain in the long term.

A good analogy she uses is avoiding washing the dishes at night, only to have to scrape off the hardened food in the morning which requires more work. 

Sitting with and listening to the feeling when it first arises, rather than thinking so far from it...only for it to still be there plus extra suffering and running around for no reason. This is the "Acceptance" part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and the creator made a short video about it here: How To Practice Acceptance: ACT Core Process

"Sacred place, created by boundaries, means you don't have to run away".

I realised today that I have a strong urge to get away from myself and my own feelings. 

"If I don't approve of myself, I really will be all alone. I really won't have anyone."

Not running away is not about acting like your life is sunshine and rainbows, and has everything you want in it. It is about make a plea, making a case to yourself, when the urge comes up:

"Hey, we don't need to go anywhere."

Or it can even mean inviting yourself back in after you've already run off into unhelpful thinking. 

I might go into more detail about this on day 5, but basically.

I felt like I was being held emotionally hostage in a situation, did some art therapy. Seems like I'm locked into the situation mentally, but what I think could happen if it turns out how I'd like.

But a better way to think about it is, why is the idea of things not going my way so unconfrontable? Uncomfortable?

If you want to be free, if you want to feel free, free yourself first. Decide yourself that you cannot be bought.

And how do you do this? By confronting that fear of what life might be like when things don't pan out how you want.

Stop seeing this scenario as the big bad wolf of your story when it could be grandma. 

Day 5, 27/03/2026 - Slow Down

Had a day off from work today, went to the garden centra and bought some sunflower seeds. I love that place, very peaceful.

I thought about how I move so fast in my mind sometimes, and how I want to become more aware of when I do it. When I'm scrambling ahead. You don't scramble ahead on vacation. 

When you actually encounter the worst-case scenario, it is very likely that you'll have a better time and suffer less than when you're actively anticipating it.

ED4AW - A Life of Undercomplication

Day 1 - 09/03/2026 - Intro

Hello, welcome to my blog.

This will be a blog about making things simple. Some things in life are genuinely difficult, and other things we make them difficult and get in our own way. 

Maybe I have undiagnosed OCD, I am definitely neurodiverse. Why does there have to be so much ritual and pageantry before I do anything.

I can't do anything unless it's written down. I don't feel motivated to do anything unless it's associated with big sweeping emotions, unclosed loops must be closed immediately.

Each Day for a Week I will be asking - can I make this simpler (and simpler and simpler)? I think it will be really interesting. I think it could lead me out of my comfort zone, I think it might let me trust myself more, take initiative. Free up some brain space.

Let's see how it goes, I am excited.

Day 2 10/03/2026 - Looking from the outside in

Life doesn't know about all the problems in my head, life doesn't know that there's anything wrong. Maybe I should live from that point of view, maybe that will keep things simpler.

Nothing is complicated to life. When you live life from the outside in, the pacing and time of life isn't all messed up and back to front... the story you run in your head is different to the multiple stories running out there.

It's all about where you start from, what's your base, what's your backdrop. What do you use as a reference for everything else. I don't want to use my biased, constricted mind that jumps from 0 to 1000 in half a second. I may encounter it, but I don't need it as my base or my default. 

The world out there is slow, big, neutral, and impersonal. It doesn't acknowledge conflicts because everything is on the same side, maybe there is only one side. 

Life out there is the definition of simple, even when bad things happen. We respond, we encounter tough emotions, and most likely we move on.

The mind is the only place where things get complicated, where there must be something out of place, where there must be a story beneath the story, where we can't trust what's happening before our eyes, where the most likely story is not good enough. 

Day 3, 11/03/2025 - There are two halves of the truth

I found that I was really stuck on a particular set of feelings, and it wasn't shifting at all; that wasn't going to help me keep things simple.

So... I did some self-administered EMDR therapy. You probably wanna go to a professional, those prices though!

I'm not going to talk about how it might have fixed my life etc etc, but how it related to this week's topic of keeping things simple. 

EMDR works by employing both side of your brain to reprocess trauma in an adaptive way, to help with the stuckness. 

You hold an image in your mind of the traumatic memory, or the current issue that is causing distress. The technique works by desensitising you to the memory or feeling.

What it felt like for me was reaching a hand back in time and providing more context from the future. It felt like a healthier dialogue between my two positions on an issue; one where the feelings were still very raw, and another that can see that currently, I am safe.

Heralding one traumatic memory or one distressing feeling as a good representation of reality is exhausting, distressing, and not simple actually. It requires a lot of mental resource to keep it going. The mechanism that keeps it going is sort of running on autopilot, a messed up nervous system with well embedded stories that keep the maladaptive stories running at the expense of your heart and mind.

Acknowledging that stories have two halves helped me to keep things simple.

If you're curious, here is the EMDR technique. There is a disclaimer at the beginning of the video. You can also download the video to avoid YouTube ads: https://youtu.be/Ljss_Ut5pxY?si=GXtWb8kGWE-8oCeh

Day 4 12/03/2025 - The Fixing Plane

Sometimes it's good to think of life as happening in different physical spaces. The fixing plane is a place where nothing happens, where problems are described but they are not real. Where people appear to be working on or working through something with nothing to show for it. I don't want to live there anymore, and I feel this will make my life more simple. The fixing plane is an abstraction from real life. I don't want to be there anymore.

Day 5, 13/03/2025 - Who's at the steering wheel??

I'm using voice to text for this because I'm lazy. 

I think a lot of why I write this blog and what I'm trying to resolve and heal as I'm writing is CPTSD. I did an EMDR exercise that I linked on day 3. What EMDR is good for doing with distressing memories is gently bringing you back to the time of the memory, in order to provide a bit more context, a bit more space around the memory, a bit more of the temporal details. How this exercise or at least the version of EMDR in this video works is that it will in rounds, ask you over and over again What is the most distressing part of this memory? 

I got to about round 3. of this exercise and 1 of the things that I still found distressing about the memory is that I was feeling all of this anger, all of this frustration, being undermined, being disrespected, my personhood disregarded... And I was just thinking where did those people expect all of those feelings to go? It's like they drummed up all of these very distressing feelings without any consideration of where they would go or what I would do with them or how I might process them; very reckless.

And this just got me thinking about an analogy of reckless driving. I promise this still links back to the topic of this blog about keeping things simple, but you just have to remain a bit open minded and stick with me through the process of describing this. 

If you're put in a situation where your personhood is disregarded, you've been dominated by someone to the point where it's extremely distressing or anxiety inducing, at that point it's basically a hijack situation. Someone has managed to take control of the steering wheel that is your nervous system, your level of comfort. They've hijacked the car without any consideration of what that might cause to rise up in you, or where the car might end up. If this happens in an institution such as school or work or anywhere where you have to show up every single day, now it's a loop and your brain becomes conditioned.

Fast forward now to present day, there are (usually) no practical, actual reasons to feel unsafe now that you are driving your own car on your own terms. But because you were conditioned to feel like at risk of a potential hijack situation or to feel like you're in a current hijack situation, sometimes as you're driving along as normal, perfectly safe, you become activated and your mind enters that hijacked state.

When we become hijacked like this, we forget that we're driving our own car on our own terms; we are not present in our current reality, in our current situation, and it is very hard to keep things simple when your mind is functionally somewhere else. When we are triggered, it is like we are living the experiences again. Traumatic memories are processed differently. The feeling now when you're triggered are exactly the same as the feelings from the initial injury.

I think a big part of keeping things simple is trying to remain present. What is practically helping me with this is a mental exercise I'm doing, this seems to be working. 

If I find myself triggered, I push aside for a moment the person or the thing that triggered the feeling, I tell myself to come back into the room, and I say to myself "there's no one else here". I then try and address the feelings 1 on 1; it's me and the feeling in this present moment, I would say this is keeping things simple. 

I'm not thinking about the person or the situation that triggered them, I'm not thinking that I shouldn't have this feeling because of one story or another i.e. it's overreaction, etc. It's me and this feeling 1 on 1. Then I ask myself, "Now that it's just me and the feeling, what seems like something I could or should be doing now?"

In terms of keeping things simple, another thing the EMDR process helped with is being able to describe past events as a matter of fact, describe their effect on me or how they shaped beliefs, as a matter of fact. 

It helps you confront the truth without the truth bowling you over, so I can easily say "this is something I experienced, and I can quite reasonably see why X Y Z belief feels true". It's like I can trace the origin of unhelpful beliefs, whereas previously these beliefs had no trail. They were just uncomfortable, and the only thing I knew or wanted to know about them is that they had to go immediately (not helpful).

