1/25/26 - 1/30/26: "I just really like radishes."
1/25/26
“Am I even saying it right?” That feeling in the pit of your stomach where you’re looking for the right words but you can’t find them and you truly believe if you do uncover them it’ll solve an important issue you’re having. But they’re nowhere to be found, and so the issue will never be resolved and instead you’ll just be left with the chasm of ache in your stomach that always loves to show up in the middle of unsolvable problems to remind you how much anxiety no control gives you.
I can put a lot of responsibility on the shoulder of words to save the day. I want them to always be able to. But sometimes only time and silence helps a situation.
A no-words existence feels quite good to me now. Especially amidst this tangled mess of feeling I’ve been swimming in lately. Wordlessness feels important.
Who am I without my glasses, headlamp, headphones, cellphone, and melatonin? Who am I without these nighttime accoutrements? When it’s just me with bad eyesight, staring at the blurry ceiling with my swirling thoughts, and the sound of the fan going? Who am I all by myself at night lying in bed? I always wonder how people feel all by themselves in their heads. I always want to look inside and see what it’s like and maybe take a picture. Does it look like a painting? A mountain range? A calm bouquet of thoughts?
I love how beauty doesn’t have to explain why it’s beautiful in order to be beautiful. It just is. You may not really understand why you find it beautiful, but you do. And maybe you’re so captivated by this beauty that it feels like you’re it’s captive. Beauty holds your attention. It holds you and you don’t want to let go because it feels soft and fresh and freeing and like a home you want to stay in forever. A safe home. And it is.
I’ve had In-and-Out for dinner two nights in a row now.
I went on a friend outing tonight to an art exhibition of the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I felt a particular connection to her and the forms her expression took through language, performance, ceramics, and video. She even had this large textile piece hanging from ceiling to floor. Long pieces of fabric that sometimes didn’t seem to want to hold, like they were coming apart but they weren’t. Like how I’ve felt lately.
I’m finding I can only handle time nowadays in very small increments. Thinking about only right now is ideal, but sometimes a day is okay, too. A week max. Everything that dangles far outside the borders of right now makes me far too anxious at the moment. I’m incredibly worried about certain things working out and I find that giving my mind time parameters translates to calmness.
1/26/26
I’m looking for lasting love. But I’m exhausted now. I quit. There was someone who I was excited by. Who was easy to talk to and my whole body was telling me “yes, this is the right person”. I felt drawn to them and their company felt comforting. Like something I finally found and I could relax now because I found it. I could be excited now because I found this very real thing that is the thing I’ve always been looking for. But life has a way of making something that feels straightforward complicated.
I think the only time I can make sense of anything is when I’m quiet. And even then, not always because some things are empty of any sense. I crave quiet right now. Where is it? I’ll close my eyes and look.
January is almost over. Cancer lingers in my mom still. A deep longing lingers in me. My only goals before the end of the month are to finish a painting and finish a book.
I was reading Reddit tonight: “…but in my case, it’s been true: when it’s the right person, you just know they are different.”
7 p.m.:
In the locker room showers at the pool the people next to me are talking about food. “I just really like radishes.”
I spend 84 laps in the pool tonight thinking about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and how she died at 31. I think of all the art she didn’t get to make and all the life she didn’t get to live. When she found ceramics she would spend all night at the studio. I imagine her newfound obsession to pottery felt similar to my own.
Later on tonight I was thinking a lot about the line between passion, obsession, and addiction. In the past I cheekily and simplistically equated passion with obsession. I know lines can get extremely blurry, but I now realize they’re very different things. And I feel like addiction and passion can easily get confused for one another. With what I was reading, addiction kind of eats at you and leaves you with nothing, while passion feeds you and keeps filling your cup, so to speak. Obviously they’re both intense feelings with a lot of overlap, and maybe you can feel both of them at the same time, which would make things extra confusing.
1/30/26
When does your soul die? When you give up? And what exactly would it look like if a soul died? Like the inside of a mountain that was made of bubbles and flutes and flying platypus just melting away in a painful display of despair? Maybe this is what it would look like if a particularly playful soul died.
I’ve been noticing all the explanations of who we are in daily life. The ones asked of us, and the ones we give freely to others. There are just so many explanations in general. It’s tiring to think of. At least today it is.
I can’t control it. Most of life really. It’s been in an especially uproarious upheaval. Life sometimes starts to feel like one big, strange science experiment that is slowly dismantling any small sense of control I thought I still possessed.
And without control things are scary. And that’s where the pain can seep in. I think of it like a growing crack in a large dam that’s been keeping the weight of things at bay, but the water is falling through that cement crack, and more cracks are forming, and the structure will eventually completely break unless the original structural damage is fixed.
I see faces everywhere. On the sidewalk, in the architecture of the buildings, in a crumbled up blanket, a pile of dirty clothes. They’re all around me and it’s kind of comforting. If I could take a poll of everyone on the planet, I’d love to ask people if they see faces everywhere, too. I’d conduct a secondary pole to the ones that said “yes” that just asked bluntly “do you wanna be my friend?”
What does it mean when people don’t choose you? When you get rejected by someone, how does it change you inside? When someone doesn’t want to spend time with you for whatever complicated reason they have, how many gallons of tears do you cry? I ask questions so often that don’t really have simple answers.
There was someone who recently broke things off with me after three months of dating. I wasn’t too effected by it after the fact because I didn’t have strong feelings for them. I’m unclear why I kept dating them.
There’s someone else I have strong feelings for. These feelings for him started growing since September of last year. I was really taken with him right off the bat. Something about us being together felt magnetic and natural. I had that feeling like we’ve known each other for a long time already. And also the feeling that we were supposed to know each other. The moments I got to be with him were very comforting. I found them to be beautiful. Inside those moments time didn’t exist for me. And that is always the barometer for the things in my life I know are right for me. I started to feel sweet on him so quickly. So many soft and gushy feelings.