The debilitating attempts to package yourself neatly.
Outrunning
The idea of outrunning yourself is a well-trodden concept. The feeling of moving through low shutter-speed, remnants of our past remaining behind us: past mistakes, past regrets, past memories - haunting us atop the event horizon. We all want to outrun the things we don’t like about ourselves, of course, and I’m not going to try to arbitrarily explain the intricacies of my pacing as if I’m any different.
But why does everything I experience feel like the single most unique experience out of any experience that any human being has ever experienced? How is it possible that I’m able to so decisively convince myself that I am singularly positioned to feel the cascading feelings resultant from an entire life lived behind me? It’s so dumb.
I’m not sure what the point of this specific post is. I felt randomly compelled to start a substack today, on this very warm Sunday in May, a few days after my estranged father’s birthday (is it estrangement if I cut him out?) It’s been a few more days since I was on the edge of suicide. It’s been a few days more since a heartbreak crystallised around me. Again, the cascade of moments leads me to this moment here - this now moment - and I’m writing this post simply to say hello. I am here. I am trying to take space. I am trying not to outrun myself anymore.
I was in a club the other night, dancing. I am a social creature, and I love people, but I am also besotted by exile, even if it does nothing but torture my soul in the long-term. Perhaps, of course, I think I deserve that. So I’m in the club and I look around at all the other floor-dwellers, cutting shapes to daft donk sounds, and I want desperately to engage with them. Face toward that guy and just dance for a bit. Oh, there’s a pretty girl - make eye contact and smile. But I don’t. I never do. In these moments, I am faced with a chorus of long-exited people from my past telling me that I’m not worthy, that I will be rejected, that I am unwanted and my engagement with those around me will leave them politely nodding but internally befuddled. And so I don’t do it, I just continue dancing on my own.
This is what has led to my interesting relationship with intoxicants. Maybe if I drink enough, I will no longer be in control of my faculties, and I can try again. I will outrun my anxieties and the choral criticisms behind my ears. Yet I never get that drunk these days. My anxieties know the shape of my defense mechanisms so well that they can effortlessly outlap them. The voices sit right behind my eyes and there’s nothing I can do. Okay, perhaps MD will do the trick - drop a bomb, wait 45 minutes, and then you will be whirlpooled by euphoria. You’ll no longer be you - you’ll be a “high person,” and with it, you can exhibit the known tropes of the drug - so if you’re rejected, it’s not you being rejected, it’s the drug.
Yet when I’m high as fuck, I still can’t outrun myself. So I’ll take more. I’ll keep trying to run away. Run run run.
In this moment, I gained a deep sense of clarity. The tectonic plates of my world - the infrastructure of my emotions - have all shifted drastically in the last year. Every time I face it, I quantify it differently: it’s the last week where the change really occured; it’s the last month where things started shifting; it’s the last year where everything metamorphised. I find that, even through transformation, I try and quantify, and understand - and it’s because I’m trying to outrun the need to give in to the transmutation of my soul. I want to control it, so I quantify it, and keep it at arm’s length as a result. I always want to pin-point the moment of change, rather than just feeling it. But here, on the dance floor, I felt it.
I am not who I wish I was. I am not the wildly successful filmmaker with a beautiful brain who everyone can’t wait to talk to. I am not the interesting facts or articulate vocabulary that I bestow upon others. I am not my taste in music. I am not the films I watch. I am not the words I write. I am only who I am in this very moment.
I scanned the room and looked at the other punters, all in their own worlds, all dancing away. I want so desperately to be seen, but I want to be the architect of what is seen. I want them to see the version of me I wish I was. I have spent my entire adult life doing this. In fact, I’ve spent my entire life doing this. But I am only who I am, right now. My worth is in just being who I am. I can’t outrun a version of me that doesn’t even exist. If I try, all I end up doing is defining the version of me that does exist as a mirage, a blur of pink and curls.
So here I am, in this moment now, on the warm Sunday in May, taking the decision to take space in the world for the first time. I know that those who know me will think I already take up so much space - my personality is littered in bravado and arrogance - but you shouldn’t listen to someone when they tell you who they are, you should listen to someone when they try desperately to tell you who they’re not, and reverse-engineer from there. I am just a sensitive boy trying to reassemble decades of trauma, and abuse, and isolation, and I’m trying to say to myself: these don’t have to be who I am. I don’t have to announce to the world all the things I wish I was, I just have to embody the things I already am, and go from there.
I think that’s a good starting point.