When you can't or you don't trace back uncomfortable feelings to their source, you're activated without knowing the reason why. Your brain pushes you up against pinch points. These distressing sensitive spiky memories are similar to if you were pressed up against an actual physical spiky thing. There is an urgency to act, to remove yourself from the trigger or the source of the Pain. 

But I think what EMDR helps to do, is rather than acting in an impulsive way and trying to get away from the source of the pain by any means possible, you create some distance between yourself and the source of the pain, in a more intentional way. If we're continuing the analogy further, it's like "oh this thing is pressing against me and it's sharp and spiky, but that's because I accidentally made a wrong turn into the room that's small and dark and spiky"; even though you went in by accident, you can come out on purpose.

Day 6, 14/03/2026 - Maybe Ego is Getting in the Way

I wrote a previous blog about how not having boundaries and letting everyone into all my rooms, was not good. Causing me harm. I think another thing that the EMDR exercise made me realise is that it's super easy for me to interpret people's actions as something about me.

I watched a TV show that explained how if you received inconsistent love and affection from a caregiver, this can lead to a lack of boundaries, letting every single person and all their actions and everything about them into all of the chambers and compartments of your identity and your life. It makes you indiscriminate with who you let in and how.

Related to internalising people's behaviour towards me, I watched a video that says that this is actually acting from a self-centred place, similar to people who play victim all the time; The difference is you're playing martyr all the time. Another thing I realised when I was doing the EMDR therapy is that the context of my initial emotional injury meant I was not left with much space, emotional capacity, etc to really process the feelings. Making people's behaviour mean something about who I was as a person, was my mind's best attempt at getting a reign on the situation.

So, what has this got to do with keeping things simple? I think it relates to the point that I made on Day 1 or 2 about seeing things from the outside in, rather than the inside out. 

Making everybody's actions mean something about you personally is not a simple interpretation of the world, it actually requires multiple factors coming together in quite a complicated way. The simpler approach is to not make meaning about yourself out of people's behaviour. That's all I'll say for day 6.

Day 7, 15/03/2026 - Conclusion

What can I say for keeping things simple? The real world out there doesn't know anything but simple, or it doesn't hold a position on anything It comes across, and what's more simple than that? 

I think what helps with keeping things simple is decentering your ego for sure. Like I said, looking at the world from the outside in rather than the inside out. Taking a more objective view of things. Your nervous system gets hijacked and this becomes harder to do, but it's about remembering how to come back into the room (of reality). 

Thinking about how life is just driving along like a car, another car analogy whilst writing this blog.

And I wonder if maybe the urge to not take things how they are is kind of wanting to stop the car at every opportunity, which if you've been in a hijack situation I could definitely understand why you'd want to do that... but so many things are required to be brought together, often in a very complex way, for the worst case scenario to be something to worry about; for the situation as it is, to not be a reliable and stable enough (and safe enough) interpretation of reality.

I'm thinking about how EMDR therapy provides a trail for where my beliefs and behaviour come from, in the same way I am thinking about how everyone else's behaviour has a trail for where it comes from, and how the big grand scheme of reality doesn't hold a position on anyone's trail; What is a more simpler approach than that?

I'm thinking about what happens when I'm alone. If I trace my own trail, I don't associate positive things with being alone, but over these past 7 days I feel like I've been trying and succeeding at integrating these difficult and prickly feelings, rather than desperately trying to live a life without them. 

See them for what they are, in a matter-of-fact way, with a matter-of-fact understanding of where they came from; this is a much simpler way to live than rejecting the feelings, or making maladaptive meaning out of what those feelings mean about me personally.

And as we are seeing things in a more matter of fact way, I'm realising that the meaning-making and the urge to act is actually extremely unhelpful. It positions the feelings as problems that need to be solved, the work of being with them 1 to1, in the room right now and thinking about what they might need, doesn't get to happen.

Just because it hurts doesn't mean you're not healing. 

Anyways, that's enough writing for now. If you got this far, thank you. Good luck!

ED4AW - Treating Myself Like Sim

Day 1, 16/02/2026 - Intro 

Hello, and welcome to my blog or welcome back.

This week's topic might be a mix of several topics. I will work it out as the week progresses. The first angle then, is this:

"Be objective about the things and resources in your life. Treat yourself like you would a sim, or a pet. How would you optimise for happiness and satisfaction?"

The second angle: "Treat yourself and pour into yourself the same way you do for other people. You are also people."

The final angle for now "People have made it hard for you to see yourself, you need to see yourself more objectively. Stop downplaying your gifts and your skills. Stop letting people walk around in your authority, stop giving it over to them."

One of the common themes with all of these is that it's one rule for you and one rule for everyone else... and worst of all this isn't even done in your favour. You could probably do this in your favour, maybe that a good thing. Maybe that's the other end of the spectrum... extremes are usually bad, moderation is usually good.

Another theme is seeing clearly, or clearer. My vision is blurred. I think of myself and it's unclear symbols, so much of when I look at myself is other people. I set it up this way on purpose as a coping mechanism, but it also makes me angry that so much of my identity is surviving other people. I don't think you can see clearly that way. 

It's Monday morning. This is a great topic, I think. I don't know what I'm meant to be doing though. 

Some art therapy, trying to understand why I can't see myself and how this started.

I am choosing the colours, black and dark blue. It's an octopus, under the sea. Okay!!

Let's ask the art some questions.

Who are you? I lurk because it's safer, I'm formless and unseen because this works better for me. I do not need my identity anchored in anything.

Where did you come from? Life did this to me, this was the best option. 

What do you need? Maybe for someone to recognise, that not being tethered down to an identity, is an identity?

What have you come to tell me? Fortunately, or unfortunately, the nature of your internal world is deep and obscure. This is a fact. Maybe there's something about meeting yourself at these depths (or re-meeting, as this is something I used to do when I was younger). There's something about meeting yourself at these places instead of handing it off to other people. There's something about becoming curious about it. They won't understand what it is. You're expecting to bond with someone over something you saw in each other's dreams, that's not how things work. 

I want to say this links quite nicely to the 3 angles I mentioned before:

"Be objective about the things and resources in your life. Treat yourself like you would a sim, or a pet. How would you optimise for happiness and satisfaction?" - This is practically, how I would go about meeting myself at all my depths and what I should be optimising for when I do it. 

"Treat yourself and pour into yourself the same way you do for other people. You are also people." - When you see the best in people or whatever, it's actually revealing and intimate part of your own inner world which you need to get curious about and bring colour to. 

 "People have made it hard for you to see yourself, you need to see yourself more objectively. Stop downplaying your gifts and your skills. Stop letting people walk around in your authority, stop giving it over to them." - You lack clarity so you try and see yourself through other people's eyes. We ought to see ourselves through our own eyes. 

Dark, hidden, lurking. I don't want to see myself. it's safer to see myself through other people. It might be the case that I'm dragging people down to depths which I have not encountered on my own yet. I don't know, before we hope to take people to the depths with us maybe we need to give these depths language, meaning, symbols. Maybe we'll realise we don't need to be with anyone with us to see them clearly then. 

I need to try trusting my own eyes, when it comes to how I see myself. This 'ability' may have been terrorised out of you; distorted pacing and ruined internal clocks, patchy memories, over significant on the wrong things, under significant on the right things. I believe change can happen; it's only day 1. 

I was going to save the rest of the writing for tomorrow, day 2, but I write about this stuff to feel better and I need to feel better right now unfortunately. Something I wrote in my iPhone notes app:

"Thinking about depth; for a feeling, a wound, a trigger, to still be relevant all the years later, it has covered a lot of ground to finally reach you. Why and how is it still showing up now? This wound probably doesn't have words to get to you with. It is up to you to give it symbols, colour, dimensions, things it did not have at the time of its inception."

Sticking with the underwater theme, I pictured myself as that octopus at the bottom of the ocean. Something pushing me to make contact with the world above the sea. That octopus is maybe a younger version of me, me at my most raw. 

Why have you covered so much ground to meet me?

I can't pull people down to the depths, I can't say to people "meet me here".

But I can meet myself. Part of me just wants someone to walk with them along the journey. They want someone to see how we got here and see that the journal is valid. 

So, when do I start optimising for happiness and treating myself like a sim? When do I start putting in the work so I can see the world more clearly? I don't know, that's enough for day 1 though. 

Day 2, 17/02/2026 - It's Over Before it Starts

Broken clocks and broken routines. Need to correct them, that's what this sim needs.

Because somewhere in my mind, it feels like all has been lost before we've even had a chance to start.

