November 8
it's been a while
Hey hello hi friends ٩(๑･ิᴗ･ิ)۶
I hope you are all doing well this chilly November evening (or hot November afternoon, if you’re in that part of the world). It has been a while since I wrote something on here, close to six months almost? Maybe? Life got weird after my last post and I couldn’t really handle writing or doing anything, really. I’ll talk more about this in a sec but I’d been thinking about writing a post for around the last month and I finally got the time to sit down and actually get myself to do it. I’m really happy to be writing to you all and I hope that you’ll find the time to read this one, because I think it’s going to be pretty long… :p
The last time I wrote, I was back in jakarta seeing my family after almost three years; I didn’t really have anyone except for my sister and cousin Arjun who understood all the weird feelings I was feeling, so I turned to my laptop to express my feelings. shortly after, I actually made friends back home who I grew to care about and love and miss and it was easier to feel safe and comfortable at home. but it was jarring at the same time because I felt strange being armaan who enjoyed being in jakarta, who didn’t fear going back home because of the community I grew up in or arguing with my mom or seeing my extended family whose livelihoods I felt at odds with. i’ll get to this a bit more later, but my extended family serves as a good segue into what has been going on since then. So my sister’s engagement party was shortly after my last post/email and I was really nervous about it, but it ended up going really well. I got really drunk and almost threw up, but I was the belle of the ball and it was just nice to remember what it felt like to have a big family in this world with me. where everything noticeably went wrong was the next morning when I had to wake up early to get on my flight to Bali. I was supposed to spend a couple days there by myself before my mom and sister joined me & I was really stoked to go on a little solo trip. and while bali was kinda ass to be by myself–it is basically a neo-colony–it also coincided with this weird mental health spiral I went on. essentially, my OCD got really bad right around then and it extended throughout my trip in Indonesia, where I had continuous intrusive thoughts in my head and it was difficult to live at all. I started taking ashwagandha supplements at home because I heard it was good for anxiety, which is intertwined with OCD, and it was fine but I knew I needed real help. I got this in montreal, I’ve been on meds since august and it’s been working well but I fully developed a case of depersonalization/derealization disorder that has not gone away since… It’s weird to talk about but dpdr is something that is pretty commonly associated with anxiety, OCD and cannabis use, which I use to abuse (clean for 3-4 ish weeks now!), and is really difficult to deal with. Essentially, it is the brain’s response to an uncomfortable or really anxiety inducing situation; when you get there, it just shuts off and you feel very disconnected and out of your body.
Dpdr is waking up in the morning and looking at your hands to figure out if you’re real, it’s staring at the mirror and twitching my mouth to see if my reflection does the same, it’s looking at your best friend and wondering if your memories have always been real. It’s looking around the room and then to God begging to feel real, or smoking cigarettes to actually bathe in the gross feeling after putting it out; it is hugging my cat as much as I can as if I’m trying to convey that I believe she is true, or staring at the people waiting for the bus and not understanding why the world works in that way. It is fucking terrifying to feel like this, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. it’s really up and down and takes up a lot of space in my brain, like I haven’t been able to really focus on too much outside of that and the immediate moment that I try to cherish. memory, music, films, my own art, my voice - all of it has kind of taken a step back the last while. which is strange because these aspects have been so important to me, so it’s like, who am I now? what life do I return to when my mind slips away? But I’m just trying to accept it, you know, and live my life. It’s been with me for long enough that I’m used to it now. And while it is debilitating, one thing it does is make me understand philosophy way more. All the musings about reality, human existence, our materiality, our purpose. It makes me feel less alone in this weird parallel universe of sorts.
I really like Julia Kristeva’s writings on the abject. From a Purdue summary of her essay Powers of Horror: ‘the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk.'
Or Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of exotopy: ‘the technique of turning the gaze onto the gazer, or looking at yourself from outside – literally ‘finding onself outside’. Exotopy is the ability to project yourself through another’s eyes, or better to hear yourself on another’s tongue, to remove your ‘self’ from the conditions of ‘self’ production, and project the complex of self production onto a resistant alternative subjectivity.’ I’m sure there are way more exploring the matter, since both Kristeva and Bakhtin really expand on Freudian and Lacanian theories of the formation of self and stuff, but I can’t really read too much about materiality and all its implications because I literally will freak out. something interesting though is that Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream is hypothesized to be depicting an experience of depersonalization. Daphne Simeon and Jeffrey Abugel write, “Alienation, isolation, and altered perceptions have for centuries served as themes for the visual arts, particularly modern art. Edvard Munch’s The Scream depicts the essence of a private hell and detachment from all things outside one’s self.”
I love this painting. I’ve always thought it was really cool (+ I’m a fan of the Scream film franchise, etc etc) but after reading about its interpretation as an ‘episode’ of sorts of dpdr, I’ve cherished it a lot more. The horror on his face is always on my mind. I wish I could give him a hug.
