Beginning to Do What I Cannot Not Do
It is crazy how long it has been since I have written something real. Although I would say writing is one of my favorite pastimes, it has been a pure afterthought for the last few years. The pandemic made me forget everything I enjoyed and life felt like cosplaying another person’s life. But my experience is not the worst, compared to the one that many people had to go through during this collective trauma, and thus these days I have been trying to focus on the positive and what I learned through the difficulty.
I have been finding all kinds of writing, all forms of it, but especially long-form, engaging. I have been thinking about expression, how people say it is the opposite of depression. How crucial it seems for us to express ourselves, yet how uncommon it seems to be, or so it feels to me. It is like the capitalistic society has the tendency to make creative endeavors seem either unrealistic or something to be monetized or gate-kept. It is devastating, and it is lovely how people have found so many new and old ways to express their thoughts and who they are.
For me, expressing myself is found in the small moments of life. Putting some Christmas-ey spices into my coffee and snapping a picture of it, writing about life like this, listening to music and watching the snow fall. In this world, especially these days, these peaceful moments have felt like a privilege, although they should be a right for everyone. People suffer from external and internal factors that disturb them from living the way they wish to live, and just existing the way they are.
That is why it is important for me to write. Because writing feels like one way of resisting those disturbances. I wish to write and share pictures about simple, healthy and delicious food. I wish to write about mental health and how I could live a more sustainable and truly joyous life, that feels like myself. In addition to the isolation of the pandemic, for these past few years I have lived through a burnout, colored by dissociation and other consuming coping mechanisms. All of it combined, I was in a state of living life through reliving my traumas over and over again. When I was finally able to take a rest, life didn’t get magically better right away. It has been a long couple of months of learning and unlearning and being frozen while trying to pick up small, supportive habits again. After graduating, I have tried new things that have been terribly embarrassing at first. It has been scary but nice to admit that I don’t know; but that I wish to learn. I've had to come back to the basic needs and wishes I have in and for my life.
