Content warning: I discuss death related stuff?. Also this is sort of a vent post.
Anytime I feel that my freedom is somewhat narrowing, I start to act in a particularly self-defending way. Most recently I felt this with having to go back to my home country, where I have to spend a month with my opressive family. Spending time with them means I have to cut down on my self-expression to a minimum. No talking to internet friends unless you want to get questioned and no personal space or privacy. I don’t want to get into much detail, but basically it’s some 1984 type full on oppression stuff that gives me the ick. Ever since I received the news that I will be spending a month at home, I found myself in a spiral of anxiety where this anxiety is channeled into things that I believe will ‘immortalize’ me.
This tradition of mine dates back many years where I was just a kid in middle school. I was going through a rough patch and didn’t know what to make of the things I was feeling so I started to write letters. You know, for when I’m dead. And almost every single day for a month, I tried to fit all I think about my life and what I wanted people to know about me after I'm gone into a single note. I couldn’t go past writing a few pages though, I quickly realized that there is just too much to write. I got so frustrated that I gave up on the whole dying thing. Even though at the time I felt like I was just a background character without much to my life, I struggled to summarize everything that made me who I am.
This realization led me down a path of self-discovery and also gave me one of my favorite hobbies to this day; Journaling. Ever since then I got back to writing in my diary, a much healthier alternative, and bit by bit, I tried to make sense of my own existence and identity. I’ve learned how to follow my own path instead of what others put me up to. It was through heavy self-reflection and rediscovery of my passions that I was able to achieve some sort of self-realization despite living under harsh conditions. For this reason, I find writing to be an existentialist activity. It’s something that declares you were once here, you had unique ideas that belonged to you and you decided to take up space in the world. And now whenever I feel slightly limited, I turn to writing. It only requires something you can write on.
Coming back to the most recent triggering event, after I heard the news, I was faced with having only one week left of freedom. This immediately triggered my defense mechanisms, that very strong urge to be greater than my peers or write great essays to leave behind. And so I found myself in a rabbithole of escapism, watching anime to fill that space in my head with aesthetic, pleasant imagery and looking for places to go on the internet to be able to be a part of it forever. Then I found it, I could work on my neocities! and I did and it looks awful, but this time it’s functional. Last time I could not set up a system for my blog posts but thankfully I now know how css works (kinda). I will keep filling these pages up with bits from my personal life and hopefully, my writings will stay as permanent as they can be on this site. I want to own a domain someday and have it hosted elsewhere so that it’s permanent as possible and so that I quite literally own a corner of the internet. Until then, I will try to stay sane and never stop writing.