The difference between myself and a poet is that a poet believes what they do is just.

In an effort to preserve my mental health,
I’ve recently been reorganizing myself
and taking inventory of each attribute;
a task, about which, I’ve not been so astute.

Over the past several years, I started dividing
my mind and its elements, often confining
the positive pieces behind a nom-de-plume.
It was a practice that finally left me no room

For outward enthusiasm, delight, or joy.
Indeed, those parts of me seemed to annoy
the remainder, whose duties were dreary at best;
Feeling fear, being serious, choosing things to detest.

Now that both vessels have been overturned,
emptied into my head, I’ve discovered or learned
that I’ve been stuck self-loathing for no short duration.
(Those who know me well say it’s not new information.)

Therefore, to improve on that habit so nasty
I’m going to make an effort here, vastly
outside of the scope of my typical writing—
even if it’s a public place to which I’m confiding.

My aim, then, is to finally identify
attributes of me that I like, and why.
(This might seem narcissistic, but bear with me please;
it’s not a task I can yet handle with ease.)

My mind is the subject of so much conjecture
(mainly to itself) and its odd architecture
certainly causes me hassles aplenty.
(It’s been this way since well before I was twenty.)

But it’s not irredeemable; to tell you the truth
—though distractable, leaky, and often uncouth—
It’s moderately clever; with words; as example
these lines and their rhyming are fairly ample.

I err a bit far toward wordiness, yes,
and my attempts to be terse are far from the best,
but all that flowery, fluttery prose
is more fun anyway! And I suppose

That I pen a good enough essay, here and there,
my reporting is solid enough, and I swear
I once won an editorial prize — third place for small
publications in Alaska, (likely sixth overall).

This has already been qualified into the ground
so because I’m not trying too hard to sound
like I’m defeating the purpose I set out to achieve:
I’m a pretty good writer. That’s a thing I believe.

In the past, I held a quite public distaste
with the shape and appearance of my own face.
Versus my younger self, I felt it compared
rather poorly; and I honestly infrequently dared

To spend much time peering in a mirror to see.
”After all, with the weight I’ve gained, how could it be
an improvement?” I told myself time after time.
And although I still won’t claim my visage sublime;

It turns out that aging’s treated me rather well.
My features have hardened enough to dispel
my concerns that I might be hideous to behold.
Plus my hair’s going white rather early, I’m told,

But in pleasing fashion, charming pepper-and-salt
with dashing gray streaks that look awfully gestalt.
In all, I suspect I’m more handsome at present
than my soft-featured egotist self so unpleasant.

This much self-praise, frankly, would be exhausting
even if I wasn’t rhyming at the end of each line, frosting
the whole thing with “couplets,” so here’s the last one;
I’ll revisit this later. For tonight, I’m done.

Temporal Amnesia

Probably my biggest mental weakness (not to say that there aren’t plenty of them to go around) is an apparent inability to properly process linear time.

Naturally I’ve felt the compression we all do, the feeling that the minutes and days grow shorter as they each become a smaller and smaller fragment of our total lifespan. But aside from that perpetual acceleration, the moments never fully register. Many times in my life, I’ve talked up a casual friend at a party or in passing, ask them how they’ve been, how their partner is, how their job is going, only for them to explain that it’s been six months, a year, three years, that they separated from that partner ages ago, that they’ve moved on in their careers. As largely goodnatured people, these friends follow with a perplexed look, a chuckle, and little else. But it always dazes me a little bit, a forced realization that more time has passed than I was able to notice. And I’m forced to wonder; why, exactly, didn’t I notice?

This goes hand-in-hand, unfortunately, with a rather poor long-term memory. In this past month’s reflections, I noticed that my ability to recall emotions is near-perfect. (Perhaps everyone’s memory is like this, I haven’t taken any surveys.) But aside from feelings, my mind loses sights, sounds, and circumstances quite readily, retaining only the loosest outline of my history and past selves. As a result, reviewing photos or writing from past moments in my life will cause me to feel quite precisely like I did in the recorded moment, evoking everything from a moment of mirth to the drawn-out agony of heartbreak. But without specific scraps of evidence to recall, all those old feelings slosh around in my head in perpetuity—typically dormant, occasionally resurfacing for a moment without warning before sinking back into the deep.

These traits naturally synergize, with confusing outcomes. One is an unshakable feeling of personal continuity. This has been a going concern for as far back as I have records of myself. Even as a young man of no more than 17, I feared that I wasn’t evolving enough, wasn’t changing to suit my circumstances, that I was inexplicably and inescapably static. Today this doesn’t evoke the existential crisis it once did; like observing the grooves and scrapes and erosion on an old stone monolith, I can examine the evidence and conclude that, yes, I have probably changed over time. But the changes appear fairly small, and I still don’t seem to feel them.

My father has described similar if not identical sensations—if nothing else, it’s a little comforting to know that I probably get it from him.

The more disruptive of these effects is one I refer to as “temporal amnesia.” With my head unable to keep tabs on the continual clock, and my heart ready and able to fall backwards by five, ten, fifteen years in an instant, I’m frequently forced, for a split second, to remind myself when, precisely, I am. Under the best circumstances, this happens a good couple times a week, most often when I wake up or while I’m in my morning shower. In times of particular stress, however, the sensation is further inflamed by runaway thoughts or frequent dissociation. There’s been moments sitting at my desk in the workplace that, every handful of minutes, I feel like I’ve just awakened, and have to quickly take inventory; Okay, where am I? What year is it? What am I supposed to be feeling right now?

Again, maybe everyone’s brain works like this. In my case, though, it’s something of a struggle, a set of tendencies that I’ve been trying to unravel through therapy and attempts at mindfulness. Oh well. As struggles go, the difficult-to-explain, immaterial ones are probably those that are least likely to be real.

Addendum - later that day: Categorizing these sensations was simplified when I started to grieve my friend Nicki. At a certain point, I realized that I was feeling every every emotion I had ever directed at her, at full intensity, in parallel. Suffice it to say, the result was excruciating.

Words

In light of the past month’s events, I’ve been trying to make a variety of changes to my life. Some are overdue, alterations or actions I thought about long ago but never carried out. Others are more proactive, attempts to resuscitate elements of myself that I’ve let languish.

One of those elements is writing. Moving into creative jobs took a toll on my ability to put words together recreationally, and what was left tended to be quickly devoured by social networks, Twitter in particular. While I’ll confess there’s something to be said for the occasional shitpost, a low-effort joke tossed into the void with abandon, overall the platform has further muted my desire to write. Twitter rewards quantity over quality, favors vapid interactions over conversation, and its nature tinges every post with a certain air of… performativeness. A hyper-awareness that there is always an audience, there is always a chance to attract attention, and a desire to be seen while not being seen desiring to be seen. If that makes any sense.

So, rather than write thinking that every post will be seen, I’m going to try writing more without that assumption. This is a public space, yes, every word open to air and thereby possible to be found, but not served to anyone, not floating by faces in hopes of generating interaction, not promoted or otherwise shared. A combination of mental emissions, fleeting thoughts, and the like. One of my notebooks, except sitting open on a table in the middle of a tiny desert island.

Enjoy. Or don't. I'm not your boss.

-S