A Mid-June Journal


Day One:

About three months ago, I injured my wrists at work. It’s a long and strangely complicated story, but the essence boils down to this: I haven’t been working for three months. I did try to return to work twice: once for two weeks, and once for four days, and both times the pain became so much that I had to stop going again. I’ve been seeing a physiotherapist twice a week this whole time, but we haven’t made any progress. It’s very possible that it’s carpal tunnel syndrome, in which case I definitely shouldn’t be typing as much as I am, but I can’t help it, because if I couldn’t write then I would be the most wretched and miserable man on this Earth.

I stopped writing about myself online at some point. I still write “personal essays” sometimes, but it’s just a character. Since I think I have a good life, I figure I should only talk about the good parts. But no matter how good my life gets, some things just don’t change…

I talk with my parents every few weeks. Yesterday, my dad asked me what I’m doing with all this free time. During our call several weeks ago, he suggested that I start learning CAD in order to progress my career and be a project manager someday. Here I am, turning thirty at the end of the month, and I still feel like my dad is trying to police each day of my life from sunrise to sunset.

What am I doing with my days? I’m reading books that I love, I’m watching movies, I’m lying around, I’m thinking, I’m walking around the neighbourhood, and I’m writing! That thing I’ve been saying is the only thing I ever want to do, and the only thing I care about, since I was nineteen years old. I’m doing that, because I don’t want to be a project manager, and I don’t want to progress my career, in the same way that I didn’t even want to start this career to begin with. I know I have to make money; guess what, I make enough as it is, and I’m getting paid 90% of my salary by the provincial government to sit around at home because I injured myself at work trying way too hard for no reason at all, so I’m going to take this time to live the “life that’s been welling up inside me” this whole time, just like every time I find myself unemployed, because being employed is stupid and sitting around letting myself go is, in fact, a far superior use of my time.

For most of my life, I considered my dad the smartest person in the world, and in a certain sense, he might be. He is one of the most practical people in existence. He’s funny, good-natured, and he is never mean. When I was younger, I thought he gave great advice, even though I could never figure out how to get myself to follow it. This perception started to change when my problems stopped being material, and started being emotional. I’ve spent the last decade of my life coming to the slow realization that, in this field, he is utterly useless, and in fact detrimental. And for so so so long I blamed myself for everything.

But it’s the same with my siblings: no matter what you do, no matter how happy you are, no matter how mis-aligned your goals are with his worldview, he will never stop giving advice. When you want comfort, you get advice. When you want to relax, you get advice. When you want acknowledgement, you get advice. When you want to share a success, you get advice. Nothing is ever good enough. There’s always the next thing you could — and ought — to do.

And obviously, if he was just some guy, I could say, whatever. But his voice is my voice; his worldview is implanted inside of my head, even though I don’t agree with it. There’s a part of me that is him, doing his job when he’s not around, telling myself what I could be doing, what I should be doing, and why what I do now is just not enough.

I thought that one day it would get through to him. I wrote essay after essay, explaining my worldview as clearly as I could. He read them all. I wrote a novel. I said, this is what I want to do. It didn't work. It’s all frivolous. It’s a hobby. It’s not real, in the way that a career is. The fact that someone pays me money to nail wood together and throw garbage into a bin elevates that far above anything I’ve been able to achieve in my decade-plus of writing as if my life depended on it.

(Obviously, that’s not good enough either. I shouldn’t be nailing wood together; the first time I told him the satisfaction I felt at how well I was doing as an apprentice, and how much I enjoy the physical aspect of my job, he told me that I better start working toward becoming a supervisor before my body fell apart…)

I watched the movie Perfect Days the other week. I watched it after Starsailor, one of my life’s anti-heroes, wrote about it on his website. The movie Perfect Days is about a middle-aged man who works as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. When he’s not at work, he reads books and listens to music. During breaks, he takes photographs. He lives alone, and has a set routine, which includes bathing at the local onsen, eating noodles and drinking a beer at a local shop, and visiting a hole-in-the-wall bar run by a friendly woman on the weekend.

