There’s Still Pain Hiding Somewhere Inside Of Me

6/6/2025

I spent time today copying some of the journal entries I had in Evernote. There’s a lot more stuff, including clusters of pictures, but I only concerned myself with diary-style notes.

Reading a couple of them, from back in 2018 after I separated from G, my heart skipped a beat and my eyes were on the verge of tearing up. For a brief moment I felt a fraction of the pain I was under at the time, and I felt a little lost.

I composed myself, but I realize now that there is an aged, unresolved pain like a stone in the middle of my chest, camouflaged yet still weighing me down, low key suffocating me. I have clearly not processed my emotions as thoroughly as I should, 7 years after the fact.

 Affect

Friday, April 9, 2021

An interesting thing happened to me today. I have often in my life expressed annoyance as a flash of anger, raising my voice and complaining, often cursing. This tends to happen when I am under stress, and most often with family. It often goes away quickly, but it is felt very intensely.

This morning I finished a particularly taxing mental exercise at work, and had barely 15 minutes to feed the cats before a conference call. When I reached the kitchen I saw they had made a complete mess of some stuff that was on the counter, throwing it on the floor. I move fast to pick up the trash and start to raise my voice at them, then it happened. 

All of a sudden, mid-sentence, I find myself looking at the  performative nature of my behavior as if I were an outsider. A clear thought popped in my head: "You don't have to do this." I stopped talking and realized there was no feeling of anger anymore. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. This wasn't being angry and then calming myself down; this was detachment, as if I had started acting a part and stopped to ask for a script rewrite. And it was all pretty much instantaneous.

 I Was Many Things But Myself

6/10/2018

I was invisible, a fixture, a homing beacon

I was a broadcast, its volume turned off

I was a postcard from home, stuffed in the junk drawer

I was, at various times, a portrait, an exhaust vent, a shapeless blob, background music, an oven, a terrarium

An ideal

An illusion

A security blanket

I was never me