This sim needed to do some breathing exercises before they woke up because they felt panicky. This sim is used to feeling panicky in the morning because they dreaded every day and no one was ever there to protect them and make it easier; I realised this when I did the exercise from yesterday about threads tethering my past experiences to my current reality. 

This sim needed me to get up and sit at my laptop for a bit instead of going straight onto my phone. 

Being loved at great depths is not something someone else can do for you, and you can't easily do it for other people. You need to do it for yourself.

This sim needs water.

I had a dream about a friend of mine in my house. Dreams about people I know in my house often reflect my relationships with them, and where the person might feel vulnerable (I think).

I've been having a lot of dreams recently about trains, transit, going places. This one also had this. but I was getting a bit lost, I guess. 

I think this dream was trying to tell me to preserve some mental energy for myself in my relationship with this person. There is a risk I'm getting sucked into their stuff. 

And what does this have to do with looking after my sim and optimising for happiness?

Scrawlings from my physical notebook:

I tell myself "I'm getting sucked in but I can handle it". I must insist to myself that I can handle it otherwise I'm weak. Otherwise.. I'm scared of what it could mean otherwise. 
I could have had something I wanted really badly, if I was just stronger. If I was more competent at handling hard emotions. 

"You just don't want it bad enough."

But in love and life you must acknowledge when the price isn't making sense anymore. When the uncomfortable feelings and wanting to withdraw are reasonable. 

Therefore what might I have gotten wrong about looking after this sim?

First of all, taking a 1-dimensional, oversimplified view of things. Why take shortcuts?

Love requires seeing things fully, and clearly. Love also makes it easier to see things clearly and fully. I don't think you are acting in love unless you do this. I believe you are instead trying to bend reality to your will. It's probably fine in other contexts, but not so much in our relationships with other people and ourselves. 

Attempting to bend reality is one of the few ways those of us who have been left helpless at some point, know how to feel like we're having any influence on reality. That we aren't completely at the world's mercy. 

I saw a video that said if you just stay in one place things will come to you. This probably works well if you're a street vendor, but I am a human and I want to be moving and keep moving. I don't want to wait. I don't want to strip the richness away from life so that I have a still image to focus on, some sense of control, so that I eventually encounter the subject of this image. 

I want to see things clearly and love fully. I want to see things fully and love clearly.

This sim needs to consider all sides of a story not just the convenient or familiar ones. 

If you feel that someone can't meet you somewhere, make sure you meet yourself there. First by acknowledging that your feelings are justified. Meet yourself there, don't expect other people to come down to meet you, and don't attempt to drag them down to these depths. 

It's a subtle shift from "I should be better at dealing with difficult emotions" to, "things would be way nicer if they were this way, but more importantly I understand why I want them to be this way". This way you're meeting yourself, you aren't alienated from your own feelings. 

Does the suffering come from internalising the idea that you don't deserve for things to be nice how you would want or expect? Or perhaps it's your fault that they aren't?

The struggle isn't from not getting the things I want. The struggle is from wrangling with the idea that our fault we aren't getting the things we want so we have no right to be bothered by this. 

It's especially damaging when we take this kind of responsibility for things completely out of our control. 

This sim needs to hear that they don't need to be okay with everything. 

Day 3, 18/02/2026 - Seeking Out Sunshine

Each morning, this sim is searching for its own personal sunrise. Thinking about the nature of light, how it behaves. Sometimes I project this search onto things that don't even emit light, hoping they start to.

Looking for light bright enough to reach me at all of my depths. Looking to be led, looking for guidance. Something to turn towards.

Maybe these are traits that I really want for myself. Leading is risky, leading is vulnerable. Leading requires being brave. Leading might make you sad and lonely. It's not something I want to do. I admire people that do it anyways. I admire people who do not force but allow this trait to well up in them naturally. 

I think about the stories people tell themselves that allow this to happen, I think about how I've lost touch with my own. 

Leadership leaves an impression, leadership is being able to make people pause. Life is always moving but leadership provides a static image, an anchor. I need to recognise this trait in myself, lest I over-recognise it in others. 

Day 3, I don't know what I'm writing. I feel like total crap, because of the state of the world. It's getting to me on day 3. I'm angry.

This week is also about getting familiar with all my layers, like someone would get familiar with a book they'd read a bunch of times. The chapter I would direct myself to on day 3, is something around this:

Yes, you feel like you have all these layers. You feel like different parts of you have been packaged off and given to all of the world, you're wondering how much of these layers you personally have for yourself. Perhaps you've told yourself that other people would do a better job with them. But everyone's doing a fuck all job and I'm absolutely fed up with it. I'm not blaming them, I gave myself away, I take responsibility, not blame, but responsibility. 

People cannot reach me at these depths, maybe I am trying to position them or act like they're not as deep as they are, but I am left unsatisfied. People can only meet me part way, this is no one's fault.

What does this sim need?

To be told it's not too far down. To believe that I don't need someone else down here to prove it's hospitable. I'm down here.

But it hurts down here, it's lonely. It's vulnerable. These sound like the traits of leadership I described earlier. 

People can't meet me down here, I have to be with myself, at all these layers, every single day. Present.

Day 4, 19/04/2026 - My Sim is Precious, but I always forget

You are precious, this life is precious. The things that have hurt you the most in world are conscious of this, somehow.

I want to be non-reactive but I don't know how. I want to decide what is special enough and important enough. I would ask this sim, can you leave anything alone? 

No one ever makes me feel important enough. Maybe this is because I don't consider anyone important enough, including myself.

I don't need anyone to hold it because I'm looking after it.

I don't have to give it away if I own it myself.

Not sure what 'it' is, hopefully I find out what it is before the end of this week.

I spoke the day before about leadership, and it's coming up on day 4. We don't see what leads people, it's mysterious. That's why it's alluring, it's like a question mark, and the brain doesn't like leaving things unresolved.

Maybe this question mark is somewhere we just can't meet people, maybe we need to meet ourselves and find our own. Get more acquainted with what leads us. 

This sim needs to be reminded that you don't lose anything when you stop romanticising things and see them clearly, because nothing belongs to us. Love wants to own nothing, love wants to see clearly, love doesn't ascribe more worth to any particular part of the story above another.

Speaking of seeing clearly, I thought of reality as a type of antidote. The antidote to the affliction of romanticising things. 

Speaking of romanticising things, I'm thinking about fasting. Fasting is about identifying false idols. False leaders. It made me wonder what I'm actually hungry for. It made me wonder, if I'm fasting now what was being previously fed? 

Fasting means you're swapping out false idols for a daily dose of presence. It's meant to remind you of something we ought to have known all along, that this presence is actually enough. It's meant to be anyways. 

Fasting, being non reactive to something, to what? I wonder what is starving now? What was previously being fed? I don't know, it's time to do some art therapy. 

I have drawn it, no idea what it is. Just colours and shapes. As a reminder, this art was prompted by the idea that terrible feelings of feeling unsafe, and unstable, are actually feeding something. Some part of my brain wants more of it. 

Who are you? Dance, play, colours, light, motion. Things you've incorporated into your life, all your life. 

Where did you come from? A conflict that part of you keeps daring yourself to resolve. Taunting. You said this would be enough, you said you would build a life that is enough, you keep doubting. I will never stop calling you out for it.

What do you need? To not mind looking like a fool. To acknowledge that there will always be a risk that my life might mean nothing or be completely bowled over, but choosing to engage with dance, play, colours, light, motion anyway.

What have you come to tell me? You need to starve that part of you that says, "it might not be worth it, then what will do you?", I wouldn't have lost anything. I will still have everything. I believe in my ability to have everything, I believe that all I need is my daily dose of presence. Life is beautiful and I will fight to recognise this everyday, and if I'm not great at doing this right now I will believe in my ability to get better at it. 

Day 4 is feeling a bit all over the place like spaghetti. I think I need to fast my fear of losing. That is what's being fed when I engage in "What if what if what if" or wonder if what I'm doing in my current reality might not be enough because "there may always be better choices to make". 

All over the place like spaghetti. 

If I can lose it, I never needed it. 

Day 5, 20/02/2026 - I don't know, do you?

When I can slow down my mind, I have way better ideas about all this stuff. Here is what I wrote in my physical journal, might have some embellishments but pretty much like for like. It still explores themes of encountering your depths, accommodating them. Giving them shape and language, acknowledging that people can't meet you at all of your depths. 

My biggest area of development is not impersonating people enough.

Instead of thinking "it would suck if I fell", after seeing someone fall. I ought to think "how would it feel for this person to fall, if I was them instead of me".

"What would they say about this from their own point of view?"

