My emotions have been shot. I’m sick. Like, actually. I have a cold or something. On top of that, within the last two weeks I have experienced all five stages of grief over a relationship that wasn’t even a relationship. They had to cut the lock off my locker at Planet Fitness because I somehow forgot my combination during my workout. I knew the combination when I unhooked the lock from my bag and locked it onto my locker, but when I came back to unlock my locker I had completely forgotten it. Last week my mom was afraid I was anorexic and wouldn’t stop pestering me until she finally figured out what was going on. I was surprised she guessed right on her third try and I didn’t have to explain anything.

Her first guess was that I was in love. That’s a negative. Her second guess, that I was pregnant. Yeah, also not true. Her third, that the guy I was not-really-seeing was seeing somebody else. Honestly, I was super impressed. 

He played the entire piano of my emotions. Every octave and every key, he hit every single one of them. Anger, love, betrayal, relief, happiness, longing, sadness, despair, hysteria.  All of it. The emotions would surface out of nowhere at random times. My logical brain couldn’t figure it out, my body would just issue out the emotions at random. Sometimes some unique emotion would wake me up. They just come out of nowhere. And I just have to hold on tight to my seat as the emotion passes through. And it’s this, for days. My body is being wrecked by emotions my brain doesn’t understand. With time they settle down but jeez those first few days are horrible. How does my body even know what’s wrong? My brain took it very logically but my body took it very poorly. 

Neil Gaiman says. And then Rivers Cuomo says. Revealing your emotions is embarrassing and sometimes those emotions are only true in the moment. 

I got a TikTok recommendation that told me to stop being the chill girl and be the crazy bitch instead. I think I’m gonna be the crazy bitch from now on, or at least the honest bitch.

I’ve been consulting the I Ching a lot recently, casting oracles after oracle and trying to make sense of them. The I Ching I first read about in the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. The thing about the I Ching is that it’s used in the moment based on your personal interpretation, it’s not a future thing. “The I Ching was supremely the book of Now, of the moment. For, as Jung said, the way the coins fall is inevitably tied up with the quality of the entire moment in which they fall, the entire pattern, and “form a part of it—a part that is insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to Chinese minds”

I think you can divide your life up into chapters, like a book, and you typically know when a new chapter begins or one ends. It’s not a retrospective thing; you can typically feel it in the moment. You know because emotional turmoil flips the page and all of a sudden it’s a blank. Not sure what this new chapter’s gonna be about. In a way you know the future because you’re in touch with the present.

The past three-ish years of my life can be divided in three phases: 1) cult phase 2) COVID 3) first relationship/situationship/falling-in-love? phase. I’m embarrassed by what I said, and I know the I Ching told me to pull out completely, and I didn’t listen, and then it told me I fucked up. And you go at it with your own understanding. The lasting one. I feel like I fucked it up, completely and maybe permanently, but I wish I hadn’t. I want this not to be true. Good because I can move on maybe, but also no. If something can be blown to smithereens and yet in the end it’s true, it will be able to be recovered, right?

Meditation and figuring out I was in a cult cemented my worldview and my spiritual beliefs. COVID didn’t do much for me I think, except give me a chance to reset and cope with some personal image issues. Nothing I can particularly remember, anyway. This relationship thing also changed my worldview and increased my confidence and did some other things that I’m not quite sure about, but it changed me positively for sure. Could’ve been the acid and the ketamine. It’s also the year I started working at a music venue and decided to pursue my dreams I guess?

All have been fairly influential, with the cult phase being fairly negative in the moment but positive in my conception of the world, and the third phase being pretty positive somehow. Each phase lasted between eight months and a year. COVID phase was probably the most depressing of them, but I did learn to drive so that’s a positive. 

Meditation is a thing. Anyway, I find the I Ching really helpful. I think this relationship was extremely transformative for me, and maybe it was the acid and ketamine but I’m never really too sure.

I really need to be in a place where I’m comfortable with myself.

Deciding on my next steps feels weird or hard. I’m not sure what the next chapter’s about. The last three were pretty riveting, for sure. I was glued to my seat. 

