My Welcome Doppelganger,

Did you know that depressive states evoke seemingly effortless and beautiful poetry from you? It's as if your language was specifically created to elegantly capture the melancholy that Voltaire spoke of.

The pattern of starting new chapters, making breaks with old lives and starting new ones... This is something I'm all too familiar with. I wonder if we've experienced that particular kind of change in the same way (yes? no? probably both, says the ExtraTerrestrial). Recently, I resolved to attempt a new kind of break. Usually, the break is with people, with a place, with a habit, with an obsession over a psychological theory (or theorist, ahem) that I now realize is fake or subpar. This time, the break is with myself: specifically, the deluge of journal entries I've poured out over the last 5+ years.

Since my freshman year, I've been writing in the same journal. I've accumulated over 1500 entries since then. I've written so much, at so many different moments, in so many different states, that I've written about just about everything in my static experience, from just about every perspective. Until a few days ago, I felt comforted by that huge wealth of self data, and proud. I liked being able to flip back to my 2004 or 2006 self at whim, to search this catalog of Me for any and all dreams I'd ever recorded. When depressed, I would look for other entries that confirmed that particular experience. But I realized, finally, how destructive it is to have the last 6 years so accessible. Because that accessibility of past selves has started to define me. When I'm on the brink, and in desperate need of a fresh pair of eyes, I don't look for novel solutions, or to the future. Instead, I drown in the past.

So I started a fresh journal two days ago. It sounds like such a negligible change, but it's felt monumental for me. Because it was painful, for one, letting go of all of that history. But two, it finally feels like I can start something based on the goals that I currently value, based on my ideal self...it finally feels like I'm in a position to do that. And I no longer feel like I have to justify everything I write by saying "I know this is incongruous with what I've said before, but..." and "I know that saying it's incongruous is something I've said before, but..." and so on. I've given myself a chance to experience my life anew without self-consciousness.

For the first time since I started graduate school, I'm excited--and more importantly I'm curious--about the future.

--Self Explanatory

My Sorbitol Seducer,

Today I feel strangely in touch/tune with the world and equally/simultaneously disconnected from it all. I admittedly wrote this line a few months ago, but I realize now that this is my static state of experience. I noticed it more when I was stoned all the time and consistently in tune with the world of incongruence and inconsistencies. All the minute disconnected details would form a coincidental network of synchronicity.

I bet it would amuse you to know I often (still) scrutinize my reflection. Most often, I see my prepubescent or teenage self staring back at me with lonely, uncertain eyes that seem to ask what the hell happened. “Where did the best years of our life go? Who are you and what did you do with our future self?” they ask.

When I see my subjective unsophisticated self he always seems just as sullen and defeated as I seem currently. I should start drinking again to put some depression in my veins to go with all that self-pity; get some creative juices flowin... I feel less creative than I’ve ever been. Almost past the point of no creation, approaching bohemian, again.

Sometimes I smile, laugh, frown, scowl or simply glare at my reflection just to see the subtle changes in the only face I can ever remember having; changes no one else could ever detect because of the slow and steady onslaught of time and the elements. I’m the only constant in my perception of self. The world has gone around the sun dozens of times, spinning around on it’s axis incessantly, countless stars were born while many countless more extinguished their light. The world and culture around me have changed in so many immeasurable ways since my earliest memory.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that this is the same world I’ve always been subject to. Further still, that this is the same body I’ve always occupied. So many of my former selves I’ve left to die in places I’ve been; places I could no longer grow and had no choice but to abandon.

I simultaneously am and am not all of my past selves, living all of those past lives in places and times that only now exist as memories; like Schrodinger’s cat... alive&dead, at the same time. I am clearly alive, but how can I be certain I did not die long ago? I’ve often wondered and argued with my internal voice about my state of experience. What if this is the waiting room between lives or a kind of ironic purgatory? What if we’re all dead, waiting to be reborn? Who knows the difference; if there is any? Dax Riggs said “All any one of us has got to do is die.” Or live, depending on how you look at it. I prefer to acknowledge the worst-case scenario. The first American male to female transsexual, Christine Jorgensen (as his former self, George Jorgensen) said of his discontent in a mistaken body before the transition, “how can a futureless life go on? Yet it does. Year after year the body lives while the soul dies.” I often imagine I’ve long since died and my experiences are but a fabrication of my last moments of brain activity. It’s actually quite a romantic and comforting thought to me. Is that macabre of me, darling?

Up to a certain point in my life (broadly, around the time I moved away from the coast on my own to start college) I would transition from situations through a very distinct break with my former life. I would leave the people I knew and the reputation I’d built to start a new chapter. I feel like I’m now at a crossroads of abandoning this pattern or redefining and repeating it.

When someone important in my life (possibly the most important thing in my life) tells me they want to be the one person outside of myself that I can always count on to be there and I know it’s genuinely heartfelt promise, it terrifies me. Am I scared I can’t reciprocate such selfless devotion while facilitating my own needs or am I convinced I don’t deserve it? Perhaps both. Perhaps I covet their genuine selflessness.