I give myself a voice all the time, but never other people.

I wonder, therefore, how I've ever been able to relate to anyone or their projections; how they want to be perceived. What they're putting out. Consider that play is a very important developmental milestone for children. 

A type of awareness that allows you to imagine yourself as another. I think of people in images, I never imagine what they're inner monologue might sound like. I know not every person has one, but I do so this is how I should be relating to people.

I normally have 3 'flavours' of internal monologue. Good, bad,  and 'like myself'. Bad is giving fear, especially fear of the unknown, a voice. Wondering what it might say, giving it a voice over other actual people that I know. I relate to it because part of me feels there is something in common with this fear, something true about it, part of me feels like the truth of this fear is a core part of its identity. 

I need to encounter this part, accommodate it. Give it shape, texture, colour. Acknowledge its backstory as real, and valid.

The part that related to those fears, doesn't always have words. It's intimate... and not everyone can meet us at that place. 

And speaking of inner monologues, and parts of us resonating with fear... The feelings are real and justified in the moment, as much as possible yes, but the moment will pass.

This process, feeling a fear. Knowing this is probably internal monologue coming from an unknown source. Fear is often fear of the unknown. This unknown source reflects a part of me that I've become alienated from, that doesn't have a voice. "I want someone to relate to me", it says. I think the work is to tell its story and being open to all mediums. 

Day 6, 20/02/2026 - You Will Always Have Problems but You Need New Problems

Straight from the iPhone notes, maybe with some embellishments:

Healing doesn't mean never having problems, but maybe it means being able to overcome new ones. I'm in a revolving door of past problems and maybe I'm sick of it. 

I want to go through a door to somewhere else, choose a new model, a new paradigm. 

Revolving door; part of me wants unequivocal evidence that I have evolved enough, and feels it isn't getting it.. and back through the revolving door I go, it never quite feels enough like a win. 

I said to myself "I could try assuming I've evolved enough and recognising new evidence, maybe."

Deciding to be biased towards x and against y... but I'm scared, I'm hesitant, I'm not ready.

What does this sim need? To not let myself roll into oblivion, to know that when it comes down to it, people around me will not allow that to happen. 

I acknowledge that this was allowed to happen when I was younger, but those times are over. I wish I could pass through a normal door instead of going round and round through a revolving one. 

Day 7, 22/02/2025 - Conclusion

Part of me fears there's always a sinister plot to diminish me, that I have to fight to be human. This has felt like a type of violence, this is a feeling I've been familiar with my whole life. 

Today I'm thinking about leaving things alone, I'm thinking about signals. Does leaving things alone with grace signal to your brain that you've on from the revolving door to a door you can actually pass through? Maybe it's all about trust. 

It's been a long week but also a very short week somehow. I had to go to the top of this blog and remind myself what I was even meant to be writing about:

1. "Be objective about the things and resources in your life. Treat yourself like you would a sim, or a pet. How would you optimise for happiness and satisfaction?"
2. The second angle: "Treat yourself and pour into yourself the same way you do for other people. You are also people."
3. The final angle for now "People have made it hard for you to see yourself, you need to see yourself more objectively. Stop downplaying your gifts and your skills. Stop letting people walk around in your authority, stop giving it over to them."

1. 

"Be objective about the things and resources in your life. Treat yourself like you would a sim, or a pet. How would you optimise for happiness and satisfaction?"

If I'm honest I could have done better with this, or been more consistent. But then maybe I should be less hard on myself. I am the best care taker I'm ever going to have. I thought about meeting myself at all of my different lengths and layers. Some of these feelings have travelled a really long way to get to me, I try not to make rash decisions based on the very intense ones. Especially, if the intensity doesn't quite match the situation. This is a signal in the dark for me, that I need to sit and listen. 

• It's a chore to stay connected to me
• Everyone leaves. 
• No one will let me in. 
• I have to fight to be considered human.

They are true for some part of me, this part wants to speak its truth. This story has travelled a long long way otherwise I would have left it behind. I have left many stories behind. 

How do I respond as the best caretaker I have ever had and probably ever will have?

I have to do something I have never done in my whole life; be the adult role model I didn't have.

I was stuck in circumstances I hated and wasn't sure when I would get out of, and part of me still feels trapped or in some sort of prison. 

I’m technically writing this on day 8, and I’m thinking about time travel. If there’s a version of me that feels stuck, how do I get in touch from the future?

Two ideas that helped me think more constructively about this;

That sometimes, time can travel backwards. Didn’t they confirm this at CERN or something?

I have been sending my past self a care package from the future, that’s what kept her going. That was her source of sunshine, when things were dark and bleak. 

“Intuition is memory from the future”.

2. 

The second angle: "Treat yourself and pour into yourself the same way you do for other people. You are also people."

I must acknowledge that this week, I did not make too much progress on this point, because it is hard. I am alienated from myself. Yes, I am people, but I am people that I want some space and distance from. My feelings around feeling like I'm not being taken seriously, feeling like a fool, feeling like someone doesn't have a stake in whether or not I feel diminished, is a violent, and angry feeling. It has sharp fangs, I want to get away from it. I suppose it's very human to have parts of ourselves we want to get away from. I let it come, I let it leave. I don't break my life into pieces about it. 

Feeling distinct from other people, might come from not accepting my own feelings as normal-human-feelings, and outsourcing the work to other people. There was an urgency to outsource these feelings, to reject them. To leave them behind and go be with everyone else away from them. How could I begin to treat myself like everyone else, whilst in this mind frame? Very difficult I think. 

Is this a long way of saying "You can pour into yourself the way you would with everyone else by just rejecting yourself less."? Too easy.

Anyways, 

Part of me said: "This feeling cannot be allowed to exist." 

And another part of me said "Well it does lol."

Part of me said "There's no way I can feel this bad without something being immediately done about it."

I listen... I want to take these more insecure feelings seriously, but I don't want to lose access to reason in the process. 

Things that diminish us, make us doubt our perception of reality. They corrupt our pacing, our interpretation of pace. I wonder how these more vulnerable parts of me, these rawer feelings, would react/respond if I reminded them:

"You have more time than you think."

"No one else is here, we are safe right now, and we aren't on anyone else's schedule."

I would have loved to feel like I had more time to deal with stuff back then, but it was unstable all the time. I felt like a marble on a piece of card, everything was conspiring to tip the card over and allow me roll into oblivion, and it was urgent and pressured and awful. 

The problem isn't any of this stuff, it's feeling the same despite my circumstances being different. Despite me investing many years and a lot of hard work to make my circumstances different.

I had to overreact, I had to go into my own abstraction of the world, I had to make sure none of that stuff never happened to me again, lest I roll off the world into oblivion. 

3. 

The final angle for now "People have made it hard for you to see yourself, you need to see yourself more objectively. Stop downplaying your gifts and your skills. Stop letting people walk around in your authority, stop giving it over to them."

My first thought about this, is seeing me and my normal-human-feelings, as a town or a commune. Things work how they're meant to, work all together. Yes, there are things we wish were different, but we make improvements where we can and accept everything else as they are. This made it easier to be in the posture of accepting myself, seeing things clearly, denying the urge to act and break and change and disrupt. 

Corruptions in pacing, distortions in time, also probably make it hard to see things clearly. I'm working on my career, but I still feel like a kid. I encounter a new situation but still am scared it will be like situations from the past. 

I think this point relates well to becoming more familiar with or my depths, not immediately offering these depths up to the world. Not everything about me should be up for consumption, and I don't need anyone else to taste it to know that it's safe. I'm down here, it's safe. 

It's been a lot of writing this week, so after reading back all 7 days this is what I have to say:

Scared of encountering myself, I feel dangerous and like I'm too much or chronically not enough. But this signals to what I should practically be doing to optimise this sim for happiness. I need to encounter myself at these depths before offering up anything to anyone else or considering what anyone else is doing. 

Love is accepting my 'town', my life my reality for what it is.

Don't overcomplicate articulating what these depths are, surely you can ask the question. What is bothering you? Optimising for this sim's happiness means becoming a better listener.

A more attuned listener, when I try and pick out which of these depths need attention, thought like this come up:

• I make bad decisions
• I don't deserve nice things
• I am delusional
• I might look like a fool

I'm thinking about how much any of this correlates with reality. Perhaps they correlate with something else. Another place, where does reality physically live? Ids this getting too abstract?

Maybe that's why EMDR is so effective, it works by tracking where your eyes look when you're recalling memories or something right? Anyways, too abstract. The best I can do for this idea, is acknowledge again that feelings are real and valid and perhaps intense in the moment but the moment passes. 

