Mirror Falls (Redemptive Abjection)

I've been feeling so much lately.

I can't seem to help it. It's overwhelming, almost comical at times -- walking from the IDS to my apartment I actually stopped in my tracks and watched three rabbits crouched beside one another in the moonlight. They scattered when I started walking again.

This kind of emotionality can be absorbing, but it never strikes me as a waste of time. I've spent so much time repressing, wandering without wondering, that it feels vital now, even replenishing, to take care of my emotional self. You wouldn't be wrong to think this screams of triviality or privilege, but you wouldn't be right either.

To paraphrase one of my friends: Whatever feels most important in your life at any given time is the most important thing in your life. For the past five semesters, I've done a good job convincing myself that school or innocuous resentments were critical. I've been selfish, neurotic, and careless. I am still these things (they are me when I least want to be them, and in rejecting them, I reject me).

But these things aren't nearly as important as selfishly spending time on my/yourself.

Let me be selfish: Another one of my dear friends has said where most people filter their thoughts before saying what they want to say, I myself just say whatever first comes to my mind.

I do.

Because of this, it's been hard to trust myself as a friend, brother, son. I rarely know where "I" is coming from. But I can't help but bring whatever this is and whatever I'm feeling to you. I'm almost always seeing you to see me. It helps me feel better.

For everything I've felt, there have been few times when I've gotten it out. Lately I've been doing better. I've confronted contradictions within myself I'd been too afraid or too ashamed to admit. I've unlocked memories I'd spent years missing. I've made myself wide awake.

This isn't self-improvement (I still make more mistakes than I know) and it's not self-enlightenment (I'm safer in the dark most of the time).

I have much to regret. I have much to look forward to. I have much to be silent about. I also have much to be vocal about. I have stories with which to alarm you, disappoint you, impress you. If we want to wake up, we should be telling stories to ourselves and each other all the time. Remembering. Representing.

Some of you know most of my stories and most of you know some of my secrets. I wish all of you knew more. I've shared my poetry and I've shared my sensitivity, much of it through this very blog. It's not a terribly new thing to do, or particularly courageous. But maybe it will help when so many of us seem to be plunging ourselves into difficult situations without remembering what can matter to us.

So I'm writing this now -- sentimentally and transparently -- to tell you to hang on. There are so many of you I care about, but only find time to see when my eyes are closed. This can't make up for all the times I'm missing you, but it's for you anyway.

I want all of us to make eye contact between classes. I want us to think about how and what we're thinking. I want us to try to learn about each other. It's how we'll survive. When it's all too easy to get caught up in homework and partying and our endless commitments, we forget how easy it is not to get caught up in it. 

Our business is seductive clutter in the way of our reflections. When the mirror falls out of our view because of undue work, we have to remind ourselves what we should be looking for. We might not even like what we see, but that's no excuse not to see it.

We need not plateau or stagnate. We need not get comfortable or get bored. We need not forget what we can feel.

While it's easy for me to say we should all wake up and see what a wonderful life we're living, it's also easy for me to say this isn't an easy life to live. If we're feeling everything, and feeling each other feel everything, we've got a lot of work to do. All this on top of the thankless work we're already supposed to be doing. It's everything time.

I doubt we'll find ourselves in the coming years, but we might find something of ourselves in each other or in what we do and make and say and think. Maybe we'll find something or someone to care about.

For that'd be worth feeling so much.