I come to myself on today feeling pretty bad. I have problems in my sprit it is or has become hard for me to address. If there is a solution, I only hope I can find it. I just want to be ok. That has been, really, a running theme. Though this pressure in my stomach and skull feels—simply, feels, I guess—there is no real way around that. You kind of just have to feel it and try to keep functioning regardless. I have these intricate vaguely symbolic usually strange dreams. Sometimes they’re mundane and more purely experiential. There is it turns out maybe no reason to worry. And that is the case simply because I want to believe that’s the case. In order to really not care what others think about you, you probably have to go under the duress of them thinking pretty negatively of you for a good good deal of time without changing who you are or who you want to be. In that way, the eagle or whatever fledges its beak. If the fledgling can’t do that, it will die. In the same way probably, if you can’t thicken your own skin and actually be who you want to be, your soul probably dies. They have that old turn of phrase “a thousand deaths,” and it’s probably like that. You can only trust and believe in the present moment. Your own body. The air against your skin. Your finger pads loosely on the keyboard. You have to really believe in the only things that appear to be real. I’m writing a novel where reality itself sort of falls apart and becomes or turns out always to have been fiction. That is like the ultimate mindfuck so far as I can imagine it, but at the same time, it makes you question what the difference is, if you’re the one inside the fiction.
I don’t know why I’m saying much of this. I’m not feeling too well. My stomach is kind of queasy, my throat is sore, and my body on the whole is pretty tired. There is simply just no way of dealing with yourself if you can’t be compassionate toward yourself. “If you can’t help and love yourself, you will never be able to help or love anyone else.” That is what they say. Some of the best advice I ever received was from my brother when he said, “Just say ‘fuck it.’” It goes a long way to remember that this is probably the only life we’ll ever get, and that we won’t get to live it again.