Where did the time go?

I accidentally thought myself out of my mind and stumbled upon mindfulness. My true essence. Very present, but almost empty. I’m like a fisherman on a boat, fishing for thoughts from under the water, deciding what to keep and what to let go of.

The thoughts are not suppressed, they are water themselves, they take the shape of whatever I decide to see. I am not dissociating, I am very much here, and I am very much real, and yet, it doesn't matter if I am not.

I think that mindfulness is the absence of feedback loops. The brain(s) stops searching for similar information to compare and categorise memories with what’s happening in the given moment. That’s the majority of the buzz usually: the processing. I can hear its gear most of the time, but not this time.

To be in the moment, I have to let go of the past, and the past doesn’t really exist, it’s all just memories stored somewhere in the brain, a place to come back to when necessary, but better if consciously. So, when is it necessary? What if I allow for the new information to come in without comparing it with the pre-existing cognisance? What if I store it temporarily in some other part of my brain without processing and come back to it in a more conscious way when the time is right?

Since I am autistic, that information has to be handled actively and manually anyway, but does it have to be processed here and now? Does it go lost if it’s not processed immediately? ADHD also doesn’t make it easy to hold the memories for long enough, the thoughts feel like slippery fish too close to the board of the boat. Maybe the more physical and intuitive things can linger around, but words have to be filtered as soon as possible. I don’t know.

What if someone tells me “I like you”? Am I going to smile and blush? Or am I going to wonder why and ask about the specifics of their feelings towards me? Probably all of the above. Are my fucking emotions even necessary to be expressed? Probably not, but that would freak people out. Are any of the emotions I express spontaneous? Maybe. But why?
Sadness seems easier to engage in and reveal. Happiness takes much more effort. But that could be because of all the fucked up things that I went through since I was a child; repetitive abusive behaviour made happiness more difficult to feel and recognise, let alone understand and express openly. I guess I didn’t have many points of reference to build an archive in my brain.

I am building that archive in my adult life, but the preexisting factors already take a lot of space, it is just more work to dismantle something and repair what’s broken, rather than build from scratch.

In conclusion, what is mindfulness for me? It’s when I don’t have to express what’s in my mind in any shape or form. It’s all water. There is no past. There are no memories, therefore there is no time because my perception of time is dictated by how much space is occupied by my own memories. Mindfulness is the absence of time, it’s my own non-existence, it’s the death of ego, it’s my soul stretching across the universe, it’s my life without a purpose but not without meaning.

I care

It’s hard.

But there is something different this time. I think I spent the majority of my life looking for a home, trying to fit it, craving to belong. This time it’s hard, but it’s also quick, it’s liquid, like water taking the space in between little rocks in a glass.

It’s easier to keep your shit together when everything around you is falling apart if you have your inner core strong and purposeful. It’s like coming back home after a hurricane, finding the place dusty, quite a few things broken, but the secret journal with the collection of your mental notes of sanity is hidden under the wooden panel of the floor.

I don’t think I’ve ever had an objective in my life until recently. I always had an inner strength, a passion that moved me forward, but I must have wasted so much of it by not knowing where I was going. I always thought that as long as I kept moving, something nice would happen, eventually, and it did, but a lot of those nice things were not the nice things I wanted. I learned from them, but I wasn’t in control of my life, with the excuse that I had to stay open and embrace whatever came my way.

I have a goal this time, and whatever happens in between are the different ways I am going to get there. I have never been committed to anything long term, I survived from little achievement to little achievement, and any time I achieved something big I didn’t even realise it because it was not something I consciously worked toward.
I don’t know what changed, how I changed it, and how active that evolution was. Perhaps something snapped in my brain, or maybe it was just me repeating myself to embrace my deepest and the most secret desires, perhaps it’s the influence from the people that shared a bit of the path with me, the nice words of encouragement, the kicks in the ass.

I so often said out loud that unjustified pain is a waste of energy, and yet so much of my pain wasn’t leading anywhere. It was an energy I didn’t know how to use. I would collect it and throw up words on a piece of paper, then refine them, then call it art and feel like an impostor. I was so tired of struggling and crying, and of people telling me that that was the path I’ve chosen because I decided to be an artist. Oh but it’s not something I’ve decided, it was just there, and I have no clue of who planted the seed in my mind and filled me with passion I could channel into literally everything. The decision I made was to stop the pain, and to embrace the light and see that I could still create. It’s in me, everything I need is in me.

So long, it took me so long to internalise that. It was pain with no justified gain.

I like myself. I love myself. I want to spend time with myself, and I’m here to talk, to fuck, to cry, to do whatever it takes to support myself. I don’t want to die, and I am tired of seeing that as one of the options to explore. I don’t want to think that I deserve to be happy; I want to take for granted that happiness is there for me regardless of how I approach life and how I choose to behave. It’s not this non-renewable energy, a well from which we all have to drink one at a time after queuing for the entirety of our life. Happiness is here, and so is everything else, at the same time, endlessly, we just need to breathe in.

The past few months have been so fucking tough. I imagine my life as a piece of paper with the events written on it, and all the struggling moments highlighted in red. They are so many, I wonder why I haven’t just scripted everything in red to begin with. But when I take a moment to observe, I see words and sentences, little snippets of laughter, mind blowing sex, satisfying work, days and days of writing with passion and commitment, late night mind fuck conversations, growing together, supporting each other; microdosing and walking in the woods for hours, wondering if the trees would talk to me if they could; learning to be more empathic and understanding, learning to be kind and patient with myself and others, getting to know myself better, opening up in desire rather than as a coping mechanism. I highlight all of that in green and I can barely see the reds, it’s all a matter of perspective.

