Old me vs New me

If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see, I'd put you in the mirror I put in front of me.

Old me was a planner, I used to be booked like two weeks in advance from any given date or experience. And if you tried to reach me, there'd be like a 24 hour turn around because I would be doing things until then. Emails phone calls etc would generally not get through. New me lives a deeply unstructured life, like people ask me what I'm doing today and I have no answer to that question. There is generally a bin of things I could do today or some day but which of those eventuates depends on my mood a lot, and I don't really know from one 15 minute interval to the next what my decision will be. It makes a lot more sense to ask me what I have done because I know the past.

Old me was super social and active, out five nights a week fairly reliably. New me goes out maybe once a month? Jeremy is still out twice a week and also those nights I tend to go home on my own instead of home with him. New me does not socially organise, where old me was the social planner of my group. And I'm calling my close friends, people I love or have known a long time, but not the more casual connections I used to socialize with at all. I also for the first time in years do not have any plan or process to bring new people into my life.

This means new me is alone a lot. Old me was alone up to one night a week but new me is alone all day every day and about three nights a week. Aficionados of old me should be impressed at my failure to have a mental breakdown under this stimulus. New me is lonely, but interestingly, not a lot more lonely than old me. I'd say the version of me who saw hundreds of people a day felt intense pangs of loneliness about half to three quarters the amount of time that the version of me who has between one and three in person human relations does.

New me is not engaged in any political activism or volunteerism for now that I think of it the first time in my adult life. And it's getting to be a break that feels longer than a transition.

New me doesn't listen to a lot of music, but is listening on an infinite loop to a lot of podcasts, news stories, editorial kind of thinking about the world in which we live.

New me is quieter. This is a change that's been happening for a long time, influenced by Jeremy, but a thing I think a lot of people close to me have managed not to notice about me, because I do still get loud and sassy and performative when I'm in public or tipsy or happy or excited. But my average is quieter, more serious, less inclined to say everything I think or know and it's a sea change I think people don't notice about me to their own peril.

But speaking of thinking, old me had this mile a minute frission mind, drawing conclusions, having ideas, synthesizing inputs and spewing out patterns theories thoughts conclusions. If you asked me what I was thinking and I said nothing I inevitably meant it's too involved and wordy to be worth explaining, or I don't think you'll be interested, or that's a part of me you don't like, or I don't think you'll understand, or there's four things and I can't sort them out right now, never really nothing. But now if I said nothing, I might really mean nothing, or not much. I don't think a lot of things anymore, and the things I do think are more hesitant, or diffident. Some of this is simple aging, a great gift of growing older is uncertainty.

But some of it is like I'm listening, hard for the voice of god. And it's told me things but they're not the kind of terribly well structured or relevant things. But I am listening to a lot of voices right now. I'm reading a lot, and I'm listening to a lot of podcasts, and I'm walking a lot, and I'm alone a lot, and I'm not talking a lot. So one thing I heard and this took a couple months could largely be summed up by that stuff I wrote about Brisbane last year, the specialness of my town and that part of my life.

And there's another thing which I don't know fully what it is yet, but is about Marlon James, and Toni Morrison, and the war between the sides of you and how you can be a slave in your heart or kill them all but neither of those things is you and the part that's you is more like the part that will jump off the cliff and fly. And then that thread is also connected to Marley and the redemption song thing and how everyone around the world loves Marley and the ecstasy of punk rock and the bands where the love is the music and sufferahs lifting up their voice and places where you can't write the ugliness because you make it too beautiful. There's a war on and it's inside you.

And there's a third thing that I know what it is even less that comes from sort of the Cuban People, which feels like it should have those capitals and salsa is life and it is everyone's responsibility to be sexy and how if you were here you would never know that you weren't good enough because there would never have been an industry of people tasked with telling you that you weren't good enough so you just wouldn't know that you were too old and too fat and not in the right clothes and not when you get right down to it very good at this there would just be do you salsa yes/no salsa. And that's related to but not the same as the way that there's just this absence a bit like stepping on a stair that isn't there of people in Africa hating your whiteness. It's a jolt but it's wrapped up in this thing where no one has time to question or undermine good things that come up cause you're not vouchsafed an oversurfeit of them or something the stuff in Africa is not right but there's something there something with the difference between a politeness culture and a friendliness culture and something about the layering of identity and language Lara/Congolese/African or Jesus I forget/Tanzanian/Swahili and the smell of the border between gentle tranquility and sudden violence and the ability to contain really diverse things in a place that is also in another way all one thing.

And there's a fourth thing I just said to Bharath yesterday about how you want to fight the real battles but there's all this petty shit and egos and factions and people stopping you. And I know I know in my heart that the solution cannot be to take these people out so then you can do what you want because it's this Hatfield McCoy thing where those people somehow keep multiplying and who even knows who started it and who's defending themselves, and then there's the other solution where you just stand there fighting the good fight and lose every time which is not fun but maybe worth it if it's valuable but then again maybe it isn't valuable. And then there's quitting which is what I'm doing right now but also does not feel like a real solution, and then there's Toney's solution, quitting institutions but not goodness and you know, acting locally, individual giving, helping your neighbors and all that stuff which does demonstrable good but then my mind and body rebels against it because it doesn't solve the Cambodia thing, the Yemeni thing, the Sudanese thing even the fucking Malawi thing hell even the Glenwood thing that we live in a walled garden where everyone with any kind of power and resources is carefully separated from people with any need so a disaster in New Orleans will raise ten times the caring and resources than the same one in Pakistan because we just will not understand that geography does not make us more and less human than each other. Ok so so none of that is a solution right but there's gotta be somewhere where people are pulling an oar and they're probably not even that hard to find but I'm not ready yet and the whole scene has something to do with power too dogs tearing at the one bone of power but I don't know how yet.

Ok so none of these make very good answers to questions like what are you doing with your life and what do you do all day and what are your plans and how long do you think it's ok for Jeremy to support you. Which are the questions I get from the world and for which I have no answers, no more answer than I did a year ago. Except maybe the answer that I'm listening, listening to god and I think he'll tell me when he's ready. But I'm not sure of that.

Nor do I think these insights are necessarily more profound than the ones I used to have when I was working full time and volunteering part time and had a full social life on the side but they're what I've got.

New me is also moved to tears super easily. I've been reading more poetry and also books and also YouTube videos. Not really sorrow tears but like moved, love and beauty and loss stuff but even where it's a really silly context anything with that sentimental feelscape and I'm there, tender and full. I don't know what that means at all yet.

Also I'm pretty sure I'm happy and content but I'm not totally sure.

Also here's another thing I'm not sure about, if the subtle avoidance in my own mind of the parts of my life and heart I cannot face and fear will hurt me are making it impossible for me to progress or be reborn. My whole process is about the connectivity of the subconscious and conscious mind so you just know what you need because you know who you are like the way magic works. But if you want to block off and hide from stuff that you are you lose access to a lot of other stuff like when I went sane and so couldn't go to my land anymore. That's possible but also possibly irrelevant and also by engaging with some of this stuff you can make it worse or just be ridiculous and I am at the core of me, ridiculous. Like prufrock right?

Ok thank you, for listening.