He’s not a sage, and he’s not perfect. He’s not always happy. He doesn’t always make the right decision. He doesn’t talk much, and it’s hard to tell whether this a choice, or a result of fear. If he’s anything like me, it’s probably a mix of both, in a way where cause-and-effect has become so tangled as to be inscrutable.

Later in the movie, his niece appears, and after his niece, his sister. We learn, from a brief conversation, that he is estranged from his family, particularly his father. And when we extrapolate from this information, we become once again entangled in our web of cause-and-effect, the final result of which is this: he’s living a life that his father does not approve of.

Is there anything wrong with this life? I mean, I don’t know, can there be anything wrong with any life? But here this man is, working enough to keep himself going, in a field of work that is beneficial to society, and in his leisure time enjoying the things he loves, and yet there’s a person out there in the world — and maybe many others besides — who look at it with a disapproving glare.

I’m reminded of this quote from No Longer Human I wrote down almost exactly ten years ago.

What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society?” I had spent my whole life thinking that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh, and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words, “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue… Society won’t stand for it. It’s not society; you’re the one who won’t stand for it, right? If you do such a thing, society will make you suffer for it. It’s not society; it’s you, isn’t it? Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society. It’s not society; you’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?

I was so depressed back then that I almost died, and my mom told me I had to stop reading such depressing novels, which is exactly the kind of good/bad advice my parents were always giving me, because if you look at it from outside, it’s easy to say: well, if you read sad books, you’re going to keep having sad thoughts, completely ignoring any speculation as to why such a person was drawn to depressing books in the first place, and why they feel they can see themselves inside of them — why that is, in fact, the only place where they can see themselves.

For a long time, I conceptualized my dad’s advice as The World. The World expects me to do this; The World expects me to do that. The World won’t allow me to live the life spontaneously welling up inside me. But it’s not The World; it’s you, isn’t it? No one else out there seems to care one way or the other. My friends don’t mind; my wife doesn’t mind; my siblings don’t mind; my aunt and my cousins don’t mind; my boss doesn’t mind; the Prime Minister doesn’t mind — no one minds at all. It’s just you! It’s not The World; you're going to do the ostracizing, aren't you?

Should I keep constraining myself, keep trying to be an adult, keep trying to be a “real person”, just for your sake, when I know that even if I were to personify the ideal of adulthood, you still wouldn’t be satisfied? And is it childish of me to be sick and tired of this whole thing?

Day Two:

On Sunday morning, my wife and I watched our friends’ one year-old for a few hours while they went out for Father’s Day. This child is the first child I have ever properly known since I stopped being one myself. None of my siblings or cousins have children, nor did any of my friends back on the West Coast.

He’s a good guy. He took all of his toys out of the box and put them in my lap, one by one. I said, “Wow, look at that.” We watched as he ate watermelon and cheese, and then threw most of a croissant on to the floor. We took him to a nearby park, where he sprinted around the field at an alarming pace.

Apparently, he had been a fussy brat all morning until we showed up. For the few hours we were there, he was as happy as a clam. Everything was hilarious. We didn’t need him to do anything, and we had nothing to do except watch him. Just pure, unhindered playtime.

Yesterday evening, we went to see our other friends’ newborn. This was my first time seeing a newborn up close, and I even held her in my arms. She was tiny. Her fingers looked like miniature french fries, and she kept making strange noises, like an alien. It made me understand why the little guy from Eraserhead looks the way he does. She was five days old (I suppose she’s now six days old), and all she could do was waggle her arms and contort her face into surreal expressions. I kept thinking she was dying in my arms, but since no one else seemed worried, I played it cool.

Other than these two, I’ve met a few other children, mostly those of my wife’s coworkers. The older ones, ranging from four to seven, are a total mystery to me. They can talk, and it almost makes you think they can be spoken to, but I’ve never properly tried.

