Private Thoughts Become Easier to Share with Time

I shake my head but cannot shake this feeling. This sense of fundamental inadequacy, powerlessness, and utter confusion that turns my waking hours into an anxious dreamstate. The effort put into this line, into the next idea, cannot be captured by machine ink (note: as ever, this is digitized after the fact). I sat down with so much to express, so much unspecific anguish to pour onto this page...and I mustered a sad two lines of any value to describe my condition, to seek my direction. But I write on, connecting character after aimless character into words, sentences. I believe that a reader reading a manuscript is better able to connect to the author, to share in the elements of the human experience that gave birth to the ideas on the page. Machine ink takes something away.

I have not written in a very long time...I have forgotten the extent to which these conversations with myself sustain me. But whenever I am at this pursuit, the ways in which I perpetually waste my time tug at me...they beckon. I reckon there is a problem in one's life when, with an excess of leisure time, they cannot comfortably allot a measure of it to doing something they truly love, to work at it and nurture what even they are convinced is a precious gift. Yes, a problem exists. It has one name, and humans are as susceptible to it as any other creature I am familiar with. Addiction. People struggle with it all over the globe, and a recent trend is to seek refuge in the label, to write off the force of human will and claim that the human spirit cannot conquer the external, cannot even broadly govern a single human body. But I will not do that. I cannot bear to do that, both because I know it would doom me by allowing me to make peace with the unacceptable, and because a rarely-heard-from voice deep inside cries out against living by what I perceive to be a tremendous falsehood. Addiction rules me now, in ways I never imagined it could, but it is not the totality of me. I will never let it be me; I have faith that I will rebel against it consuming my personhood.

There are few things that I feel are in my power to change, but I am one of those things. My father always told me to be my own master, and there was wisdom in those words, for if you do not govern yourself, then someone or something else will. As of this moment, I am not my own master. I exert free will, but it is only free insofar as it is human will, because it is profoundly influenced by decidedly negative forces. But I WILL, god dammit, I WILL establish a firmer grip on myself. One day I'll wake up and say: shit, this is a mess. And I'll fix it. If it is not too late by that fateful moment of my radical awakening...

"You will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not."

-Artem Potemkin