flames

I. 

i only realized recently how easy it is to forget something. you just clear your mind, do your best to stop thinking about it, and if you’re busy enough your conscious brain forgets all the details in a few weeks or months. people i cared about kept telling me how surprised they were that i was remembering everything about them and now i realize that was just because i was post-processing all my interactions with them over and over, and most things just disappear if i avoid doing that

so i’m trying my best to forget you, but it’s been hard

jonathan pointed out that despite all our interactions he still hadn’t heard my “life story” yet, whatever that means, and he was right. journaling is for documentation in case i need to revisit something later and blogging has generally been about capturing feelings or snapshots rather than events but that’s more or less the extent to which i want to remember my past

we tried an activity which i guess is a version of hot seat. i’m not a big fan of regular hot seat because you usually don’t have much control over what kinds of questions you’re asked and people often end up asking uninteresting questions you don’t really feel like answering, to the point where regular 1-1 conversations are probably more enjoyable but in the variant we tried the person in the hot seat tells a long (or short; most of them were in the 5-10 minute range i think) story that they consider important before the questions start, and i liked that a lot

except the issue is i don’t really have any interesting stories and the important stories are mostly the ones i want to discard, so i just talked about the origins of my social habits, and at the end someone commented “you’re the first person i’ve met who doesn’t have a circle you fit well in and also doesn’t care about finding one” and that assessment confused me a lot initially but maybe it’s accurate after all

II. 

in middle school i got addicted to pokemon rom hacks for a solid year and regretted it so much that i trained myself to get bored of most games extremely quickly. that’s one of the main factors in why i transitioned from playing chess matches to solving chess puzzles, and it’s why no game since then has lasted a week without me uninstalling it out of boredom

in ninth and tenth grade most days of school were filled with emptiness. cliques and loneliness, exclusion and worthlessness, all the pain you felt because people didn’t yet understand the myriad ways in which each one of their actions could spawn misery for others. i think they still don’t understand and i probably don’t really get it either yet, but i can’t unsee visions of my past every time i participate in any group which is even vaguely clique-like, so for the most part i avoid them entirely

a lot of last year was stuck in the wistfulness of thinking the best of my days were behind me, the constant feeling that something had been taken away that could never be returned. it’s easy to justify nostalgia as appreciating life or something along those lines, but i don’t really believe in that anymore. i think at this point i’d rather burn, burn all the memories and people and highs, burn everything to destroy for good a past which i can never return to

like i said, i’m trying my best to forget you, but it’s been hard

i don’t think i have many phobias or insecurities, but i am disproportionately terrified of negative self-reinforcing patterns. it might be the case that most of my behavior originates from overreactions to experiences involving these patterns. i choose doing nothing over the possibility of addiction, i choose solitude over cliques, i choose obliteration over nostalgia, and i don’t regret any of these choices but i also don’t know how i would undo them if i ever did regret them

III. 

one of the psych people here believes in some notion of core values. basically you look at all your desires as a giant directed tree and in theory there’s some core value at the root of them all and you can have multiple values you care about but supposedly you care about most of the values only as a means of reaching other values so really there’s only one core

i don’t know if this is something i really believe in or not, but if i had to describe my core value i’d say that it used to be love and sometime in the last year it transitioned from love to peace or something like that, love in the sense of being loved and peace in the sense of being at peace. as a gross oversimplification i’d say the transition occurred when i learned to depend less on external validation which happened sometime between winter sparc in january and watching bojack in august? although maybe the core value has always been peace all along, or maybe it’s been something else entirely; it’s honestly pretty difficult for me to just pick one

and like, even though i’m sure i care more about peace than love at this point, i’m still not entirely over it, and i’m still not entirely over you, and i want to cure my addiction to love, and i want to stop thinking about cliquey relationships, and i want to burn our memories and forget them together as the smoke rises