I was once left with one of them for a brief period of time. As her dad went to grab something from the other room, he told her, "This is your new dad now," and she started crying. I felt that was a little unfair to me, as I was trying to make a good impression. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like kids remember anything, especially when it comes to strangers.

I remember being a child. I remember it pretty well. So, when I see children, I tend to sympathize with their perspective more than their parents. I remember that I hated talking to strangers, so I try not to bother them. I think becoming a parent fundamentally changes the way people view children — either that, or I am still a child myself.

I remember going to school and thinking it sucked; if I were to have kids, I wouldn’t be able to lie to them and tell them it’s important. I remember just wanting to sit around, play video games, and live my own life. I am enough of an adult now to see a teen loafing around playing video games and briefly think, “He should go outside!” before remembering that the outside can be appreciated fairly well without actually going into it — that’s what windows are for. You open them and you can hear the birds chirping, while you play Halo.

I was lazy and directionless and antisocial, and I didn’t really turn any of that around until I was left alone to deal with my own problems. I dealt with them terribly for a while, and then gradually a little better. I made invisible progress while my parents fretted and nagged. I couldn’t see the bigger picture. They could see the bigger picture, but they couldn’t connect it to my smaller picture. Because of this, they couldn’t convince me that the bigger picture was real. So, I wanted to die for a while.

There’s a fundamental disconnect between parents and children. This is probably what scares me most about having kids. Parents see their children more than anyone else, over a longer period of time, watching them develop and grow from a tiny little alien to a fully grown adult. They come to understand their habits and mannerisms. But they don’t understand their children. They’re not allowed to. Because they can never see that teenager, and later that young adult, and later that full adult, as anything other than their child. We develop into a being that is much, much more than the child of our parents, and all that much, much more remains functionally invisible to them.

I am not blaming parents for this. It’s inevitable. It happens to the best of them. And it’s true of other relationships; I find it hard to think of my best friend, who I’ve known since we were four years old, as anything other than the boy I’ve always known. We are twenty-six years older than we were back then, but our relationship is the same. He goes to work, runs marathons, goes to the grocery store, and hangs out with different friends who I might never know — and yet none of that is real to me. I only think of the part of him that’s my best friend.

For a while, I really thought I wanted to have children. But, I wanted to have them in the future. A lot needed to change first. We could barely afford our apartment, and I didn’t know how to work a full-time job. We lived in the middle of a city where we didn’t want to raise children, and the idea of moving to the outskirts was inconceivable, as was ever buying a house.

Then, we moved here to Saskatoon. Saskatoon is a much nicer place to have kids, both in a financial sense and in terms of lifestyle. It’s just easier to do things here; there’s less traffic, and places are less crowded. You can be a little more spontaneous.

So, we had the location. The only thing left was a bit of cash flow. When I got my first full-time job in a decade, opportunities started to open up for us. A few months ago, we bought a house in a quiet little neighbourhood, sandwiched between a Catholic school about 500m to our south, and a public school a few kilometres north. All the conditions were perfect.

And then, as soon as the fantasy became possible, as soon as I was able to think about it realistically as something that might actually happen, I realized that I wasn’t sure if I wanted it at all. I like my friends’ kids, but they don’t light a spark in me that makes me desire to have my own. And they especially haven’t done so in my wife. We like kids when they’re playing and doing silly things, but the more we learn about the lifestyle, the more we realize we might not be cut out for it at all.

To be honest, just thinking about the reasons I don’t want kids makes me feel childish. It makes me feel irresponsible. I feel the kind of embarrassment I felt during all those years without a full-time job, when I felt like everyone was looking at me like I was the dregs of society. I know it’s normal and common to not want kids — especially at my age — but I can’t help but feel guilty.

