So. I saw the Oppenheimer movie and my thoughts are mostly that I appreciated things like the practical effects and the score being performed and recorded as opposed to composed with MIDI (and the fact that it was all shot and finished on film…), but I hate that media is what it is, for lack of a better way of saying that. I don’t know if movies or media have ever been “good,” but I remember that they used to feel different. Maybe I was just different then. Maybe I was dumber. Anyway, like I said elsewhere, I thought it was cute that so many people in the movie called him “Oppie.” My little psyoppie.

Today is a “lore” day for me (for a lot of different reasons). I’m not going to talk about that much, but I am going to bring it up. The most notable of these is that it’s actually been three years since I (re)made my AO3 account, so it’s my AO3 birthday today. (It’s also Sasuke Uchiha’s birthday. Happy birthday, Sasuke.)

I wrote a non-zero amount of fanfiction over the past few months, but none of it really feels like it matters right now, if that makes sense? I thought about one of the story ideas I had a lot today, and recently I’ve been thinking about something I wrote but superimposing other characters on top of the ones I actually wrote the fic about. Funnily enough, one of my friends in treatment also did that. She sort of mapped her own characters over that story. Now I’m doing that to my own work to the point where I almost considered rewriting it. Regardless, it’s sitting in the notebook I wrote it in, and it;ll remain there for the foreseeable future. I have too much other stuff I want to do besides digitizing a story that maybe four people will read.

I’m going to have to start writing up my thoughts about treatment soon, but I’ve been kind of putting that off. I know pretty much everyone who reads this isn’t even going to know that I went; for context, I spent about 75 days in live-in psychiatric treatment this year, and it had a pretty profound impact on me. It’s not my first rodeo—hopefully it will be my last—and I came out of it with some really vital supports that I didn’t have going in. I’m doing really well compared to when I was first admitted. I remember finding an old and very brief journal entry from before I was admitted the night that I got out and just feeling horrifically bad about it. It’s a terrible thing that everyone in my life was subjected to that level of despair and hopelessness all the time. I think the people that love/support me are really compassionate and try their best, but I was (genuinely) almost beyond saving, and things had been that way for a long, long time. We’re talking multiple years. There’s nothing I can do to change the past, but reflecting on that moment really makes me wish I could.

I feel… I don’t know how to really describe how I’m feeling right now. I also don’t want to pity myself or make a spectacle of my feelings. I’m better off than I have been in a while, that’s for sure, but there’s a lot about my life that I’m not happy about right now. I radically accept that—I know what I don’t like, why it happened, and what I can control about it. And what I can’t. Thinking about what I can’t control helps remind me of where to put my emotional energy, but it also really sucks. The child in me just wishes things were better over and over and over again. It’s like that part of my brain doesn’t even know how to think. (It probably doesn’t.) I try to talk to myself and remind myself that being upset isn’t constructive and explain why things are okay in the moment, but I guess I need to change my approach. If we’re talking reparenting, I don't really think that’s the right approach for an inconsolably upset child, but we wouldn’t be here right now if good parenting was modeled to me.

There is a lot that I want to do. It’s mostly little things and medium-sized things. Ultimately, I feel completely immobilized and distracted by one particular issue going on in my life right now, so even though I have a plan for how to address that issue, it’s not something I can control whatsoever right now, and that’s been hard to deal with. I’m actually kind of bitter about just how distracting it is; I just want to be able to live my life and focus on the day-to-day, but I’m consumed by this. If I’m not consumed by this, I’m consumed by something much more awful and disturbing, but if I’m lucky, I can distract myself. That’s what a lot of my life has been recently. A lot of distraction. Part of me wonders if it’ll be like that forever.

At least I have the belief that my suffering has some level of purpose. Sometimes that purpose is terrifying, and sometimes it’s not. I don’t like suffering, but I think if I had to suffer with absolutely no cause, I would truly lose my mind. I think that’s why certain things work the way they do. When the soul is confronted by immense and unfathomable pain, the narrative presented to make that pain make sense becomes a lifeline—even if it isn’t true. The unconscious mind will accept anything in order to keep surviving. [We should probably write an article about this in the future.]

Anyway, that’s all I have to offer right now. Will I ever stop being cryptic and ridiculous in my own journal? Probably not. I need to go to bed.

Goodnight, world!

Wow, those are some nice numbers!