I don’t know if I’ll find someone else to make me feel calm like that again. That sorta thing really came outta nowhere. Rumi says that half-loves need to be thrown away for the whole love.

It’s times like this when I think of my middle-aged Satanist friend’s ex-wife who works at a dildo shop. He says she’s her soulmate, and they’re actually still married, and he dreams about her all the time and he’s sure she’s his soulmate, but when I ask why he won’t reach out, he says he can’t, but won’t explain why. Surely if It was your soulmate, truly, you’d reach out, right? Sometimes I want to walk into that dildo shop myself and ask about him. 

I looked it up and apparently it’s impossible to screw up your destiny. My mom told me what my name means. She’s also been sending me horoscopes in Russian per my request.

I’m a fan of the esoteric, the things that are hard to believe and that “hard” science disagrees with. Not sure what I get out of it, because I truly only look for what I want. 

High Fidelity the book and the series and the movie are all good. Good breakup material, if you ever need it. Zoe Kravitz is hot.

Say what you will about breakups (pseudo-breakups?) but music sure does hit harder in the moment. There is nothing more pleasurable than wallowing in your emotions and truly listening to the lyrics and feeling them, when your emotions match the song so well. Whenever this happens, relish in it, because it doesn’t last. It’s like the foggy wobbly feeling you get after a psychedelic trip where you feel like a newborn calf wobbling on its little legs for the first time. Everything feels slightly unsteady, maybe quiet. You feel more impressionable, it feels nice to just experience things. And you’re in the moment, everything feels sort of quiet, you’re just there to feel things in your body, the other part, not the small corner of the brain where your sense of self and your inner monologue is (pretending to be it all), but the other place.

Those emotions blindside you. You’ll be ok and then BOOM emotion. You always end up saying things you regret. You wait for time to bury those feelings of embarrassment. You hope they forgive you for being so vulnerable. This is why you should wait to send a text, wait at least twelve hours is my advice. And if you still feel like sending it then, then fuck it, move the plot forward. All can be forgiven, as long as you forgive yourself. I know Rivers Cuomo hated that album, and I know the I Ching said that even though it’s satisfying in the moment maybe you shouldn’t have, and I feel bad about that and maybe I should’ve taken that advice. And then I think of Neil Gaiman. And besides, everybody loves Pinkerton now, even though it sucks. Time paints things rosy. Can you really screw up something that’s meant to be? Is life like that?

I remember the assistant said something to the man who was marrying his sister. That he had to choose her, and keep choosing her. Since they were getting married and all. In his book Kal Penn, in order to not use real names, he uses these monikers. And Nick Hornby sort of does the same thing in High Fidelity. And I’m pretty sure it’s a common trope so I’m gonna start implementing it.

I think about the advice my LASIK surgeon gave me back in September a lot. He told me to travel the world while I was young. A frat guy stuck in the body of a middle-aged Asian man. Yeah, man, you’re really blind. He asked if I had a boyfriend and I said “working on it” which I mean I’m not sure how true that was and he told me to travel the world while I was young, preferably with a boyfriend to stay safe or whatever. 

I got two poetry books today from Rumi, because I’ve been seeing Rumi quotes everywhere lately, the same way I’ve been seeing stuff about Neil Gaiman. Here are my favorites of what I know so far: 

“I’ve tried prudent planning for long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.”

 The lovers

And I’m still journalling. Not every day, but it’s a habit I’m planning on sticking with. It’s nice to track your emotions and how you’re feelings and I wish I hadn’t thrown out my previous journalis from 2019 and 2021 out of embarrassment, because now I wish I could go back and read that stuff. You know, from believing the cult was the truth to being super depressed and stuck in my house during COVID. It was wild, just thinking back on it. Being convinced the cult was the truth, feeling depressed and just completely batshit in 2021. And depressed. KEEP A JOURNAL. Oh my god, keep a journal. It’s so worth it. Emotions are temporary but wonderful, and they repeat, and you’re gonna want to know how you felt on this day years ago. And please for the love of god don’t throw the pages away. Your kids, or some anthropologist, might want to know how you felt, your innermost thoughts. Those are for sharing because we’ve all got the same ones, despite how you may feel. It’s empathy. For your past self, for others. It’s a release.