Part of this stems from the fact that my parents, despite having four kids in their thirties (as of next week), don’t have any grandchildren. And while they never say anything about it, and they never put any pressure on anyone, I just have a feeling that it bothers them. My three cousins, also all in their thirties, are similarly childless. Seven whole grown-up children, between my parents and my aunt, and no grandkids. What are the chances? And somehow, despite being the youngest, I feel like all the pressure’s on me. My wife and I were the first to get married, the second to buy a house, and have more financial stability than anyone, thanks to fleeing the Lower Mainland for the Prairies. And yet… I just don’t think I want to have children. Especially with my family so far away.

And this all gets back to a far larger dilemma within my life. As I grow older and become more stable, there’s this pull toward just being a Normal Guy — toward, for the first time in my life, just fitting in with my surroundings. Sit back at my trade job, have some kids, live in my little suburban house, and do all the things my parents did. Fill up my weekends with family trips, kids’ hockey tournaments, play-dates, while hustling and bustling around trying to fit grocery shopping, car appointments, visits to the dentist/optometrist/doctor, etc. into the gaps.

But it’s that busy-ness that frightens me most. That administrative burden. I don’t know if we have the energy. And when am I supposed to write? When am I supposed to lie around and dream? When can I lose myself to literature?

And it comes back to this question: am I selfish? Is it entitlement to be so attached to this life where I’m simply not bothered?

I want to hide away in my pretty home, sitting in the backyard where the vegetables and wildflowers grow, as the cat stalks in the long grass, watching the birds shriek from the power lines. Everyone is always so busy, always wanting things and buying things, always doing something. I just don’t want to! I simply do not want to. I never wanted to. I never wanted to do anything at all.

I have contorted myself into an approximation of a normal human being. But deep down… I’m missing something. Let’s call it "drive". I like the term drive because it combines two concepts: desire and energy. I don’t have desire and I don’t have energy. This means that I can not become motivated. I can not enforce discipline upon myself.

A writing teacher, when I was about twenty years old, commented on my last composition for her class: “You not only have the talent, but the discipline required to become a great writer.” But she was completely wrong. I don’t have discipline. Any time I try to write in a disciplined manner, I just slack off. How did I write, edit, re-write and re-edit that composition until it was worth an A? I just did it because I felt like it. I was writing essays all the time for my personal website anyway, so I just wrote another one. I didn’t write out of a sense of duty: I wrote because I had way too many emotions, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

At the moment, I probably shouldn’t be writing at all. It really hurts to do so. And yet I’m writing more than ever, because the very idea of possibly not writing makes me want to write. If I let myself go, putting no pressure on myself, allowing myself free reign to watch movies or play video games or just sit in bed doing nothing at all, I will inevitably start writing instead. That’s the only “drive” I have.

I sometimes feel like all my personal writing boils down to this question: is it okay to be me? Am I allowed? And I guess the answer may as well be yes, since I’m here, and it doesn’t seem like anyone is about to stop me.

So maybe I should just stop getting in my own way.

Day Three:

I’m depressed at the moment. I’ve lost all interest in books, in movies, in stories of any kind. I have no attention span, so I just alternate between my computer and my phone, looking at stuff I don’t care about. When I drive across town to see my physiotherapist, I blast garage rock as loud as I can, so I can scream along and pretend I have emotions.

I feel like I’m seventeen again. I have no thoughts for the future. I really don’t care if I never go back to work again. My wrists hurt, but it doesn’t matter to me that much.

I’ve been watching samurai movies, or jidaigeki. I like imagining myself wearing those loose-fitting garments that look so comfortable. There’s always trees and birds chirping and little scoops of water. The characters climb hills and run around and ride horses. Then, they slice each other up with swords. A woman cries.

The plot doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the little moments. An old man drinking sake and watching the snowfall through the open door, while his daughter begs him to stop letting in the cold air. He says that there is no greater satisfaction than drinking sake while watching the snow fall. And I think, yeah, you’re probably right.

I’m lost in Japan again. I suppose it’s my comfort zone. I’m returning to that Japan I knew before I ever knew Japan. Samurai, shrines, scrolls, little water scoops. I’m reading Tale of Genji. I want to be exiled on the shores of Suma.