Love is plain, clear, lets things pass through it. Love doesn't hold things up. Love is fine being this way.

I want to get away from myself so bad. I was like to myself "You have more time than you think."  and this allowed me to feel safe enough to acknowledge that I don't want to be with myself

Encountering your different layers is a continual practice. Are some of frustrations coming from thinking that doing it a couple of times is enough and to leave it at that?

I don't want to be anywhere near you - now we can start encountering some more layers.

I see this feeling: "I don't want to be anywhere near you"...  but I also see a part that insists on living its life with dignity regardless of everything. Resilience.

One part says: I don't want to be anywhere near you".

Another says; "lol you're not going anywhere". 

"Encountering myself at all these depths." - the key having something to offer myself, or respond with when I get down there. Sometimes this is just acknowledging that the difficult feelings are valid. Walking side by side, down the path it look to go from the initial industry to your current state, This is in addition to acknowledging this is a continual practice. I can offer myself resilience, someone to trust, someone who offers acceptance. Encountering yourself at all your different layers means bringing together two worlds a concealed one and a bold one.

Maybe being neglected makes you forget this is a continual practice. 

I don't know. No more writing now.

If you go this far, thanks for reading. 

ED4AW - Dialogue with Other Versions of Me

Hello! Welcome to my blog. If this is your first time reading this, how it works is this; I pick a topic and I write about it for 7 days. I've been doing this for about 7 years now. I always notice a refreshing change by the end of the week, I do this for me and I'm not sure if people find it interesting or helpful, but I share it on here anyways hoping someone might. 

I have been journalling a while longer than that though. I have gone into the attic and will be reading through my old journals, having a dialogue with previous versions of myself. Every time I think I remember my life clearly, I am floored by an old tweet or an old photograph; I don't remember anything. And yet so much of what is propelling me forward is from that time. 

Each Day for a Week I will be writing letters to previous versions of myself from my journals. What would I like them to know now? What would they say to me if someone asked them to write a letter to the future?

Day 1, 19/01/2026 - Knitting my Life Together

I've opened the journal and some paper has fallen out. A detention letter from when I was 16; I was always late and getting detentions. A mind map I made for codependency. I literally remember how I fell down that rabbit hole; I was like "Why does it feel like I like everyone more than they like me?", I googled this. Google said I lack self-awareness, and somehow this brought me into learning about codependency and enmeshed realities. 

Don't beat yourself up all the time I wrote down, I still do that a lot I'm afraid past-version-of-me. But it has improved, a lot. I have a habit of doing it without noticing, which is not great. Anyways. 

So, onto my actual journal (this mind map fell out of it). 

I was writing about how I got bad grades, and my mum was disappointed. I want to do well in school so I can look after her. I wrote about hanging out with a friend I made J. J is into punk rock music. 

Things I would tell kid me from 2014:

Hey! You actually bumped into J at a party not that long ago and he was really happy to see you.

I still have a lot in common with me from 2014, I don't know if that's a good thing or points to stunted development. 

Despite everything going on you still were trying to be a good kid; you were trying to stay strong on your values; I'd say I'm still reaping the benefits of this. 

You're still friends with the Jewish kid and the Italian kid and you did end up going to music festivals together. 

You did become a corporate mastermind in the end. 

You still struggle with holding yourself accountable but it's improved; impressive that you picked that up as a weakness so early on.

You do not have to worry about being too nice anymore!!!

You still spend too much time online wanting to hear from people because you are thinking about them.

When you're sad you still insist that it's just physical pain but 'mentally you're okay'.

You were such a dating skeptic, but I think that was just your way of making it easier to be alone. 

Now between me and you, the reader.... 

Reading my journal from 2014, I can see that I was an unsupported and extremely isolated child. I was journalling as a way of knitting my life together, knot my knot. Creating some sort of webbing, structure, scaffolding where there was nothing. Maybe that's why it's so easy for me to slip into abstraction and fantasy, because I had no options. I had to make something out of nothing, weave yarn into gold. 

Whenever I do come across something I grip onto it with everything. 

And being left with nothing, and forced to knit life together knot by knot, I'm always desperate for connection. Maybe in this knitting analogy connections help me to understand what the final product might look like, where to add knots. 

Your brother being a bully affected you more than you realise; even though your relationship is better now. You internalised a lot of it.

I'm thinking about how I might need to craft who I'm becoming next. A lot of who I am now is yeah, the work of a child who had nothing. They did their best, they had to. I'm still knitting life together, loop by loop. Maybe it's starting to look like something now, a scarf?

Day 2, 20/01/2026 - You Have Made a Disturbing Amount of Progress

Still reading the journal from when I was 16 but getting to the end of it. I still have so many of the same issues, fear of people leaving me. Now it's not so much my platonic friends, it's more in a romantic context. But you are seeing someone very nice at the moment, which is why this is being written on Day 3 first thing rather than Day 2. You are growing a lot as part of this process. 

I wrote down that I need to face my childhood issues and be honest about the origins of my codependency.

"Boundaries are what differentiate me from other people" - yesssss.

Will I always be in a stage where I look back on myself disappointed? - No, I appreciate you past-version-of-me, you tried your best with the cards you were dealt. I am very proud of you.

I was disappointed at people bailing on my birthday - You've had beautiful birthdays since, including one where you sang and played guitar in public, could you ever have dreamed of this?

Looking back, I want you to take nothing anyone did personally. Not because, "this person's actions do not mean they think less of you" (they might), but because what's the point in engaging in that idea? Where will you end up? I've seen the future of your relationships with those people you were so desperate to make time for you; they end up never being for you. Just a lot of heartache and wasted time. If you visit a store and it's empty I hope you would leave.

I wanted to lose weight; you lost a lot of weight in 2020. There was a global pandemic.

Day 3, 21/01/2026 - Been Writing About the Same Stuff for Years

So it seems I didn't journal at all when I was at uni or I lost those notebooks. After 2015, all of my notebooks start from 2020, when I would have already graduated. 

Wrote abut some books I wanna read; how music works by David Byrne. Blood Sweat and Pixels.

I wrote about how I catastrophise a lot - I have improved so so much with this. 

Maybe I should make it a practice to meet people where there at - something I wrote.

I was always thinking about how I might prevent bad things from happening by being hypervigilant: "yeah it's a prison but at least I can see all four walls".

I also wrote that "everything you are trying to prevent is where the real living happens." Errm okay. I guess this is a note about stepping out of your comfort zone.

I need to heal my relationship with others, not for their approval but to feel safe in the world. 

My problem is that I'm impatient, frustrated over things I can't control I have to accept that things may not happen according to how I want and on my preferred timeline. 

It's not about action or in action, it's about taking action from a place of surrendering everything - clock it.

Theres something innate in me that pushes people away - people made you nervous and people get nervous around nervous people.

No community has claimed me as their own, I feel like I don't exist. It gets so much better for you wow.

People are superficial; this feels like a lazy answer to a lot of my social issues - this is the truth past-version-of me; people don't warm to things they don't immediately recognise. Humans need a box to put things in, and you probably exist in a cardboard tube. This might be superficial but it's human nature

There's some HTML code in my notebook; wouldn't you know that you're studying computer science at the moment? Wow.

Sometimes I think I've explored all the options and maybe the only one left now is to choose to be happy. Like... man. Is this the shift I've been looking for? I've tried for years to be 'realistic', not too optimistic, lest I get let down.

Yes, I'm basically talking down on the fact that I journalled for many years; what I will say is that it improved my writing, it improved the quality to which I narrate my own life. It added language to things that were hurtful and I had no language for. But 5, 10 plus years later I'm still writing about the same issues!!!

Why do I feel the need to prepare for every moment? Why does every moment require that I have done some work in advance, lest it bowl me over? At one point it was definitely important that I did this because I was sensitive, vulnerable, volatile; I needed cushioning. 

But now I can see that writing doesn't necessarily make any of the feelings go away; maybe this is making a case for just choosing to be happy, but there's some hesitancy.

I did some art therapy to understand this better. I think the art was me inside a womb. I'm frozen in time, I don't perceive life in the order it happens. This art pointed to an unmet need to "live life in real time instead of always abstracting, projecting, pretending time isn't real etc."

You've done enough preparation and now it's time to live life from front to back; it's time to take off the parental controls.

I might also feel stuck with certain emotions from when I was younger because I'm always in preparation mode. Something like... you have to allow life to catch you by surprise. I think that's the only way to move out of these feelings. When you spend months, and weeks projecting and planning, your feelings have so many hang ups and dependencies. I do believe that feelings are meant to be 'digested'. 

