I started drafting this post Friday night while walking to the train station. I was going to different Whole Foods’ in Manhattan to see if I could find my favorite sauerkraut because it was sold out in Williamsburg. I was too picky about what should go on my salad to settle for something else. It felt nice to think about writing again while wandering around, it felt like life was starting to fall into a familiar set of grooves.
I stopped smoking weed though, that is my big update. I haven’t smoked in 13 weeks and I’ve only micro dosed shrooms twice in the past 7 weeks. Sobering up is a really intense cycle of fatigue and I’ve been sleeping so much. When I get home from work my main focus is just to be in bed at a decent time. Sometimes it’s agitating though. I want to think about things, lose myself in something interesting, cut hours away my sleep.
I’m trying to get back into the swing of writing though. I fell off for several months and now I want my habit back. I want all the little pieces that make up my life to fall into their usual spot. I’m not sure if I’m a control freak, but I like what I have and I like what I’ve built, and I hate the idea of needlessly surrendering things that are important to me. I remember having a crisis as to whether or not I was obscenely selfish for living my life in such a specific way, and then I gave up on the crisis. It didn’t matter if it was selfish, I was going to do what I wanted to do. I knew what was important to me and I wasn’t going to give that up.
I don’t know what precipitated this thought process. Maybe it was thinking about marriage. I remember listening to a relationship coach say that as time moves on, the self takes more and more of a backseat and the relationship becomes the priority. I think about how people live in communities and have an obligation to care for each other, and it can sometimes veer towards self-sacrificial. I’m not sure what that’s going to accomplish for me, let alone others. It’s smarter to abandon the trajectory of self abandonment. There isn’t much appeal, let alone use, for a walking corpse anyways. A warm body without a soul. I try to seek out relationships that are usually interdependent and mutually supportive. The best ones enhance us, sometimes by force. What ideas am I feeding into?
I remember when I wanted to move to New York, I was spending time with two friends while they were tripping on LSD. One of them was a small time filmmaker. He turned to me and said “People move to New York to be forgiven.” I guess that’s why I love the city. The sheer enormity of it lifted norms from my back and let me choose a path that was better suited to me. Out went the constrictive cultural obligations of my Muslim upbringing, and in came a compass that teased out my oblique personal development, one precarious step at a time.
a soft death 