I am being so fucking stubborn these days. I could be watching YouTube videos on how to write and trying to improve, but I’m not. I’m sticking to what I know and repeating it, ad nauseum. It’s a terrible strategy and I’m honestly surprised that I’m bringing so much ego to the table. At some point I’ll get kicked in the teeth and get my shit together.
My apartment has been such a source of safety and sustenance for years. New York City can be so obscenely superficial, it’s easy to psychologically sink into the madness of it. Ego is such a funny thing. I think it’s particularly outsized in Williamsburg. While it promises grandiosity it has the opposite effect, shrinking a person down and collapsing their reality.
My apartment was always some strange little beacon of light against the madness of the city, sheltering me in it’s safety. It’s a prewar apartment that’s bit too well lived in. I painted my living room (including the ceiling) blue. It’s a questionable decision but it felt right at the time. I’m starting to hang bowls on the blue walls. Also a questionable decision, but I’m still pursuing it.
Ego though. I was watching videos on Narcissistic Personality Disorder and it talks about how narcissists will infect you with their thinking and engender a shame of the self. This has a domino effect. When you don’t accept yourself, you cease to build healthy relationships based on deeply rooted respect. Instead we sink ourselves into superficial ones, ones that amplify the ego and prevent us connecting with ourselves, our true nature.
The pandemic created so much safety for me. I was sheltered from the ego madness of the city and spent my time under the glow of my projector watching movies. Painting my living room blue came out of that place of safety, an idea at the time that felt authentically me and skipped over the need to impress the world. I created a space that mirrored my eccentric and rebellious self.
I spent the past year and a half being collapsed by and recovering from someone else’s negativity, the blooms of my emotional safety crushed in the wake of their narcissism. Spring is here though, and light is coming through my apartment windows. I think about what it’s like to go home and disappear into myself, ceasing to exist as something for the world, and instead existing as myself for myself. I want to come back to life in all the ways that I am strange and unseen.
a soft death 