CaucasianAsian

I always have thoughts I wish I had the courage to write about. But honestly they are all so dumb. So cliche. But I think one of the most important lessons I have learned is that everyone experiences the same emotions, but also every person’s experiences are unique. I think the fact that the previous statement contradicts itself is one of the core aspects of being human. To be human is to feel understood and so close to others but also knowing you are so wildly unique that no words or expression could ever do justice in representing your identity.

so. what “i” wish “i” knew is how to tUrn what “i” feel into art.

this is dumb. but I’m gonna hit publish.

I recently opened the back on one of my film cameras which I thought was empty. It was such a frustrating feeling knowing that I destroyed the existing images by doing a single action, an action so easily avoidable. All I had to do was gently turn the film rewind lever to check if the camera was loaded.

I view un-shot film as a small object of great potential. The possibilities of what it can capture is endless, yet the medium can be irreversibly damaged, so easily destroyed, but only through stupid mistakes. Its always a stupid mistake.

With this roll, I pulled the film from the camera and realized that the amount of film used was only about 5 or 6 shots. What ever those 5 or 6 frames were, I will never know and I will never get to see those moments I previously felt worth capturing. Still the roll of film has about 30 shots left on it. It still has potential, and a use, more so than cheaper film which only has 24-27 shots on a single roll.

Amidst my frustration and a tinge of loss, I pulled the roll out and threw it carelessly into my car. Later that day I saw the outside of the canister all scraped up from the sand and surfboards in my car. The previously shot portions of film were mangled and folded.

It took me a couple days to realize something. Something which I think is a lesson I will apply to portions of my life now.

The roll of film has less potential to capture as many moments than it previously had; however, it can still do more than others. The loss of previous frames won’t impact the quality of future ones shot. My initial reaction to part of the roll being damaged made me feel as though the whole roll was a waste. But 5/6 of the roll is still perfectly usable.

I guess my take away is that, a small set back in the past can’t ruin future success. Things that have been damaged still have so much potential. The roll of film shouldn’t be thrown out, or left to sit on a shelf. What is left should be used.

The roll of film will one day be complete, most of it will be filled with smiles and memories worth remembering. Some of it will capture moments of sadness and ones to learn from. Yet no matter what, part of that roll will be shaped my memories forgotten, damaged through a mistake. Having damaged portions is now part of its identity.

Looking at my journey through managing my mental health I have lots of days where I feel helpless and worthless. I should look at myself within the same framing as I do that roll of film. Recognize the future will hold a wide array of emotions and mistakes of the past have not changed the capacity which still lies within.

Also hello to future me looking back on this. I really be on some dumb introspective shit right now huh? Present me is very interested to see how I/you react to reading this months or years from now.

Song playing as I finish writing this: “Finding My Way Home” x Far Caspian, it’s oddly applicable. And nah Im not gonna proof read this.

I just spent the past 2 hours writing and I archived every draft of everything I wrote. It was all terrible and had no coherence. But I wanted to write something because I have been wanting to be more consistent with this blog. So here is what I got.

“I got absolutely nothing. I’m going to go cook and watch a TV show. “

I just finished writing this and I’m so tired. Weird seeing the last sentence written at the start of the piece. Right? You know this sentence is how it all ends, but you still have no idea how this will end.

There is something to be said about instinct. A gut feeling.

Everyone has heard “Go With Your Gut”. The internet is littered with quotes like, “Trust Your Gut”, “Just Go with Your Gut Instinct Because Its Smarter Than Your Heart”, “Your Gut Knows Whats Up, Trust That Bitch”, etc. Until recently, I had never thought of why the anthropomorphic organ was connected to a means of intelligence.

I’m not a scientist, nor do I currently have the energy to cite my sources, but I recently found out that the gut, the human digestive tract, actually has a direct effect on the brain, its levels of stress, its ability to rebound from hardship, and overall mental health. You may read this and think “How the hell did you not know that?!” but I don’t know, I just didn’t. I don’t know if that’s normal or not.

I am always thinking introspectively. I feel like I know myself very well, but sometimes that knowledge causes more trouble than clarity. I guess recently I have been thinking about trusting myself. I’m always telling myself “I don’t know how I feel.” So often my brains logic and my hearts emotions are fighting each other, trying to tell the other they are right. As with many, my brain is trying to use logic in order to protect my heart, my heart is telling me to take risks so that my brain doesn’t make my life boring. I understand my logic, I know my brain. I understand my emotions, I know my heart.

Still, I rarely understanding what I feel, I guess I don’t know my gut. Of course I knew natural instinct plays a role in my decision making (but I’ve never connected that instinct to my gut, I always considered it source code in my brain), but now I’m asking myself “Have you ever allowed it (my gut) room to speak?”

