snowleopard-star blog

Here I am again, with my back against the wall.

In the library, listening to Far From Any Road, surrounded by strangers studying with friends and trapped here by the rain. I don’t mind my solitude, in many ways, the library is my second home. Or it is my first home, and my actual dorm is my second home, and then my mothers house would be my third home I suppose.

The idea of having a home after graduating doesn’t entice me as much as I would like it to. I’ve thought about it, where would I go? San Diego, San Francisco? Further North? New York, Boston? Out of the country? Mumbai, London, Berlin? 

I would like to be everywhere, really. But is a nomadic life the one for me? No home, no safe point. Is that truly what I want?

But anyways, yeah my back is against the wall. In this cold library. Another class I am failing, another email begging a professor to make exceptions. I don’t LIKE to do this. It’s just what always ends up happening. 

I’ve been meaning to research more on neuroscience lately. 

A lot of behavioural and meditative things I feel like I know, but I think now I overestimated myself actually. I always thought of myself as having high metacognition, always wondering why I behaved the way I did and trying to find the true source of all my thoughts. But, my brain protects herself with the ego, and I may have been tricking myself all this time.

What a fun way to think of the self. As a chess match between the natural and the spiritual, the consciousness and the brain, the soul and the vessel. Often at odds with each other, I wonder if that’s true.

I used to think “I trust myself TOO much”, that’s why I do all the self-sabotaging things I do. In relationships, in school, in life, I feel as though I will always dig myself out of whatever hole I’m in. And I phrase that as a bad thing, but in reality it’s the mind with her extravagant tricks again. Excusing myself on the basis of self-love and confidence when in reality it is avoidance and fear that causes me to dig a deeper grave. 

While I have never given up, curled over, and laid to rest in any of those graves, it may still happen one day. Exhaustion and disappointment will catch up.

So what am I avoiding? What am I afraid of? Responsibility? 

I think, am I afraid of failing? Not being good enough? No, that doesn’t seem exactly right. A part me doesn’t give a fuck. A part of me thinks something is wrong with the other parts of me. It’s leading me to voluntarily lobotomize myself. It hurts to think about. 

Everyone is so disconnected with themselves these days. I’m not talking about disconnection from the physical world (there’s plenty of discussion about that), but something else. More than not knowing yourself, it’s overcomplicating yourself, separating parts of yourself, contradicting yourself and tripping over all the ways you wish to act. In the moment you can’t constantly be checking how you are perceived or how you are acting, but later, when that moment is gone, we torture ourselves. We criticize that person in the past, not knowing she is as equally distant as a toddler version of you. 

I muddle myself. A room of one’s own. Virginia Woolf talked about that. I need to reread it, but modern day it could be equated to A mind of one’s own. Even our own thoughts are not ours these days. Everything detects, everything senses. There are so many small behavioural patterns that we miss, but computers pick up. They know us. Just another disconnected form of self – nothing true, nothing real. And we never get to have a thought, especially with AI or social media. We must always be subservient (the self lobotomization I was talking about). I wonder what she would say if she was here now.