I want to honour the difficulties I endured this year, especially in the past four months or so, because now I know what they mean and I assemble them myself to bright my way. For the first time I am in control, even when the events are adverse and unpredictable, because I trust myself.

It’s hard.

But this time I am not imagining if anyone would care if I died. This time I care. I really do.

myself by Janine Mizéra

Thirsty

I can feel you in my bones.

They vibrate slightly if I go quiet and suspend my breath. I want to stay like that, gasping for air with you filling the space in my mouth. My body is moving slowly but not cautiously, my hands are impatiently passing between your ears and collarbone, my arms surround your back and push you down against my body.

Your chest opens into mine and our ribs entwine. My bones stopped oscillating, and I forgot my name, I forgot my pain, I only remember why I am here. There is no other reason than pleasure. I am here to take all of it and leave just as much of it behind. I can’t stop.

I feel you crawling inside me, and it’s just the universe imploding on itself; my cunt is tight but there’s no resistance, it’s like there is infinite space in which you find your ways by just existing. My muscles cramp around the stillness of my bones. This energy is dragging me down, it’s tearing me apart, and it compresses my body into a small drop of sweat on your back.

“Nina...” I hear from faraway. There is a question awaiting for my response, and my answer is a serpentine yes, waving around my tongue, slipping into your ear. I’ll take whatever can fit, in every which way, I’ll raise my body temperature and let you melt onto me, drink you with every pore in my body.

I was so thirsty. So desperately, painfully, restlessly thirsty. I’d lick off the condensation from my window to see the world outside, but I would only grow colder and lonelier. I’d crawl in the grass and smear my face in morning dew but all I’d see would be the ground.
And then, I finally sat on my knees and spread my legs, spat on my fingers and found myself wet of all the water I’ve been collecting from all the wrong places.

All I needed to do was to invite you in.

Feedback loops

I told you you’d end up here. Let’s talk, shall we?

Everything I wanted to talk about felt like sand slipping off my hands every time I tried to write. The feeling of not being here took me to places I didn’t think existed; I was scared, and I cried, I never dissociated like that before. I even thought I might be schizophrenic because I couldn’t distinguish between what’s here and what’s in my head.

So, I’ve chosen what’s in my head, just for my own sanity, just for a while, and my imaginary stories softly brought me back. Sometimes you’ve got to let go in order to get a grip; I don’t fucking know how it works, but it’s like a time loop in space and when I embrace its power I am in control.

I can bend it to my desire now, the time, you know? And it’s nothing like they tell you, the clock doesn’t stop, you can only shift in between that fraction of a second, and you can travel back in time by simply knowing that you are already there, in the future. It happens all at once, and it’s terrifying.

Sometimes I sit at the desk and my whole body freezes; I can feel bits of reality lift, not as if to oppose gravity, more like if gravity never existed. This coated lie leaves my visual field and I am free. I become everything.

Isn’t it beautiful how an artist can transform mental illness into the most natural thing in the world? A story. And sometimes I feel like I am not writing the story, it’s already there, I just need to wait for the reality to evaporate and for the characters to show me where they reside; it’s not me projecting myself onto them but it’s them teaching me how to become a better and more interesting person.

Am I delusional? I think so.

I struggle to talk to humans, and sometimes I don’t know if what I’m saying makes any sense or if half of my sentence is only formed in my brain, so I stop talking to only find my interlocutor staring at me in wonder. Oh my friend, I am scared, I am so, so scared that I’ve finally lost my mind. I know the mind resides in my brain but where am... I?

I observe my body in its day to day life, and when I think about the breath I do not take control over it, I just let it happen, I let the lungs accept it and do their job. When my legs walk, I see them go places but it’s almost as if I’ve decided to be a passenger in my own body. I am beyond mindful, I don’t know if I’ve completely lost the connection with my physical being or if it’s just a natural process when a human starts to understand what consciousness is. Is it perhaps time to go home?

I don’t know why I’m here, if I am ever really here, but I don’t have a choice and I am desperately trying to keep these three elements together: brain, body, soul. I thought Shibari helped to keep this shit together but my brain became really good at switching off parts of my body, the consciousness (I) sort of sits back, way back behind my eyes and observes everything with a layer of irony: “look where we are now, just to see a little bit more, and understand how little we know.”

I got my nipples pierced the other day and the lacerating pain locked everything together, no wandering for the consciousness, no dissociating for the brain, we were all there, connected to the pain, right under the skin. And the piercings look really pretty on this flesh prison, in case you were wondering. But I can’t call on pain every time I don’t know what’s real anymore. And perhaps the whole point is to acknowledge that me is made of all the three things and we need to make sure they work together, at least in this dimension.

So far, I’ve noticed that the best solution for my schizophrenic tendencies (to mention King Crimson), is to fuck. I have to fuck as much as possible, and the best I can. I eradicated all the bad sex from my life and I haven’t dissociated even once since then. I only fuck people I am in love with, or someone who can take in all the crazy thought process that led me to a first date with them. Love is just a bunch of chemicals but it’s about how we measure them and channel them and mix them carefully with one another.

And then there is work, I can fuck for work, and I can vibe on it, but it doesn’t mean my soul is going to be there every time, and that’s okay.

Sex is the best way to feel your body, nourish your soul and let the brain do its thing without being a fucking control freak. When sex is good, it erases time, or to better explain this, it lets the time go in circles, so that the consciousness is in its whole and always feedbacks from the same body: a feedback loop.

There is a reason I don’t come back here often but I wanted to talk to you and tell you that I’ll be alright. I know because I’ve seen the future by travelling back in time.