I didn’t know what to title this since it’s been six months…
(cue in background music — Coldplay’s Fix You)
Hi,
It’s been so long,
It’s been too long…
ngl, I have missed you. I most times refrain from telling people I missed them because I don’t want to lie to them. I think I do miss people but maybe very specific people for very specific reasons and I am not sure that the “missing” is mutual or alike in the way other people miss me. Nevertheless, I admit that sometimes I say it because I can tell that is what they want to hear and it is so much easier to give people what they want (sometimes). But this time, I mean it (Look at me, I am barely a paragraph in and I am already rambling about something else).
More than that, I have missed myself. For the last 6 months, I have shut myself out from the world. I have felt like a hollowed-out shell floating through an infinite amount of space, time, and bodies. It is like I am here but not at the same time. Everything feels ephemeral. I can’t say it was intentional — it just kinda, sorta happened.
Just to be clear, it is not like I have been a total shut-in with no human contact. I have (thankfully) kept my job, stayed in touch with my friends, gone to lunch and dinner a few times, and my kept Instagram monthly recap reel streak ( I know, I know it's vain but I like the sense of routine and normalcy it gives me). I have tried as much as possible to maintain the illusion that everything is okay. I think I have been doing it well ( I should organize a master class in masking) there has been little to no unravelling.
Most of my free time, I spent reading novels, manga/manhwa, watching a few series, painting artworks, working out at home (mostly yoga home) and just breathing. I abandoned almost everything else that interested me, especially ones that connected me to the world outside my cocoon and stripped my interactions to the bare essentials.
But in all it hasn’t felt like me doing all these things, it has felt like someone was in the front seat, driving all these actions and activities, laughing, chatting, working, and spending my time and money (especially my money) and I have simply sat in the back seat watching everything marinating in ennui.
It was worse at the beginning of the year. My friends — Precious and Femi paid a visit and were worried about my social media disappearance. I couldn’t explain to them why I disappeared or what happened I just knew that I didn’t want to be seen. I used to be so invested in taking pictures of myself (and posting them) but now I could go weeks without taking a single picture of myself. I also now avoid mirrors.
When I wrote last year, a lot of it was filled with pain. You may not have noticed, and you may not have felt it in my writing, but underneath everything I wrote (published or not) was a thin veil of pain. Even though I told myself I was doing these things for myself — to bring me joy, in retrospect I realize now that the pain was what woke me up in the morning and made me bull-headed about wanting to live well. Spite was my propeller and Hate was my catalyst.
But somewhere between last year and now, I let go of it all. Usually, I know when these things happen to me. I know the moment something shifts or changes but this time, I don’t know for sure. I think I began to get a sense of it by the end of last year which is why I hinted in my last essay that you may not hear from me for a while.
I now have a new problem. In Stubborn Love, The Lumineers said “It's better to feel pain than nothing at all. The opposite of love is indifference”. I had stopped feeling pain a long time, what I had at best was a phantom pain. But now that the scales have fallen and I know that the pain is gone, there is nothing left. Just numb hollowness, pure emptiness. There is no love, there is no hate either, if anything it is just indifference.
If I am being honest with you, this feels alien, I am not sure I am even doing it right or writing like I used to because that Keyu seems to be long gone. I don’t know what will fuel my writing now. What kind of writer will I become? Who will read it and what will they feel from my writing?
I haven’t published for six months not because I haven’t had anything to write about. I have at least 10 partially written essays in my draft. My main obstacle to finishing and publishing has been no one else but me. My evolutionary process has been so jarring that every time I picked up my keyboard, I felt incomplete.
I have been trying to slowly take back the driver’s seat again. I am trying to open up myself again but it’s been so hard. I don’t even know if it’s working. I am making extra efforts to be more present and participatory in the lives of my friends. I used to revel in the joy of missing out (JOMO) and I found doing anything out of my comfort zone bothersome (plays a mental image of Shikamaru muttering めんどくさい -mendokusai at the slightest inconvenience).
I keep surprising my friends by showing up. I even went on a one-day group trip in May, can you believe it? I’m trying to do this with the hopes that something new will awaken or the old will resurrect. Not the pain, by the way, I like that it is gone.
Am I back now? You ask. To be honest, I am not sure. I think I am at best a passenger princess right now, pretending to know what I am doing, giving directions and suggestions to the person at the wheel.
I was talking to a friend about my worries about who I am becoming and how I seem to be evolving in a way that is very worrisome for me. They told me to embrace it and if it turns out to be permanent it may not be so bad and if it is only a phase, I will find equilibrium — Nirvana, if you will.
So if you are new here, Welcome! I can’t promise you it will always be fun but it will be something. If you are curious, you can go read all my previous essays from 2023. But if you are a return reader, welcome back. I hope you like the evolving me.
oh year before I forget, HAPPY F*CKING NEW YEAR!!! (Yeah that hasn’t changed. I still swear)
PS: so I know the title is a bit… weird. But I was struggling so much with what to title this and it was becoming a headache. So I went with the easiest thing that came to mind. I have also been watching a lot of Isekai Anime with funny titles so don’t blame me, I was inspired or would I say influenced?…