And no. I haven’t.

I try to understand my emotions through bodily sensations. After listening to a podcast I like, I have started to record the different ways my emotions manifest themselves as sensations. I feel sadness in my chest and triceps. I feel disappointment in my chest. I feel calm in my hands. I feel anger in my forearms. I feel stress in my sternum. I recently felt something I’ve only felt a couple times in my life. I might change this later, but I think what Im feeling is truth. “Truth” is not really an “emotion” but it’s a physical manifestation of confirmation. It’s something felt by my pragmatic brain and my wild emotions, but it’s not a direct product of either one. Physically its a manifestation of a drop in my stomach. Its only really happened a few times in my life. What I find odd is that it doesn’t appear with any specific emotion, I can think of a time I’ve felt it while overjoyed, and I can think of a time I’ve felt it while in pain. It’s confirmation.

What I know now, is my brain and heart need to stop fighting each other once my gut makes its call. It doesn’t make itself known often, but when it does it’s right. The drop in my gut is the final bell, in the final round, of an even fight. My brain and heart fought admirably and evenly, but one will be undoubtedly affirmed as victorious but the other will know for a fact that it wasn’t a fair fight. Those two parts of my thinking are always going to be at war. Logic vs. Emotion. But I need to let myself relax when I feel my gut stops the fight.

Currently I am dealing with heartbreak. When it ended, my brain said “I kept fucking telling you it wasn’t going to work, I tell you every time, listen to me for once” and then rolled its eyes and stormed off in frustration. On the other hand, my heart, the optimist, patted me on the back, told me I never need to worry about the “what if,” and then sat down and relaxed knowing it had done its job of keeping life colorful. I feel like it’s a paradox of processing of my emotions. Both my logic and heart are completely confident in their actions. Which is why I never know which way to go. It’s not that I don’t trust myself, I guess I trust myself too much.

Now, I’m looking back at all the moments I spent with her, because thats what happens. People say you see the past in 20/20. In this case, thats not the case. I relive the fight between my logic and emotions. I relive it like I don’t know the outcome. I see the rounds in which my brain conquered and the rounds in which my heart emerged victorious. And I see the affirmation of truth held by each.

Leading up to the end of having this person in my life, my gut made its call and I should have trusted it. It would have saved me a lot of mental strain. I felt the drop. While my brain and heart continued fighting each speaking their own truths, my gut knew what we had was over when she started calling me “Chris” and not “Christopher”.

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on my life during the pandemic. I haven’t thought of this website in forever but every couple months I find myself back on here, writing. All the content on this site falls into mental categories for me now.

The first category I will call “pretentious and naive perspective on my life.” I thought I had it all figured out. I look back and cringe over some of my sentences but I acknowledge the stepping stones towards progression aren’t a paved road.

The second category is childhood, the earliest posts on the site. Nonsensical posts which were the rambling of a 4th grade child. My take away is the happiness I used to derive from the simplest things. I could find entertainment in a train of thoughts. I remember being a kid, and liking to trace my train of thought and see where it would end up, a source of happiness fished from my brain. My thoughts were fun to explore. Now a thought, the one which contemplates confronting its mental peers, is a source of stress one which

The last category is accurate, things that still resonate with me, most of what goes into this category is a sentence or two pulled from a couple of my posts.

Now to the original thing I meant to write. I found an old journal of mine, my plan is to go back and pull words from my past into my present. As with the content on this site, everything in the journal falls into the aforementioned categories. The subject of the journal entry was a drawing, linking the past, present, and future with directional arrows and short phrases.

I’ll start in the present.

In the present, I look to the future as it is more hopeful than the past. Nostalgia from the past stains the present and future. The pain of the past lives on in the present and is alleiviated by the future. Looking to both the past and future is easier than examining the present. The existence of the unknown, the simplest fear, connects the past to the future, but not the present to the future? “Trying to escape comparisons” connects the the past to the present and the present to the future.

Looking at the drawing, I see no positive ideas moving into to the graphical representation of the present.

A friend once told me “depression is living in the past, anxiety is living in the future, happiness is living in the present.

Just sitting on my couch, feeling all contemplative but I have no idea what I am thinking about. I seem to be doing a lot of that these days. I don’t need to be anywhere, I just want to know where I am going. I just reread that and almost gagged on my own words because I sound so dumb.

I miss having something to aggressively fight for.

-CA

I used to feel broken and full but now I feel stable and empty.

very simply put, I just realized how much I have changed over the past few years and honestly I don’t like who I am as much as the old me. I am in the “best” position I have ever been, good health, great mental health, low stress, and I would always like to improve but I am confident with my character.  I have improved in many ways but certain things I used to love about my life are out of reach both literally and metaphorically.

