On the 8th of January in 2024 – so a little over a year ago – I wrote ‘This Feeling’ on my Threads account. I have been taking a trip back through blogs and social media (Threads and Instagram), pulling together documents on my PC so I can map where my words have been. I may not go back more than somewhere in 2020, I don’t know. I walk the meandering path until it peters out, then wait for the next path-head to emerge from a Fog we humans often refer to as reality.
The speed at which life has travelled from 2020 to 2025, and even from January 2024 to today, gives me the sensation of living inside of a mystery. My days go neither forward nor back, each one appears as a 24 hour repetition of the one before, with small variances selected it seems from a drop-down options list of limited number. This sensation became especially noticeable from the end of 2019. I expect that there are differences, but they accrue in tiny allotments, over the entirety of which is pervasive exhaustion. Most exhausted is my attention to things called ‘life goals’, ‘achievements’ – I do not feel that they are essential to living, nor the purpose of it, yet the social complex of the human race continues to speak about these things as if they are divinely mandated, a functioning of proper evolutionary development.
How the dialogue of productivity with which we are bombarded continues to be the dominant control after centuries of enlightened oral and written wisdom to the contrary baffles my wits, which perhaps are too slow to understand the pervasively simple nature of human consciousness. It is a small thing locked beneath the Earth’s atmosphere; a fish in a bowl believing itself to be a bird and left to imagine what being a bird is. And not just any bird – a powerful bird, a clever bird, a stunning bird, a talented bird, the best bird that it can be, based on its understanding of what birds are, all whilst it is a fish and not yet even familiar with the wind much less the clouds.
So now I come to this stream of words I wrote a little over a year ago. I believe that I was speaking about being a fish, told to be a bird, being given little choice in the matter by environment, society, pervasive opinions which bang louder than a child on aquarium glass. I am in persistent opposition to human life expectations, so much so that for the majority of my hours I ignore what the human library has to offer. I ignore it because it hurts, like breathing car fumes when taking a deep breath of gumtree scented air after long-awaited rain. I don’t think that being human will ever stop hurting, be it mentally or physically. So I will continue to write about that sensation, looking back across my words occasionally to see if anything in my experience of life has altered.
May your own day flow kinder than you are accustomed to, Sherri-Lee.
Published on: Threads @between.speak Date: 08/01/2024
This Feeling in my nerve bundles today goes something like this
Poisoned, twisted, toxic, enforced logic squeezing limbs seeking unimprinted atmosphere. This is life, this is how I should be, how I should think, how I should act. A smile should be my companion, kind and gentle benevolence to settle the assumption of innocence.
But I revile, I deny, I object.
Don’t look for me if you want a captain to agree to your belief.
I hate it.
Your world is perverse, a faux perfume mixed of hallucinogens;
My emanations which you call emotions overwhelm it, while it preserves
itself with ridiculous knowings to subjugate my innate awareness.
If I could tear this feeling from my solar plexus it would be a blood-blackened
rose,a wind-howled vortex, nothing you can use; a Spectre’s heart.
It will be the manure for my garden, grown above your disease,
and I won’t let you come with me.
Also published on The Nothing in Between
Image by Zoltan Tasi
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