For the longest time, my biggest fear has been forgetting. I started writing a diary at a very young age because I wanted to remember things the way girls in TV shows did - slumped over their desks, dim lamplight spotlighting the page, manic handwriting scratching out the events of the day. I filled endless notebooks with my adventures and, as my feelings became more complex, I wrote about my constant, exhausting feelings. I was fairly convinced I was writing for an audience of the future, who would stumble across my little words and know what it was like to be me. I've really struggled to think of myself as an artist. Writing poetry or film criticism is not what takes up the bulk of my days and, as a result, does not make up the sum of my life. Shifting into 'art production mode' is not something that comes easy to me simply because most of my day is taken up by trying to stay alive. Much of why I stopped writing a diary and, to a lesser extent, stopped using this blog as ...
The past few of years have been marred with a kind of weightlessness. There have been and continue to be people who joke about still feeling stuck in 2019, how it doesn't feel as though it was 6 years ago at all, how it's hard to feel present when time feels like it's constantly being stolen from us. Not just pandemic-wise, but spending most of our lives working jobs we don't like or in bus stations, waiting to get to those jobs or pretty much just anywhere that isn't with people who value us beyond what labour we can provide for them. As a result, I have formed some theories about why I seek out things I know will disturb me or piss me off. In my abandoned blog post on disturbing media I attempted to write a couple of years ago, I argued that affect is very grounding and that taking the cultural litmus test of what you can and can't endure keeps you assimilated to a certain extent, even if it's based on having an overly negative reaction to a taboo topic. ...