I am sitting, realizing that I have fallen out of touch with a positive part of me that used to exist when I considered myself a broken individual.  That positive aspect amidst pain became my personal understanding of my identity. That’s gone and I don’t know who I am  As I sit and write this, my mind is being flooded with all of the highs and lows of the past 6 years and I’m sad thinking of how much of my previous life seems to not be a part of my current life.  At times, and if I could, I think I would relive my darkest days because they were constantly mixed into the happiest moments of my life.

I know that tomorrow I will wake up unable to connect to the mood I am in now, a mood I have been wanting to feel for such a long time now.  In justification to myself of why I am writing this, I guess I hope that if I see this tomorrow I will remember the fact that who I was, can still be who I am, and that I guess what lies ahead is trying to mold together the past and present.

//Looking back on some of my old posts, I am  thinking to myself that they are “the written version of the ‘flow’ haircut I had in middle school.” The posts, like the haircut,  made sense at the time.  In retrospect, everything about that time period, especially the thoughts pouring out of my head were just too ridiculous not to question what I was thinking.  I don’t even know if I identify as the CaucasianAsian anymore.

Aanywayz i try not to think too much about stuff that doesn’t really matter in my life and I’m currently failing

I am currently just bored out my mind sitting in my living room. I don’t want to sleep but its too late to really do anything else.   As of late the only thing that brings me clarity is water.  Like swimming or surfing or taking a shower at the end of the day.

I have always said the best super power would be teleporting, and to a certain extent I still agree with that. joweverg; if i could do anything right now in terms of ability it would be the ability to accurately articulate the ideas in my head and emotions i feel in the form of art.  i don’t even care if people would ever see or appreciate my art i just want to know i am still in connection with and understand myself

I want to try something new videography, carpentry, music production, flower arrangement, fuckin basket weaving idec I just haven’t been connecting with photography lately and its been my go to medium of self understanding for so long.  I used to feel that having a good eye for photography meant understanding who you were as a person, what you valued, and what you saw beauty in, and my mind is kind of blank

I am not going to stop taking photos but I feel like I need to find myself before I can make my best work

//Maybe in order to find what I am looking for, I need to stop thinking that rules exist when it comes to self expression.  I suppose I do not need to be 100% authentic to myself in everything I make.  If I create enough “stuff,” and each piece has a little piece of me within it, then doesn’t that mean something?

as i type this i realize that i don’t even know if i have an answer to the rhetorical question previously posed and i was hoping that i would ask myself a question which i knew the answer too and i would find something that meant something else

When encountering writer’s block, what is best… to push on through it and be… less(is that the word I want?) , or to take a calculated step back and reassess the creative goals?

My whole life, I have either been unhappy and knowing of exactly what I need to be happy, or happy and knowing of what to avoid in order to remain happy.  Now, I am just neutral with very little understanding of anything.

I just want to understand myself again.

I just revised my first section of text in this post and realized that all of my ideas from the past, the bowl cut, the post about pasta, feeling as though I understood myself, it all existed because it felt right at the time.  They were all ridiculous.  What I am thinking now is ridiculous. This post is ridiculous.

alright I’m going to cut the existential bullshit. I think I am just going to maybe like stop putting pressure on myself to know everything I could. at the moment.

rules are exhausting

I am sitting on a plane, which is flying from Boston to Los Angeles.

Here are my thoughts.

I am moving to California. A few months ago, I posted a photo of my arm online. On my arm, I wrote a date and time with words saying “at this moment, I knew I was about to discover something BIG.” I am one step closer to discovering what that is. Before my flight this morning, I was at home (wow riveting). I was calm about making this life change but I also kept telling myself “this is fucking crazy, what I am I doing?”

A few weeks ago, I realized that I am not afraid to seek out what I truly want in life. I am not someone who waits for tomorrow to come in order to do what I really want. Despite not being afraid to follow my dreams, I am terrified of what I will do once I have them. Leaving for California was easy, but being away from home will be hard. I know for a fact that I need to spend the next 3.5 months of my life in California before visiting my family and friends again.

When I went to visit California before moving out, I sat on a roof top one night overlooking the ocean. It was an unreal scene but I had none of my close friends there to experience it with me. It felt so amazing and so empty. I will hate California at first, but I know I will grow as a person

When I left my friends, I said to them, “this is not the end, just an intermission.”

I don’t know what I am doing, I’m just going with whatever happens.

Sidenotes:
1) I am listening to a new playlist I made which is the title of this post.
2) I might post about how I came to realize I belong in California and why I left everything I know to go there.
3) I’m thinking about starting a music blog. My goal is write about new music I discover and how it fits into my life.
4) I cannot wait to take my photography to the LA streets
5) I’m going to start shooting video and making little edits.