I’m so full of myself and down on my poor pitiful and unfortunate life, I pretend to do something about it... to take control and steer away from the iceberg of dependence, but there’s always someone there who will feel sorry for me because I’m so alone in the world. I’ll inevitably always take advantage of those who are closest to me, whether he or I am aware of it. I am my own worst critic/enemy/antagonist. I fail.

I’ve been thinking recently, that it’d been too long since I cried & felt really awful & powerless. I was due. My water broke. Not surprisingly, I don’t feel better. I feel awful ashamed. I do this to myself. This too shall pass. I need to disappear for a while on a vacation from myself.

--melancholic and misanthropic

Future Genetic Collaborator,

If you think you’re curbing my enthusiasm with these little interludes, you are dead wrong. Dead wrong. I do try to restrain myself, you have to know that, but when you write, it inspires a little burst of manic, creative pleasure that I can’t help but share. Immediately.

It tickles me to know that you also accumulate small collections of letter fragments. Your reasons are different from mine, but all the same, it’s yet another secret shared something that we weren’t aware of until this very moment.

I want to talk more about this personal progress idea, even though it is entirely possible that we have beat it into the ground at this point, I with my flatlining and you with your endearing self-aggrandizing (oh, don’t take offense, lover—you deserve some aggrandizing). After reading your response(s) to this issue, though, something new (or at the very least, new in a Clive way) occurs to me. There was a theme that you kept trying out in different keys, about being static, but in a dynamic sort of way, or frantically changing in the same ways, or forever progressing in a thousand different directions from the same point. Something along those lines.

And what occurs to me that did not occur to my former self (AKA Debbie Downer) is that the line is flat, but not futilely so. We—as in you and I—sometimes become frustrated, I think, at the fact that for all our ambitious laundry lists of change, we remain the same in all the important ways. As you said, we really are still the people from our childhood photos

(and I must fugue here a little, and tell you that during my most recent time home, I had the task of sorting through several crates of my old belongings, and found a photo album that I’d made from a trip I took with my Mom when I was around 6 years old, and that the thing that struck me most about the photos was how unabashedly joyful I was, and I wondered for a moment what the trajectory was, exactly, that has taken me from that point to this one)

in the most consequential ways. Debbie Downer, in her ignorance (which I now scorn and distance myself from) assumed that this indicated that progress was an illusion. But you hit on something with the idea of self-acceptance. Perhaps the reality of ourselves doesn’t change, but our view of that reality does change. And with that comes a thousand microscopic mutations in our internal and external experiences that make this progression far from futile.

As in, I buy all the same kinds of books that I did when I was a freshman in college. But I do it now because I want to read them, not because I want to buy them, or own them, or be seen with them. As in, I have all the same discussions about favorite movies, and music, and authors, but they are about the pleasure of mutual self-disclosure rather than self-presentation.

As in, I’ve always had hidden, repressed portions of myself, but they are intimate opportunities rather than shameful secrets. Once, I went to see a movie by myself (which movie isn’t relevant), as I am wont to do, and when I returned to my apartment complex, I didn’t immediately get out of the car. Seeing movies late at night, and in a publically isolated sort of way, always feels mildly dissociating for me (but not in an unpleasant sense), and I needed a moment to collect myself. I flipped down the mirror from the visor above my seat, and looked at my reflection. It was an odd moment. I recognized my face, but it didn’t look familiar. I stared at myself, and as I watched, my visage changed. I saw my mother, and then I saw my father. For a moment, and only a moment, I grasped what it meant to be the product of two unique sets of DNA. I looked, and in a moment of true (fear? panic?) enlightenment, I saw that I was simultaneously beautiful, and terribly disfigured. I noticed the dilation of my pupils (and isn’t this exactly how Dorian Gray must have felt looking at his portrait?), and then I realized that my own movements were slightly out of sync with those of my reflection. I frowned, and it did as well, but not at precisely the same moment. I started to form my mouth into a smile, and the reflection’s pantomime was terrifying. I remembered a dialogue from a movie I’d once seen about doppelgangers, which in turn made me think of Freud’s writing on the unheimlich, and I remembered that someone had once said (and maybe it was Freud) that things are uncanny when they are and simultaneously are not. Precocious children (at once children and not, adults and not), zombies (alive and not, dead and not, human and not), and mirror images (you and not you): all are unheimlich (which, ironically, means both unheimlich and also heimlich). My reflection, which was both me and not, was both adult and childlike, masculine and feminine, my mother and my father, real and imagined--


--repressed and denied.

Unheimlich: German; literally, “un-home-ly.”
Refers to experiencing an object as at once familiar and alien.
Derived from the word
“heimlich:”
1. homey, familiar
2. concealed, deceptive

My fierce and frigid lioness,

After a long hiatus, I've decided I can no longer neglect a response. I feel silly after so long and think it best to pretend I never remembered. Or rather, I’ll pick up as though there was no delay seeing as I have half-written portions of unsent letters from months ago. I have (read: used to have) trouble accepting something as finished enough, in most (read: all) aspects of life. I’m getting better with (read: over) that.

