Just Keep Swimming

I read manga. That's in the past tense, by the way. I haven't had much time to do so, nowadays. When I do indulge myself on a dreary weeknight after a stressful day, I find myself going back to the series I enjoyed a lot—mostly Tokyo Ghoul, appreciating the foreshadowing of the events that unfold which had, when I first read it, caught me by surprise.

That's how I am looking at this blog today. Qualitatively and subjectively, I am no different than how I was in 2020. If the last half-decade were a Silksong theme, it'd be Greymoor. There's a stagnation that has enveloped my life. Reading back through my posts dating 2019, 2015, 2020 randomly, I see the unhealthy patterns that plague my mind today present years back; only that they were not obviously harmful or sometimes enabled. Since then I have been plucked by the current of "the way the world usually works", removed from my accommodating substrata, and am lost in the deep ocean. Sounds very dramatic, like Dory's story from Finding Nemo; except, Dory had initiative.

If any behaviour has been trained into my mind, it is chasing interests; and unfortunately, these interests have never been constant, coming and going. I see them, I chase them, like a dog chasing a squirrel. I am a sailing vessel on the open seas, going wherever the wind feels like taking me... or abandoning me. The trade winds have left me in the doldrums.

Of course, I'd like to do what I want to do. There are two hurdles: One is getting out of the present situation, and the second is figuring out what it is that I want to do. When chasing interests bore no fruit, my minds instinct wasn't the spiritual realisation that chasing interests is ultimately futile. It concluded that I wasn't chasing enough. The problem with that is that the size of your sails matters none at all if there is no wind. To get out, I have to row my way out, and I have no oar. I have but the direction of home, so I've to get back there. However tempting to the mind it may be to be a doldrum-faring Robinson Crusoe, it's prudent to remember that he survived because Providence landed him on an island.

Movies often cut from the shipwrecking storm to the protagonists being washed ashore. It'd feel nice to sometimes have that option available. But the movie's like Life of Pi, and I don't have a Richard Parker. I have me, my mind that I've to deal with, and my body which feels heavier and heavier with the ticking of the tempus constrictor.

As 'usual', all posts on this blog are first drafts with zero revisions. I did use this blog relatively continuously (now that I have dwarfed all previous 'breaks' with this 6-year one) from 2015 to 2020, which were important formative years. So, it makes sense to continue posting here. I did briefly move to Instagram and then Tumblr, but there are eyes there. They're there here, too, but the ones here feel more like my eyes. This is a first (post in a while), so I don't know how it's gonna go from here on out. I don't even know, and I highly doubt, if anyone else even notices or remembers this back pocket of the internet from over a decade ago.

If there is anything to learn from Dory, it is to just keep swimming.

Further, further.