That’s the type of thing I think when I’m depressed. I want to be exiled on the shores of Suma. I want to be imprisoned in the Chateau d’If. I want to be shipwrecked on a deserted island. I want to develop asthma and die in bed at age 40.

Maybe this wrist injury is the best thing that ever happened to me. In my younger years, Gregor Samsa and Bartleby were my role models. I’d prefer not to. Samsa is the manifestation of a desire to be incapacitated; to have the doctor say, “You don’t have to do anything anymore, and it’s not your fault.” I’ve got my wish. Everything you wish for at 20 years old — it all comes true. This is what I’ve learned in my life. It comes true whether you want it to or not. It comes true once you’ve given up on it, and once it’s stopped making sense (if it ever did in the first place.) And when it comes true, you won’t be ready to deal with it.

Back then, I had two main desires. My two main desires corresponded with two ways of dealing with depression. The first was the above, wanting some grand dramatic calamity to occur that would justify my way of life. This is why I loved break-ups. I could just be miserable all the time and I didn’t have to wonder why.

The second desire was to die. The reason I wanted to die wasn’t because I thought death was good in itself, but because it seemed like the only way to end my depression. I was too depressed to make my life any good, and I had this feeling that even if my life was good, I would continue to be depressed (a feeling that turned out to be half-right.) So, I wanted to die. But I didn’t really want to die, as much as I just wanted not to exist. I didn’t think about suicide as much as I thought about simply wasting away.

Depression is boring and uncomfortable. If you want, you could say that it is severely boring and uncomfortable — to the point where perhaps these words stop being meaningful. When we say boredom and discomfort, we are often thinking of fairly mild manifestations of these concepts. But when you reach maximum boredom and maximum discomfort, it becomes an entirely different thing.

I’m on edge all day. My foot is tapping, or I’m grinding my teeth. I can’t expend this energy, because I can’t get myself to move. Nothing interests me at all. Any potential action seems worse than what I’m currently doing, which is already the worst thing possible. Thinking sucks, because I can only think about things that I can’t do, or things that I don’t like, or things that I used to like but can’t like anymore for some reason.

Because I can’t do anything, I’m bored. Time passes very slowly. I’m waiting for something to happen, knowing that nothing will happen. I can’t fill time. I can’t even waste time. I can’t focus enough to get into a rhythm, and I can’t disassociate enough to stop remembering that I exist. I can’t focus on a book or a movie, because I get distracted by how depressed I am. I can’t let myself forget that I am me, and that I am depressed.

It’s been argued that depression only affects a certain class, and that it’s a privilege to be depressed. I don’t think that’s true; it just manifests itself in different ways, depending on your circumstances. I’m of a class where my material needs are sufficiently met, meaning that my base level of existence is comfortable. This means that, when I am depressed, I can simply not do anything. It’s when you start not doing anything that it’s called depression. But if you respond differently: say, by gambling, drinking, or doing drugs, it becomes a gambling, drinking, or drug problem. But it’s likely that the root cause is fairly similar.

I suppose you could argue that since I’m only depressed for a week or so at a time, it’s not really depression. I don’t know — I guess I am just arguing with invisible people about words at this point. But I feel the need to say that I’ve also been depressed for months and years at a time, and the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Symptom-wise, I am just as depressed right now as I was in November of 2016. I just deal with it differently.

I guess one of the ways I deal with it is I just write down exactly what I’m feeling, and then I look at it, and say, “Oh yeah, I know these feelings. They’re the feelings I have when I’m depressed.” And then I look around at what I’ve written at other times, and recognize those feelings as the ones I have when I’m not depressed. And so I know that these are two different states that I occupy at different times. Neither is the cause or the result of the other — they just flow back and forth. Why? Because that’s the way I am.

That answer satisfies me a lot more than it used to. I’m the way I am! I’m not going to become a different person when I grow up. Other people are the way they are, and I’m the way I am. Sometimes it really is as simple as that.