My responses have been lagging because I always give priority to something I can put off (read: academia) over people and my relationships have suffered because of it. To put my studies/future/self above all else... isn't such a bad thing, is it? In theory, no. Not especially. But I say "I NEED to work on ______" and it never really gets done. I'm just making excuses.

After it builds up for a while, I cave and confess. "I've been making excuses... but seriously now, I've got this new stuff to get done." Repeat cycle.

I’m starting to think there are more hidden, repressed portions of your self than I originally imagined. I was a little taken aback by your steamy intro early this year and the ease with which you took me in and broke me down.

Pictures of my younger selves fascinate me because they are, collectively, everything I once was and everything I had potential to become. I can see the pain & heartache that was to come as easily as all the love and awe in my little sparkling blue eyes, perhaps even more than my now greenish, hazel eyes will reveal. As we get older, it comes more natural for the expressions of our eyes to lie; to save face and keep other inquiring minds out of our one last true stronghold: the mind. As much as I know (deep down in the depths of my current self as expressed through my inner child) that my evaluations of baby pictures are based on what I now know and hold true about myself; there is still a part of me that wants to believe that even then, the white warrior was so steady and true on a sort of predetermined path; a trajectory leading ultimately to my current sense of self. It’s a nice thought that also reinforces my maxim that EVERYthing happens for a reason.

I feel as though with each passing day, I become more honest, more genuine and more accepting of myself and with the world. As my character becomes more polished & squeaky clean, in my own mind, I begin to more accurately assess the tarnished world and all the broken people it has been producing. It’s so isolating to think “if I can do it, what is wrong with the rest of those assholes...”

Oftentimes, I wonder what will become of all the portions of myself floating around on the World Wide Web after my physical body has died. I would reason that this thought consumes my worries more often than that of all my physical belongings.

It’s not as hard to imagine the common routine of distributing a dead person’s things to those who remain behind. I’ve done it a few times and anticipate a few more times. While it was nice to be able to sift through all my father’s things and decide what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to pass on, I experienced a strange kind of emotion not so unlike guilt when assembling my pile of dead-person things. I took things back from him that were once gifts I gave thinking “this will be mine when he’s gone.”

I think sometimes that perhaps I am too preoccupied with having an enduring legacy, which (I thought until recently) really just boils down to being published. I really hate my obsession with thoughts like these. It’s as if living on in the hearts and the minds of those who have been close enough to know me personally, is just not enough. So recently the thought of children at some point in the future seems especially appealing. Who else will love and care for you so unconditionally to keep your memory alive long after you’re gone?

In many ways, my life feels like it's leading me in endless new directions. But at the end of the day, it's exactly the same direction. I'm still navigating and refining my niche to integrate my laundry list of lives. It's a tedious, daunting task. Even the old ones are constantly being recycled and reshaped into something new and useful. I try not to throw anything away for fear that I'll need it one day.

It's ironic that you should talk about your state of mind, as I was just thinking along these lines. I was close to tossing it because I kept coming up dry for ways to explain it. At least ways that wouldn't sound like the usual metaphysical "the same ole mind of mine is currently occupying an almost unrecognizable body" rant. I think you might get what I'm thinking, but failing to say. I feel like the way I think in relation to the world hasn't changed much in the last decade or so. On the other hand, how I think and feel about myself, the world and other people has changed immeasurably.

I think you and this Clive fellow have got it figured out, in a sense. To live right now, in every new moment as it presents itself. Not only living in the exact current moment as it happens, but also experiencing the world in that precise occasion as a new beginning with unlimited potential.

I feel like I'm always waiting for the next break. Like I'm always waiting to cross into some other threshold of experience. What I don't often realize is that longing will never be fulfilled. The grass is always greener, I suppose, in the impossible pasture of the future.

Isn't that funny, how we always feel so much more confidently in control and "here" than our past selves that write those silly, jaded journal entries? We laugh at our former selves and feel better that things are different now. We've grown smart & quick enough to leave them behind. Having spent three weeks on the other side of the world, in a completely alien culture, I felt like I had returned transformed, both physically and mentally. Yet, I have still to pin-point the source of this change. I promised myself I would be less self-conscious than ever after having been scrutinized so closely and accurately read for white tourist filth. I realized I’m only a little less concerned with other people and I’ve decided that’s something being American (and living in the U.S.) just does to you.

I re-read a response to an old acquaintance I wrote recently. I honestly felt like the confident and comfortable voice projected into this casual correspondence is noticeably different from the voice I was using less than a year ago. I feel I’m closer to who I want to be (seen as). Whether I am him yet or not, is debatable.

Love always,

al⋅ways [awl-weyz] –adverb

1.every time; on every occasion; without exception.

2.all the time; continuously; uninterruptedly.

3.forever.

4.in any event; at any time; if necessary.

Etymology: c.1350, compound of O.E. phrase

ealne weg "always, quite, perpetually," lit. "all

the way," with accusative of space or distance,

though the oldest recorded usages refer to time.

Your faceless and forgetful friend.