My issues are my issues, maybe the exercise is to choose to be happy despite them. Because over the years they have not gone anywhere. 

I found this tiny buddha article after googling: can we choose to be happy? Choosing Now to Be Happy: Why the Conditions Are Never Perfect - Tiny Buddha

Key takeaway for me atm is that there will never be the perfect conditions. Maybe I stay in the womb, planning, projecting, prepping but it doesn't feel like the right condition to leave yet. Maybe there is no right condition, maybe every condition is the right condition; to not feel like life needs to be rehearsed, that I need to prepare for impact or potentially being let down. 

Day 4, 22/01/2026 - Considering Never Journalling Again!

I genuinely am still writing about the same issues. Still in pain.

Day 5, 23/02/2026 - Birds eye view

I was talking to my mum, and I asked myself what I would advise her if we swapped places. I said I would encourage her to witness and remember, rather than do and fix. Don't consider things in a 5 second or 5-minute window, but a broader view. Consider what you've been spending years working towards, and goals/ambitions you've set for yourself in the future. Stop taking things in your life for granted, this might require some temporal shifting; think back to you a few years ago, think about how you would feel in the future if you achieved your goals. 

I changed the word to witness from see, to articulate the increase in weight, significance, and presence.

Day 6, 24/01/2026 - Pain Doesn't Mean You Aren't Healing

From my 2024 journal:

"See amazing things for what they are, stop trying to simplify the world. Witness and not see"

I was reading a journal from 2024 about things that are wrong with my life, according to me at the time. Got to page 10, I was like cool. Accidently flipped forward in the journal, I went all the way up to 38!!! If I could only tell past-me, that I'm laughing my head off at this. She probably didn't find it funny at the time. A lot of the things in the list I have made a lot of progress on.

I'm going round and round I'm still writing about the same stuff; I don't think I can erase these issues. Now that I think about it, all these vulnerabilities are only emerging recently because I've started dating someone again. Is dating the thing that invites you to put all your learning to the test? Is it a test? Is it meant to be one?

Maybe I need to start from a different position when journalling. Before I was very much writing to cope better with my circumstances and give myself more internal real estate to work with. Maybe I have graduated from this, maybe I have passed the ultimate test.

Maybe this week is meant to be about releasing and letting go. When you don't have the intel/experience/confidence you hold on to everything. Perhaps it is a type of hoarding. What if I end up needing this?

After many years I know now which thinking patterns pay their way and which kind of lead me nowhere. 

Maybe what I should be repeating is things that help me to see and remember, things that keep me in the posture of seeing and remembering. There's a guy who said being happy is like going to sleep; you can't force yourself to sleep but you can set up the conditions for sleep and model what someone who was about to fall asleep might do. 

I'm thinking about why exactly did writing about the same topics for years and years help me?

TO BE FAIR, it never felt like I was really moving the needle with my writing until I moved to this 7-day journal format. Maybe it is a practice of releasing, shedding, deliberately forgetting.  Maybe it's a way of witnessing what matters and what stands the test of time.

I also did the artists way in 2024:

Letter from me at 80 to me now

There are things right now that feel like they're eclipsing your whole life, but once you get to my age there won't even be the language left to describe these things. There are so many beautiful experiences waiting eagerly to meet you. Time spent worrying about your life now is most likely time wasted. Everything feels like it's in its early stages because it is. You can't rush a fruit ripening, or a baby animal maturing, so don't let your mind reach too far in the future or rush to worst case scenarios. Create, and witness joy magic and wonder in real time. Don't rush. Everything happens exactly as its meant to. The course of life is bigger than us and already plotted out. So, whether or not you fight against life's current, it just is what it is. Treat every moment with the respect it deserves and is entitled to; remind yourself that some don't deserve a lot. Life is a miracle. 

Letter from 8 year old me to me now

Dude. You... I can't even get the words. You have achieved something miraculous. A real miracle. Wonderful. We are truly, finally at peace. We have the luxury of peace, stability and predictability. It's all I ever wanted, everything else is a bonus. We can fully inflate our lungs, we can notice the softness of our skin, we have not just one person but several people who understand us and take genuine interest in us as a person. We can look in the mirror. 

1) Some art therapy to uncover why anger is the feeling specifically. Why I feel so strongly, and with such certainty, that an injustice needs to be corrected. 

So, in my art therapy the central character was wounded with their eyes closed, it was like the wound was almost protecting them from the outside world. It surrounded them. My response to this art is this; healing doesn't promise to never hurt, wincing and experiencing pain is not evidence that you are not healing. I think what helps with healing is stability and consistency, not being so restless. Sticking to the same set of ideas, being a bit more organised. Over time, you begin to heal. Take on the posture of the person you would like to heal into. 

My emotions can actually make me wince in pain. I don't think pain is meant to be a prison rather a utility you acknowledge and then move on from. And remember, you are choosing this so that you can grow. It will require trial and error.

2) imagine for a second that the bad things I think people think about me, they actually do think that. What would change?

If these things are actually true about me, I can't help who I am. I would reinterpret them. Being desperate means I want something badly, there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting something badly. Being desperate means I have a higher risk appetite for things I would do to meet my needs. This isn't always a problem, being pathetic isn't always a problem.

It's all about resolving the tension. Conflicting beliefs and ideas cause tension, tension prevents healing. Organise your mind, pick something. Resolve the tension. In the example above, the central idea is acknowledging my choice and agency, putting myself at the front of my life. Not being at the world's or other people's mercy, my worth not being dependent on what people do at their discretion. 

These insecurities are like clouds floating over a central unblemished core, that's how it should be anyways. I think that's how you know your boundaries are intact.

I'm also going to write about the new direction I need to go in. Journalling the way I have over the last few years was at one point, a new direction; prior to this I would journal in a different way, whatever was helpful at the time. So, what would be helpful for me now?

Witness and remember, rather than do and fix - is a good shout, I like it better than ''practicing gratitude'' and ''just being positive''.

Take on the posture of the person you would like to heal into - I like this very much too.

Don't consider things in a 5 second or 5-minute window, but a broader view. Consider what you've been spending years working towards, and goals/ambitions you've set for yourself in the future. 

Maybe it's having pride in the things I do have, that I need to work on. This was so easy when I was a kid, you got a new games console, and it was literally a high that could last weeks. I can still recall what it feels like as an adult, what was different back then? I made a mind map and tried to extract some common themes.

First thing I'll say is that these things don't have a common theme, but I did only focus on one thing at a time. I wasn't flitting around; there was a central focus. Organisation! 

You focus on less things and it's easier for you to take on the posture of a happier person. 

Maybe life is the same as business; focus on one thing or you die. Maybe right now I'm in the middle of an identity crisis because I put my career first but quickly learned that wasn't a good idea. 

I don't know, perhaps I will flit around forever. There are too many options. 

And you know what it's okay to feel confused, it's okay to feel like I don't know what to do with my life or what my future direction is. This is part of the journey. No one said healing wouldn't hurt. 

Day 7, 25/01/2026 - Conclusion

Pain doesn't mean you aren't healing.

Listening to some BB King, music really is medicine. I really am shifting. These people didn't run from their pain they alchemised it in an incredible way, arguably one of the most incredible ways in human history.

Blues music is the perfect model for reaching the end of a dark feeling and not letting it bowl you over, maintaining your dignity. Your sovereignty! Anyways this is not a blog about music...

I had a dream last night, it was restless and uncomfortable. I looked in the mirror and it didn't look like me, I looked grotesque. From that dream I picked up a could of things:

I need to update my self image or something, I need to not have selective vision and see myself how I really am. Witness and remember rather than do and fix.

My main problem is a kind of vision problem or hallucination; this is what is causing tension and disorganisation. I don't trust people. I do not trust that people take me seriously. I feel like I am living a simulated life, people are lying to be because I am not good enough and they don't want to be the one that crushes me... or alternatively they are getting something out of me.

The raw wound that guides both great decisions and terrible ones is a fear of not being recognised, I think.

Sensitive to people not taking me seriously because it also suggests that they thought I was too much of an idiot or too desperate to tell when this was happening.

I'm so sensitive and I constantly push and push and push for people to demonstrate that yes, they are taking me seriously. 

Being able to discern that people are taking me seriously is an unstable concept for me; it's like it isn't tethered to anything. 

I anticipate that people will treat me with contempt because for a long time they did, sometimes they still do but when it's in my face I just find it funny.

