I wrote two pitches this morning for a zine I picked up at a local bookshop yesterday. For some reason, the process was exhilarating enough that I barely care if they’re accepted — just the feeling of having thrown myself back into a world I used to know was enough.
I’ve been doing my best to become more familiar with my surroundings lately. The people, places, and sounds of my life here in Colorado can be overwhelming in the most beautiful, unexpected ways. I don’t think I had the capacity to see my life in this sort of fashion even just a few months ago. In some sense, I feel like I was manipulated out of opportunities to do so. Far too many people managed to make it through the sieve I delicately weaved, rooting themselves in my everyday existence. I’ve found that even my magick hasn’t been able to entirely rid them from my life, which has led me to doubt my own abilities at certain points.
I do feel myself recovering more smoothly than I expected, however. If I don’t have faith that life will eventually weed those parasites out organically, I might lose my mind. I’m trying not to do that these days, if I can help it.
Instead, I’m trying to regain focus on what matters to me. It’s funny how you can lose sight of whole factions of your very being. Anything can be buried — deep into the core of the earth if you really want. That’s to say that, while you can forget about these things when they’re out of sight, they never truly disappear.
The excavation process has been arduous, though, to say the least. For instance, I only remembered last night that I love reading while listening to jazz in the evenings to end my day. I don’t know where this part of me had been buried, and recovering it sent me into a wild, unexpected spiral. When I pulled myself out, I was grateful for having such an opportunity to dig up this fragment of myself, but I had to wonder — how many more pieces of me like this were lodged deep within the recesses of my mind? Without any memories to build a trail to follow, I have to believe that I’m only going to continue running into myself like this by chance.
If I weren’t the poster child for trauma, I wouldn’t be anxious about that—and that is what I know I need to concentrate on right now; making sure I don’t give myself any spare moments — even fractions of a second — to overthink this process as it unfolds. I know that it’s only by doing this that I’ll be able to quickly move through these mandatory trips back into the core of the earth, and it will be critical to avoid a mental break, too.
The brain is such a fickle organ. The memories it keeps are entirely out of our control, yet we think we can take steps to dictate what it retains—like we have a choice, like we have a say in the evolution of our minds over time. To that extent, remembering this vital fact might be the only piece of information that really matters.