Day Four:

I was reading the Zhuangzi this morning, and I came upon a passage — not the first — about the sage wisdom of a useless tree.

It’s in the fourth chapter, when Carpenter Stoney passes a tree a hundred spans wide. His apprentice points it out to him, but he refuses to even look at it. He says,

This is worthless lumber! As a ship it would soon sink, as a coffin it would soon rot, as a tool it would soon break, as a door it would leak sap, as a pillar it would bring infestation. This is a talentless, worthless tree. It is precisely because it is so useless that it has lived so long.

That night, the tree appears to him in a dream and says,

What do you want to compare me to, one of those cultivated trees? The hawthorn, the pear, the orange, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs — when their fruit is ripe they get plucked, and that is an insult. Their large branches are bent, their small branches are pruned. Thus do their abilities embitter their lives. That is why they die young, failing to fully live out their Heaven-given lifespans. They batter themselves with the vulgar conventions of the world, as do all the other things of the world. As for me, I’ve been working on being useless for a long time. It almost killed me, but I’ve finally managed it — and it is of great use to me! If I were useful, do you think I could have grown to be so great?

And it got me thinking about my newfound uselessness.

For a long time, I looked at manual labourers and skilled tradespeople as a different kind of person. They were capable of work that I could not do, because I was a useless and impractical person. I felt this as a great shame. I wanted to be more practical, but I didn’t know how. I was useless because of my character.

Then, I became a labourer at a hockey arena, and then a carpenter’s apprentice, and I learned so much about what types of skills and thinking it takes to do manual labour, and to figure out the types of problems that come up. I developed a work ethic, and started to think that maybe I am capable of practical work. More than anything, I gained confidence. I can go to the Home Depot and know what to buy. I can look at a project around my house, and understand what tools need to be used. I can watch a Youtube tutorial about how to cut baseboards and not totally space out.

So now I know: I am capable! Of course, I don’t have all the skills that a true carpenter has, and even less of the time-honed craftsmanship of a drywaller or a painter. But I no longer feel that I am beneath them due to my character, but only a lack of practice.

After injuring my wrists, I am now a different kind of useless. I am useless because of a material disability outside of my control. It doesn’t have anything to do with my character. But this uselessness is valuable — because I didn’t particularly want to be a carpenter anyway! I never wanted to spend my life that way. And now my strange dream I had at 20 years old is coming true — as they always do… — I am being paid to sit around in earnest contemplation, all because the world has made me useless.

Is this fate? Is someone saying, “Well Mike, good try, and a solid effort. You put yourself out there and you showed the true nature of your character, and we see now that you aren’t as miserable a wretch as you so seemed. Here — have a rest.” The only cost is that my wrists hurt all the time. Is that really so bad?

This is, of course, all a convenient, self-aggrandizing, self-important little lie. A fable to make myself feel better about my current situation. But, I have to accept it somehow. I can’t fight my way out of this predicament — and is it so wrong to find myself enjoying it? I enjoyed working too, so you can’t kill me just because I enjoy not working as well.

I’m thinking about the saying, “You make your own luck.” The common interpretation of this phrase is that if you try hard and put yourself in the right positions, opportunities will arise. But I have an alternate reading. What if you make your own luck by developing your own understanding of what is lucky and unlucky?

When I worked at the fruit store, I thought I was lucky to have such a great job. However, a lot of my coworkers thought the job was terrible. It’s the same at my current job — I consider myself incredibly fortunate to work there, but a lot of the guys in my position are constantly grumbling.

On the other hand, there’s an older guy who constantly has troubles arising this way and that, and yet he can’t stop smiling and laughing it off with a “What can you do?” We always talk about our cats. His cats are ill-behaved, a little crazy, and a constant thorn in his side — but he loves them! He thinks they’re the most wonderful creatures around. A little while ago, an old house he owned out in some podunk-town flooded while he was on vacation. He showed up to work smiling and said, “Shoot, you’ll never guess what happened while I was gone!” And so, despite in many ways being quite unlucky, he’s managed to make his own luck.