I'm thinking about the collective image that I believe other people have of me in their mind:

• It's an unclear image, like trying to recall the face of someone you met once a very long time ago or someone from your childhood. 
• Or this person is disorganised, an idiot, should not be taken seriously. 

I don't know what to do. When I get insecure these are the beliefs I'm battling against. 

People that care about me wonder why I'm so sensitive about this but if only they could understand what was happening to me, all around me, every single day. And I have to carry it with me alone because everyone has moved on or pretends it didn't happen like... it tracks why I'm like this.

Now that I have some more information about this, I did some art therapy to better understand what might help.

Finished!!! That took forever.

I interviewed the art;

Who are you? Love is in different rooms.

Where did you come from? Acknowledging that love is assorted.

What do you need? Acknowledge both connectedness and the separateness. Let people in but maybe draw some boundaries. Not in a constricted way, but in a 'let's not rush to put everything in the same room' way.

What have you come to tell me? People do love you, people do take you seriously. We have to be responsible with how much of our story, past-present-future, we hand over to other people. Also remember there's so much we keep for ourselves; there's so much we can offer ourselves. We have the tenure, the minute details, even non-verbal details. We are best placed to be fully honest with ourselves, fully present with ourselves, and articulate what's what, give ourselves the best.

I even came up with extra questions that were not included in the original video for the technique : Art Therapy Exercise - Exploring Emotional Needs

I drew the art because I didn't feel good about people not taking me seriously, the part of the art that reflects this is the big heart in the centre of the art. A bigger heart makes it easier to funnel things into there that shouldn't be in there.

I also felt conscious about centering things I ought not to, the part of the art which reflects this is the fact that the character in the middle of the art (me) is at an intersection of all the 'rooms' in the art.

According to this art, what I should strive to do going forward is not let everyone so far in.

I am late to the party on this because I had learned to indirectly try to control and influence situations and was not aware of any alternatives to this. 

According to this art, an accurate but maybe disappointing assessment of my situation is you don't let everyone into your most vulnerable rooms without the time or equivalent experience.

These little hearts will never feel as big or close as your own, and everyone is in their own rooms doing their own thing. 

I don't want to write too much more. What now then?

Do I feel constricted by trying to show up the same in every room? Bring everything, into every room. Am I being constricted by how accommodating I'm being?

So, what does this mean now?

Maybe I need to bet on myself more, follow my own voice. It is risky, but it is something I need to do, I had a dream I was on a tram, with an indiscriminate group of people, some from my past, some from my present. My shoe fell off and slipped under the tram, I had to get off the tram and go get it. I think this dream speaks to not holding capacity indiscriminately for members of the public. Following my own tracks. Not being too accommodating. Putting myself first.

What does the person in the art need to know/do? Take yourself out of the situation where everyone is cutting across you and, in a position, to easily receive from you, you need to come up and out of that. 

I think I'll leave it there, whoever got to the end of this congratulations. This was not easy to write, but just because something hurts doesn't mean you aren't healing.

Until next time!!!

ED4AW - Maybe Everything's Fine, idk (Less Escapism)

Hello, welcome back to my blog. Welcome for the first time if this is your first time.

There are a few things I am trying to address with this week's post. Acceptance, gratitude, rejecting grind culture, being present, relinquishing control. 

I've journaled, and art therapied a lot about it. Here is my 'chain of thought' so far:

I am in the soul crushing position of hedging a lot of hope and expectations on something I have no control over. My therapist told me I'm over significant about things and I agree.

Feels like everything is fine, but also everything is completely wrong.

Did some art therapy: the art was called "hyper focus tunnel vision". It came from the need for something that would "make all the pain worth it". The art represents the unmet need of creating a solid base in what is true and current; seeing the value in their real life, being where their feet are.

The art was a long, dark, tunnel with a literal light at the end of it. Light at the end of the tunnel. This piece of art needs to be reminded that life isn't all tunnel, rewarded by the brief moment of excitement you get when you finally reach the end (that also disappears once you realise the chase is over). You can take the scenic route. Both routes end up at the same place (a little further along in life with more info, experience, and age), one having a hyper focus and the other allowing you to enjoy getting distracted, doesn't mean you end up at two different places. 

"With my eyes glued to the prize, I'll miss the scenes of my life."

It seems something has gotten mixed up; the in-between, the journey, is the point. It is not just a tunnel. It is not just a means to an end. The end goal was never the point, it's just where you end up whilst on the route. Trauma might have made us think otherwise, and I suspect that the same mechanism is running on autopilot, but things are different now. 

So, what am I writing about this week? 

"Entertain, for a moment, that your life is working exactly as it should. Nothing to do, nothing to change. What can you achieve with the things in your life once you appreciate them for how amazing they already are?"

I'm not saying you should just sit around and not try and self-actualise, not at all. I think that restlessness that comes with feeling like we aren't where we need to be yet is almost always a result of hyper focusing on something that is out of our control. Whether you hyperfocus on something you can't control or stay present in your own life, you will end up at the same place.

I think the thing I am hyper focusing on is the sense of fairness in my life, or rather unfairness. I believe that things should change so that they become fairer. Each day for a week, I am going to imagine that the current state is the optimal state and take a more scenic route. 

Day 1, 05/01/2026 - Hold Fast and Stop Trying to Escape

Caveat for day 1, I'm saying a lot of things that feel helpful but it's still aspirational and there's still work to be done on them.

So by the end of day 1 I realised the issue is this: having a desperate need to escape. This is quite a lot of progress to make on day 1 to be fair.

It started off with me thinking about this feeling of wanting things to be fair; wanting to desperately escape into a world where things were fair. Where I feel like I'm finally getting the nice things I deserve.

I don't want to sit with the reality or the responsibility of accepting that maybe, this is as fair as it's going to get, and this is as fair as it needs to be. I'd rather project expectations of being uprooted out of my life and into something better onto another person and block the rest of the world out. 

I realised that the work of feeling safe in your own life is an investment of energy, resources, time and money. I don't think it accepts being short changed. I don't think it's very easy.

I think a lot of the time I am actively trying to escape or at least ready to escape. It's remarkable how much the mind can exist outside of reality, it's like a high-functioning mental illusion.

I thought about how the default is, actually, that I am safe and healthy where I am and nothing needs to change. That's not to say nothing ever needs to change and this is where I will be forever; it just means that wherever I go, however I feel, this is where I start. This is my secure base.

And if I am going to step out from that, I need to think about if there's any point. Every time you entertain a thought that all the great things in your life are not enough, it is like you are negotiating with terrorists. 

I don't negotiate with terrorists.

These thought-terrorists try and trick us out of our ability to choose, out of access to our options.

Nothing should make us feel like we need to get up and out of a good spot we already have; whether that thing is good or bad.

I say to my insecurities "I am not moving". And hopefully that is enough. 

Being grounded in reality means confronting the urge to flee. 

Man I think it's crazy how people traumatise kids into feeling this way. Like their body was pushed so far into feeling in danger that it was left with barely any options. An utter emergency.

Who was it that said we take having options for granted? I watch too many YouTube videos and I will never remember who said this.

Day 2, 06/01/2026 - You Only Set Out to Survive, But Conquered a Whole Country (and forgot)

I'm writing about living in reality. I'm thinking about when I will finally get justice. I'm thinking about how I shouldn't let that strong desire for justice trick me out of my access to choice. I project on to people the possibility of my life finally becoming fair. I think that's what I want most in the world. The raw wounded part of me that wants this, I don't know what to tell her in the meantime. I focus and fixate on it, what can I say my brain is doing what it's doing. It's just my own thoughts, they aren't inherently dangerous (I appreciate this is a loaded statement and acknowledge that thoughts can become dangerous), but this is a helpful way of framing things for me, right now. It's just me, my thoughts, things my brain is doing. Surely, I'm not that scary...?

I'm thinking about that projection onto people: "This person could be the chance for my life to finally, be fair." if I reframe it, describe it with more of my internal language, which unmet need is it pointing to?

"The need to feel like someone can be proud of me, that I should be celebrated, honoured, appreciated, for who I know myself to be."

A lot of restlessness around this idea of fairness comes from an urge to make things fair. Maybe a better approach is to notice the already fair things around me? Smaller Scenes of Celebration.

I am skeptical of this approach; sounds like it could fall apart easily. But why? Let me think about this:

Noticing fair things around me. For the longest time I thought this nirvana of fairness could not be where I currently am. It's somewhere I have to 'get to', not realising in the process of getting there I'd reclaimed so much land. I'm using reclaimed here rather than conquered because as much as some areas are new, others are old areas that have taken on a new identity in my pursuit of fairness. 

