images without words

just so you know, i’m currently experiencing a major depressive episode concerning the fact i’m in art school.

i don’t have the time to write like i used to and my uni prioritises visual research above all, which makes sense, but also i’m currently miserable and feel like my mind is wired completely wrong to everyone around me. i miss thinking through conversation unabashedly. i want to fry my brain by writing so copiously and to the edge of my limits that i become sick because it’s better than being locked away from the practice as a whole.

i’m going to work on my stories again and it WILL get in the way of university and i have to let that concession stand. and i suppose im saying this here to make a promise to someone, anyone out there and hold myself to it instead of reassuring myself that i will have the time to do pleasurable things and relax in due time, as though calming down an anxious dog.

i keep just feeling defeated about my life trajectory but also the state of creative education in general. i think it’s impossible to judge the quality of art in such a controlled environment. and to be honest i knew this since i was about 10 years old and decided i would never go to art school because it would compromise my desire to create, but there’s only so much you can do if COVID shifts and shatters the structure of your high school diploma.

speaking of which, to segue into a much more traditional blog post, ive been reading the novel will there ever be another you by patricia lockwood. it’s a very visceral fictionalised account of the writer developing long covid. it’s psychedelic and tangentful and apparently a difficult read, but it came to me like a breeze.

i don’t have long covid (as far as i know) but i’ve had me/cfs for nearly a decade now and much more recently, concussed myself around 2021. i’ve felt myself become more stupid in real time and lose my faculty for natural writing flow. this novel is very experimental and i don’t think it’s for everyone but it completely gut-punched me in its depiction of worsening, as a general process. it likens this process to the idea of a changeling. you might look the same to others, but you had been replaced.

what can i say except: that is exactly how it feels.

there’s no greater statement i’m making here, i’m kind of just complaining about my life. but this book has been getting me through this hard time. it’s comforting being able to find an external replication of what my mind feels like at all times, and it makes me almost ready to accept moving forward without comparing myself to a different version of me.

that’s my recommendation for the day. i may or may not write a more delving post once i actually finish the book. but i can already say: please go read it. if nothing else to better understand me.