It is, in a certain sense, a misfortune to develop what might be carpal tunnel syndrome and not be able to do much of anything. But I can’t help but keep considering it another great stroke of luck, and wondering what I’ve done to deserve all this great fortune that keeps coming my way.

And perhaps I’m just lucky to have managed to develop such an attitude toward life, because I don’t really know how I did it. I certainly wasn’t like this before. When I say that I was a miserable wretch, boy do I mean it! Not only depressed but pessimistic to boot, and incapable of recognizing my own agency. I don’t know what happened! Perhaps it’s because I always had literature around to show me life’s true beauty, even when I could no longer recognize it in the world around me…

Day Five:

Why does it feel bad to do nothing? Why doesn’t it feel like… nothing?

The fact of the matter is that when we say we are doing nothing, or that we’ve done nothing, we aren’t telling the truth. When my wife comes home and asks how the day went, and I say, “I didn’t really do anything,” it means that I read books, watched some videos, played an hour of a video game, browsed a forum, and wrote a paragraph or two for my website. So, really, I did quite a few things. I didn’t do any of them enough to feel any sense of accomplishment, but I certainly didn’t do nothing.

When people lament having wasted years of their life, they usually mean that they spent that time doing things they didn’t and/or don’t currently like, like playing an MMO, scrolling social media, smoking weed, or watching bad TV. Conversely, they might actually have enjoyed doing all those things, but feel bad because they don’t meet societal expectations of “doing something.” The question of whether it’s society making me feel bad, or whether I actually dislike something, is one I reckon with a lot.

For example, there are things I do that I just don’t like. For example, scrolling through Substack, or previously Twitter. I would do those things, but I never got any enjoyment out of them. When I look back on the time I spend doing those things, I say, “I was doing nothing,” and what I mean is that I didn’t like what I was doing.

If I spend the day reading books, but not writing anything, I might say that I didn’t do anything, but that’s only because nothing tangible was accomplished. But it’s also usually the case that nobody gave me anything to do, and there was no task necessary to my future subsistence that needed to be done, other than maybe eating breakfast and lunch, which I likely did but probably wouldn’t mention. So, if I spent the day just doing something I like, then there shouldn’t be a problem.

There are many ways to spend a day and end up with “nothing to show for it.” But who are we showing these things to anyway? Sometimes, I feel like my future self will look back and say, “You had all that time; why didn’t you do anything?” But upon further reflection, I realize that I’ve never thought that about my past self at any point. I look back at him and say, “He was doing what he could.”

Some people are very busy, but I’m not. I honestly can’t tell what they’re busy doing, because most days I can’t think of anything that needs to be done. But I guess I don’t have a job or a social life, so that accounts for a lot of the difference.

I’m worried that this journal is becoming incredibly repetitive, so this might be the last entry. I think I have been able to reckon with all the issues that I was dealing with. With each entry, I expel a needless thought from my mind. I haven’t thought about kids at all since I wrote day two! That worry is just gone. I just needed to pull the plug, and it all washed away.

I suppose if we were to look at these entries and conceive of a theme, they’re about trying to free one’s self from shackles that perhaps one didn’t create in the first place, but definitely tightened. I’m trying to be okay with myself. Part of that involves turning my thoughts into words, placing those words on a computer screen, and then looking at them for what they are. When they’re on a computer screen, I can view them more objectively. I can say, “Well, if I read that on someone else’s website, maybe I’d say they were being too hard on themselves, or that they’re worrying themselves for no reason.” Or, “Well, if I read that on someone else’s website, I’d say, ‘yeah! Go for it!’” I get to be my own critic and cheerleader.

Tomorrow, I turn thirty years old! I don’t know, maybe I’m doing great.

Thank you for joining me on this journey of whimsy and discovery....