“do you want to restart to install these updates now or die trying?” shrieks the notification that’s been hovering ominously in the top right corner of my computer screen for months; not sure why it feels so unreasonable to click a button that will make my life easier. what it actually says is “or try tonight?” so i suppose i will, but only because it seems the remaining alternative is death, and i’m far too busy to die as things currently stand earthside.
yesterday alex dimitrov did an instagram q&a and it was the most interested i’ve felt in anything in a long time, which surprised me for many reasons but especially because he came across in his responses as decidedly uninterested. i think someone asked him about inspiration and he said something along the lines of fuck inspiration, which may be a slight misquote but not one i imagine he’d be mad at me for. alex dimitrov said writing is work and i believe him more than anyone else i’ve heard say that thus far, which because i have an english degree is a lot of people, not including all the self-help books and articles i’ve masochistically consumed over the years. my personal hell is the time spent waiting to know what to write, that door you have to kick in over and over, just to sit down and say something stupid.
reading dimitrov’s poems feels to me like when you listen to a song you haven’t heard before, and you know for a fact that you love it after just the first few notes. finishing the rest feels unnecessary for confirmation but does indeed further corroborate your initial suspicions. i think of settling into a warm bath in slow motion.
in my favorites he writes about parties and socializing as if from the perspective of his own cigarette smoke; this is the sort of place i prefer to inhabit at most, if not all, of the social gatherings i attend. to be so removed and so excruciatingly close, to watch people be beautiful and terrible from just across the room, to observe without reciprocated observation… this is the sort of place from which the most utterly truthful and insightful work is birthed.
tales of white lines, limerence, nights that roll on like a stubborn cherry – it reads like a sort of permission to make work that feels as unhinged as i feel when i write it. there’s this pervasive sense of unimaginable beauty and awe and desire, which when combined with longing and despair provides the most accurate simulation of the human experience i can think of.
dimitrov is also an astrologer (@poetastrologers on twitter) and a sagittarius; two archetypes i quite fancy. my favorite poem of his is my secret, but i’ll award runner up to people, and an honorable mention to august, which feels like the thematic choice.
my boyfriend once told me i love to be sad, which is true, of course, because i am an artist. gut me! ask any artist if they’ve ever endured the entirety of any sadness spell slash depressive episode without making something good. right? that’s what i thought. it’s impossible, it’s science, and there’s nothing i can do about it besides pretend to be someone else.
lately i find myself oscillating between rabid motivation and resigned weightlessness, accepting that in limbo, eventually, i’ll build myself a nest. is this what it feels like to be in your twenties? to be alive in the twenties? i fear commitment because i fear disappointment, because more than anything i fear wasting time.
on top of everything right now (i wrote write now), i’m quitting nicotine, which might be the most difficult thing i’ve done since ap biology my freshman year of high school. i was 19 when juul-ing was all the rage; at the peak of its popularity i can’t think of a single person in my circle who wasn’t constantly nursing one like a newborn. that october i came home from a music festival with some gnarly wook flu and couldn’t bring myself to smoke my usual spliff; i was desperate and young and ill and uninformed and i bought a juul. fast forward a year, standing at the crumb-strewn counter, i opened my junk drawer to hundreds of empty pods, carcasses cold and drained like bodies in a mass grave. it was enough to make me quit.
the first time.
that’s the thing about nicotine – even if you don’t physically need it anymore, you don’t want it any less. your brain remembers what it’s done for you in the past, how it’s quelled unshakable anxiety. talked you off ledges, quieted questionable inner monologues, unraveled spirals before they turned to knots. your brain remembers that relief, and that’s why quitting feels impossible. it’s like slashing holes through your safety net. or setting it on fire.
if this is starting to sound like propaganda, it’s not. i just want to live one goddamn day on this earth without a binky in my hand, which in truth might take different shapes depending on the day. i want to engage with my hedonism intentionally, not because i feel like i’ll die if i don’t. i’m sick of needing things, craving things, running from my mostly self-inflicted pain. some days i’m sick of wanting even when the object of my longing is healthy or attainable. i don’t want to abstain, to hide away from the joy and pleasure of my own life. i just want to have a choice.
doesn’t everyone?
i tell people i’m trying and it feels like a joke, because obviously no one believes that i actually am. if i really wanted to quit, i would just quit, right? if i really wanted to be rich, i would just put my head down and grind, right?
L O L
maybe it’s the hustle culture that’s become almost indistinguishable from culture itself, but i’m starting to feel like try is a bad word. either you do something or you don’t. either you’ve fully committed your blood, sweat, and tears to your goal, or you’re doomed to a miserably stagnant existence.
i’ve actually never seen star wars, but i know about yoda. dO oR Do nOt, tHerE iS no tRy.
except i think that there is try, yoda, because i do it all the time. honesty, discipline, patience, true vulnerability. these are things i’m still practicing, things that require effort. renouncing “trying” ushers in the ultimate paradox: trying not to try. we experience this contradiction when we attempt to appear effortless or nonchalant, when we carefully formulate our social media personas, when we suddenly become conscious of our own breathing.
i’m not interested in further denying my most basic humanity – this constant urge i have to become something new. this being in progress requires a room, preferably empty, where i can break things and get hurt and fail miserably and then exit, back into the long hallway of my life, until some next door appears.
Here I am, TRYing to write words I feel would capture how meaningful reading this has been at 1:35 AM on a school night that I looked forward to all day because I knew I would have time to be alone in my inflicted sadness. I’m kinda mad at you (in a cute way) honestly for being so relatable and for this reading finding me at just the right time. Ew. I guess to sum it all up I imagined holding your hand across a table at a coffee shop while we looked at each other like this: 🥹