21/08/25
Ritual, masking and God.
Content warning: Religion mention.
Four months since my previous entry. The last dregs of sunshine drip through the blinds. Waking up, skin scented with lemon. Mouth empty, I’ve already attempted to bite more than I can chew, yet my jaws crave clamping down on something fresh. “From today, my life changes” is the mantra this morning and every morning. Dangling a carrot on a stick until the end of the year. Keep pushing. I’ve developed a ritual; form a crack in the blackout blinds, switch the radio on, sprawl out of bed, scale the walls like ivy. The audio is never full blast, in this place it cannot be. Focus on breath, thank my body for enduring another yesterday. Bask in nakedness, however brief. Breakfast consists of tea and nicotine. Spend as much time in alternate reality travelled with closed eyes. Saunter through imaginary rooms, sunshine bleeding across wooden floorboards, forming warm pools to dip my feet into. Play pretend, call out for a man that loves you who never replies. How can he, he doesn’t exist. Awaken to a dull popcorn ceiling donned with cobwebs and the sounds of construction outside. Maladaptive daydreaming is what influencers selling courses call “manifestation”. They tell me the reason this ideal life isn’t my physical reality is because I don’t want it hard enough. Others succeed, why don’t you? If you believed a God can save you, you might wake up different. Look for signs in the mundane. Anything to drag you out of present circumstances. Paint to replicate the warmth that grey skies never offer. The weather attempts to offer a sympathetic pat on your back. It would offer more solace if you left the cage you’ve decorated. Making isolation bearable is not the same as escaping it.
Time isn’t applicable, yet you use it as a crutch. You cannot gesso a canvas at two o’clock in the morning, the suggestion feels wrong. Booking a hotel in the closest city to stare at a different ceiling is ridiculous. Your search history of Parisian accommodation and EuroStar timetables wastes time that could be spent on shadow work. One day you may find yourself on a train, hurtling through the English channel with a Vogue magazine in one hand, a pack of Vogues in the other. Poser. Scrap the dream of having your own place. Writing this entry is a subtle form of avoidance.
Things shifted slightly when I created a blog to role-play online. Extending praise, comfort and positivity to others. Interject your own experiences into fiction. Instead of nights spent blinking at nothingness in morse, whisper ideas into the void. Self awareness is the first part of recovery. You’re ill again. It’s been a decade since you wrote as a character. Pleasant escapism as an adult feels different. This time, I can immerse myself in the role of a show host, blending comedy, romance and addressing moments of tenderness whilst peeking behind fiction. Truthfully, this character is an exaggerated version of a mask I wear often. When it slips, I push friends and good people away, terrified they’ll see what lurks underneath. Even I cannot bring myself to stagger in front of a mirror. I’m scared there’s nothing of value there. Googling synonyms of words whilst opening a new tab, asking how to break the cycle that comforts and harms me simultaneously.
From a scrapped entry, I wrote the following:
This is exactly the note that instils dread in people. Disregard it completely if that suits you best. I ruminated even leaving one to begin with. This note comes from a person who hasn’t achieved what capital, and by proxy the ideas of many, regard as “successful”. They do not own or rent their own home, they cannot drive a car. The writer is not romantically or sexually involved with another person. This pitiful attempt of a human being is not a millionaire, though they buy the occasional Lotto ticket. They have never pursued higher education at university, or took it upon themselves to venture onto the career ladder. For them, this would be fruitless, as their mind is too flippant to stay on track. Job stability is not a guarantee, regardless of a university degree under your belt. Even though we all have to eat, the idea of loving your job, being proud of hard work and effort, means more than food on the table for them. I could starve myself if it meant stepping back proudly at the result of meticulous and careful planning that culminates to achieve a result I am happy with. Isn’t that selfish?
“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.” – Oscar Wilde
To expand upon this, Steven Fry said the following: “We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
If writing is not the correct path, how have I been able to collaborate with such talented individuals? Art, I have been told, is simply a hobby. Why does it have such a strong gravitational pull, acting as the compass my soul navigates and analyses the world with and through? When we speak of joy we compare it to that of a child experiencing events for the first time, occupying space with airy giggles, their body dancing as happiness such as this cannot stay contained. When was the last time as an adult you felt compelled to move for something other than a command? These are the questions I ask myself. Yet I am stagnant. Stationary.
Your life purpose is the one you bestow it with. Some assume it’s material gain, accruing physical possessions. The car, the house, vacations, nuclear family, white picket fence and clearing debt. Who sold you that idea? When I was feeling low a few years ago, my friend Vincent wrote the following:
I try to remind myself that my value as a human is not intrinsically linked to what I can do for a late-stage capitalistic society, which is, one could argue, anti-human in its experience as a whole. You find joy in things. Your friends, your art, music, nature, the little things. There is love in that, and beauty, and I feel like that is what matters, if it matters to you. I don't really think there is an inherent value to things as everything is meaningless at the grand scale, even those achievements we note down in the history books, but that just means we get to find our own meaning and values. The earth maybe does not know you and will not remember you, but we all, your friends and family in the here and now, we would, like Tuna said. Because you have meaning to us. You don't need to always put on a brave, happy face for us to still love you.
How do you defend your chosen path to yourself, even if it feels "fruitless"? I have messages from my friends in a journal, it keeps me tethered. Some of them have been my friends for years, others faded from the picture. That’s the thing, you don’t have to be in someone’s life for long to still have an impact. I struggle to embrace this. I’m pulling my own leash, continuing to lumber forward for what exactly? The fear of disappointing others? How do I forgive myself for everything I’m not? Life looking different is not a sign of failure.
This is all there is. Work through it scared in the hope scarcity fuels you. You could experience love the likes of which no living creature has ever seen. If only you’d open your heart. You believe vulnerability and pain are the same thing. Who sold you that idea? When you bask in the power of light, just as you do in the morning, it fills the crevices in you. Every night, drop your knees into a dream where you are good. Where you are loved. Your hands have the ability to create and crush. This can happen at the same time. If you want to be angelic, you must carve heaven for yourself. Many romanticise struggle. If I could, I’d melt it away for you. Cup the sun in my hands and smooth it across you like butter. Let it consume you, not out of hunger. Surrender yourself. I want you to be seen. There isn’t a part of you that needs to shy away. No need to pay me back. To give is to receive. I don’t do this to have the favour returned. Every time you choose compassion, the world gets brighter anyway. Allow pain to be examined meticulously and discover it’s true message. That is wisdom. Celebrate yourself, not in an act of vanity but rather self preservation. Definitions are for the absence of things. When an object is in front of us, we can simply point or observe. I have difficulty verbalising love, for it is everywhere. I’m not a religious man in the traditional sense. Vapour rolling upward from a hot drink, light dappling the pavement from trees, a warm plate of comfort food or the lines folding on someone’s face from laughter. That is love, that is God, I think.
On my wall a postcard containing a poem is tacked. Named “The Gate of the Year” by Minnie Louise Haskins. It’s inscribed on the entrance of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where I brought the postcard. King George VI quoted it during a royal broadcast in 1939, at the beginning of World War II. Again, Haskins poem was read for the funeral of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother in 2002.
I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown". And he replied: "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way."
It replaced Louise Bourgeois, “I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful." The postcard of the embroidered handkerchief was destroyed, welded to the card stock frame with glue and tape. I tried removing it, in doing so tearing the card.
Many of my traditional diaries centre around these themes: The tension between escapism and reality, rejection of traditional success, and the search for self worth and meaning. These themes whirl around one another, melding together to regurgitate the same thought pattern. We often lean into escapism to feel an emotional state that isn’t present in our own lives.