I wrote down Boundaries and Borders, I was scratching my head like "What did I mean???"  I think I was talking about, not venturing past the territory you've already claimed. Why would you? You have so much space where you are, you worked hard to get out. It's within your domain. It's when you venture into unfamiliar territory that you are more likely to feel stuck and confused. 

You definitely have the option of maintaining the pursuit of into foreign lands, but it is an option like many others. You are no longe desperate for food, no longer desperate for water; the outstanding needs that pushed you to make the journey in the first place. 

Going into foreign lands should be considered 1 option of many (many better ones mind you); don't be so fixated on escaping that you lose sight of the viable options all around you and right in front of you. This is moderation; not putting all your hopes and dreams into one basket, or at least acknowledging that our emotions can make us feel like we only have one basket.

You conquered a country and forgot.

You claimed so much land that you've moved out and past the thing you were desperate for in a multitude of ways. Narrow thinking can make it hard to acknowledge this. 

Day 3, 07/01/2025 - Whilst You Were Conquering New Land You Formed Allies

In my quest for a fairer world, though I may not have reached my final destination, along the way I have recruited people who also share the same vision as me. Who also want me to get what I deserve. 

Sometimes it's so easy for us to feel isolated and alone. 

Day 4, 08/01/2026 - Correcting Your Posture is Not Easy

Why is all there is, not enough? It's a question to consider for sure. 

I love fantasising and escaping. Otherwise why would I do it so much. I love adding layers and illusions to life. But when I do this it makes me thinking that perhaps I don't have the present moment at the right scale. Maybe the present moment is not at the right scale because when you're fixated on a fantasy that isn't real it blocks most of everything else out; only slithers of reality make it in.

And because there's so little of reality making it into your view, it doesn't get a say. You end up getting dragged around by visions of things that aren't actually real; it's a type of restlessness.

It's easier to mature, ripen, grow when you aren't restless and moving around all the time. But that 'sitting in it' really sucks. It's like correcting your posture, and it takes some getting used to for sure. 

When you're fixated on the fantasy, it's like you'll want to leap as soon as it feels like you're getting too far from it, or when you've almost reached it. I don't want anything dragging me around.

These things that make you want to jump are fleeting, they're like ether They aren't real. You know what is real and not fleeting? The scenes of your life. 

Day 5, 09/01/2026 - We Want to Bury the Bad Things That Happened to Us

Accepting that things might be fair enough as they are or will have to be fair enough as they are, feels like being able to withstand the impact of a cannon ball. Being strong, and sturdy, and stoic. I don't want to do that; I want to be able to tell the world how much it let me down. I may not be able to get justice, but I can at least articulate the injustice, I should be allowed that much. Otherwise, it isn't fair.

I have to absorb the shock and stop it from spilling out everywhere. No one showed me how to do that. Doing this requires holding two conflicting ideas together at once and I just don't know how to do that.

I'm reading Diary by Chuck Palahniuk. It mentions how everything you do is a diary, you're babbling away all the secrets of your life with whatever you do; walk, talk, write, eat. It cannot be hidden. 

Everything you do is a self-portrait.

And this was kind of a relief. It made me feel like I need to stop running from my life, really. When I am escaping into fantasy, I think I'm trying to imagine myself in a version of my life where these feelings do not exist. But your life is a diary. You cannot outrun your life, you cannot conceal your life well enough to live in a version of reality without it, your life. 

Every time you wish things were different you are denying the current version of your world; you want to live a version of life where you don't have to worry about all the things that come along with reality. But you can't turn away your own life and your responses to life. You've got to anticipate all the ways you could feel about anything; "I have been expecting you". This is the best approach, no matter how dark and prickly these feelings might be, how much they trigger our fear that we haven't made enough progress, and we aren't close enough to the life we want. Whatever it looks like, welcome it with open arms; "I have been expecting you". I don't think the feelings are the problem, but rather the interpretation of them. In particular how much this interpretation deviates from or converges towards our ideal version of the world.

And it can also work with getting lost in an idea that is far away and fantastical and not real. It's a fantasy, and slightly out of reach, just beyond your fingertips because there are real feelings of insecurity and undeservedness around that thing you may want. But when we get lost in the dream of it, we are again pretending those feelings aren't real. 

Day 6, 10/01/2026 - You Still Have to Come Home at the End of the Day

My therapist used to mention a secure base, and how I needed to work on fortifying mine basically. After all the fantasising and fixating, things we hope would happen, catastrophising, we still have to return to our normal life.

I've started writing in my physical journal for this because everything is allover the place and I'm wondering what I do next.

This Chuck Palahniuk book is really great. It mentions how things don't mean much in isolation. It's only when we connect the dots, see the relationships between things. It's networks and relationships that make anything worth anything. We can build a web of ideas that is more helpful, less helpful, was helpful at one point but is not helpful anymore. We should aspire to not let anything trick us out of ability to build webs in our favour.

Trick us into oversimplifying and seeing too few nodes. Trick us into skipping important nodes out. 

A network like this is load balancing, not attributing too much weight to something and not enough to other things. It helps us to stay honest, it helps with moderation. 

Seeing things like a web gives me more room to breathe, helps me be kinder and gentler. Things aren't small and significant, they're connected to all the other seemingly small and significant things in my life to make up the greater picture of the scenes of my life. Idk, for some reason this helps me resist the urge to run away from my life. 

It's part of the web; things that have happened, things I would like to happen, feelings that feel empowered, feelings that make me feel ashamed, the urge to want to run away, feeling like I shouldn't have the urge to run. Whateverrrrr

Day 7, 11/01/2026 - Conclusion

Small things matter, instead of wanting to skip steps and change things in big sweeping actions, appreciate where you are. Build a web, node by node. Life was only ever incremental.

At the moment your living life quantum by quantum, and it's in your best interest to have capacity for whatever comes along with these little pieces. 

Like where are you going? Where you are is the best place for you to be.

You can't bury any of it, so you may as well be the position that you're going to take a step back and observe without judgement. Be the cup, the container, instead of identifying with what's insid eit (is this a good analogy?).

Forming an opnion on any pparts of ourselves makes it hard to move forward because we can never make a fully fair judegment on ourselves. Life is fluid, life is a stream, life is always moving. You think you have a static web of ideas but an extra node can always be added. Life never stops moving but you stop moving when you oversimplify it and think "it must be this way". 

People may have formed static opinions of you, but this was never fair. And you ought to have never taken it on for yourself. 

On day 7 I did a bit of art therapy. I was frustrated that I felt like I couldn't move on from shame. The sketch was dark, confined, like a prison. 

I could never be free from judgement it felt like. Even when I was alone, there was self-surveillance. Me taking on what had been done to me by other people.

We have to understand that being in this position is something around trust. The world doesn't trust you'll get it right the next time, you also don't trust you'll get things right. Everything you do feels like it's scrutinised and examined, first by others, then by yourself. 

This piece of art had a desire to feel like it was finally being taken seriously; that there had been enough scrutiny. That a final opinion doesn't need to be formed about everything it does. This piece of art believes in a near future that this scrutiny will finally fulfil its purpose; things are fine as they are and it doesn't need constant course correction. Finally, some space to itself and a break from the judgement. 

I can expand out the web of ideas finally; to things that acknowledge I'm not a lone actor, some things are out of my control, I can't be attributed all the blame for something, maybe that thing isn't even that bad. 

This is the only time I get for my life, my real life. 

What has any of this got to do with not wanting escaping from my life?

You want to escape from what feels like a small life into a bigger fantasy but ideas, like people, don't mean much in isolation. We need to connect the dots, identify the relationships between these concepts.

It is important to acknowledge that our life history may have put us in tunnel vision mode; rather than see these ideas as a load balancing network, moderate, evenly spread, bigger, kinder. Seeing thoughts, feelings, ideas as a evenly spread web means nothing can trick us out of ability to choose, out of our autonomy. 

It also helps us to recognise that our current life is actually enough.

When we focus on the connections between two or three things, and block everything else in our lives out. What helps us to avoid this is trying to avoid forming an opinion on these ideas; someone might call this detachment. If you and your ideas are a cup of water, observing them is like being the cup and gently holding the water. Why should any one idea or thought be more significant than the other? This is not rhetorical; you have an answer to this question. And this answer should also blend into the water. Remember you are just the cup, the container.

Everything you do is a self portrait; I think that's genuinely beautiful.

If you got this far, I hope you are kind to yourself, I hope you build a beautiful web of things in your life that is nourishing and helps you. I hope you can feel more like a container for all your feelings and thoughts and not the stuff inside. 

Cheers!