The film Tarnation (2003) by Jonathan Caouette is a documentary that explores the tumultuous relationship between the filmmaker and his schizophrenic mother. It was groundbreaking because it was a very experimental (and personal) film entirely edited on iMovie. Caouette actually has depersonalization and this is something explored in the film, of which I have linked below (with Czech subtitles lol). I watched most of Tarnation when I was in high school, I think. I don’t know how much I understood it at 16. It seems like one of those films you understand as you grow older, so I think I’m going to give it a go again tonight or tomorrow. And maybe I’ll watch it every couple of years or so, just to see how it fares as I age. The titular song from the soundtrack - Tarnation by Max Avery Lichtenstein - still makes my heart drop. Watch the clips below if you’d like, and if you want a link to the film just txt me & I’ll send it to you.
I also wanted to share some poems I wrote in the summer when I was feeling all these feelings a bit too much. I haven’t really shared them with many people yet, so enjoy :) Let me know what you think if you’d like < 3 ~
But anyways, I think that what I’m trying to emphasize is that the last few months, in all of its fucked up shit, has made it so much harder for me to actually ~do things~. Like, I haven’t taken a picture in so long. I have ideas, but everything can be so overwhelming. I hope that I’ll be able to get back into pictures and poetry and writing and all of that. I tell myself that I just kind of need to cherish where I am right now and take it easy. My friend Thea who moved away from Montreal this spring/summer has a sick newsletter in which they talk about what films and books they’ve been enjoying, in addition to just general thoughts and feelings. Kind of like this newsletter if it was more consistent and way more captivating to read :p but I loved this section of the last email I got from them.
“With lipstick bleeding, mascara clotted, my posture like those trendy standing lamps, and a smile that is unsure, I’m here now writing to you like a friend tells a friend about a new resolution, less as a commitment to the friend and more out of hope (we love hope) that in the act of taking the words from your stomach and putting them into the air, of dislodging them from inside and placing them out, the goal—now public, now shared, like water freezing on contact with air in a montreal winter—becomes something more solid and more likely, please, to come true. But hurry hurry up i need to make my point, my resolution. My point is that failure is hot and I want to relax into its insouciance. I do not want the languorous glamour of success. I want to trip myself up more. I want more clumsy messy failure, not in a hot sad girl way (a temporary layover to virality and #success). No, desperately, I want a permanent grinding orientation towards failure. I want to bathe in an ethic of not doing well and with no horizon in sight of doing better. “
Life is so strange. It’s so fucked but so beautiful at the same time. Maybe that’s just what living is supposed to be, to surrender?
quickly finishing my thoughts from back home… I’ve reflected on it a lot the last few months and I have realized I definitely feel a lot more displaced in Montreal after going home as compared to when I first moved to Calgary, then mtl and so on. It’s def a combination of mental health and general migrational/diasporic experiences but I really miss my family and my friends and my home and my ibu and the food and the smells I grew up with. It’s like I fell in love with home all over again. So in all, it was lovely to be able to do that.
School hasn’t been the best, obviously. I only really enjoy my one 400-level seminar class exploring the anticolonial film archive, I’m genuinely learning and contributing and it is aiding me in my future in terms of what I actually find joy in doing. The other three suck. It’s a combination of shit profs and just generally being over lecture classes since it’s my penultimate semester before graduating. I barely go to class and am a liiiittle nervous for my final assignments because I’ve never been this uninterested in school, but I’ll be fine. What I’m mainly focused on right now is figuring out my life: job? grad school? leave montreal? toronto? halifax? winnipeg? wish me luck ＼(〇_ｏ)／any advice is appreciated ofc (;;;*_*)
one thing that did happen recently, and this is probably where I’ll stop writing after, is this date I went on recently. if you are close to me, you’ve probably heard about this a lot (sorry about that) and I am definitely being way too emo about this but I realized that I need to reaaalllly cherish the times that I actually do feel deeply. not feeling anything is the worst possible thing in the world, so why do we shy away from it? I think that’s another thing dpdr has taught me, is to feel and feel and feel as hard as you can.
so I matched with a boy on tinder, thought he was so attractive and we chatted a bit before planning to hang out after my class on a monday. I didn’t really know what to make of it but I was really looking forward to it since our text conversations actually flowed v seamlessly. I usually hate texting tinder matches before dates, but this one was fun so I was kinda excited. he met me after class and I immediately realized shit this is genuinely the most beautiful guy I’ve gone out with *____* we got dinner, then drinks, then went to his house and read poetry to one another, chatted, slept, got breakfast the next morning, discussed our night, kissed goodbye, and parted ways. It was the best date I think I had ever been on in my life. I had forgotten what it felt like to feel butterflies in that way, to feel so worthy of that kind of attention, that kind of love. His kisses, his smile, the way he smelled. The way his face squirmed when the shower water got in his eyes. The hair on his chest, his armpits. Ah god I felt insane!!! I literally called my sister skipping home and telling her all about it. Thing is though, he had just gotten out of a four year long relationship which we talked about during breakfast. Even though we agreed that this was a really good night and that we should just take it easy and hang and let life take us wherever, I kind of had a feeling that he wouldn’t want to see me again. I don’t know, gut feeling. And that’s what happened.
I kinda knew so it was fine, but when we were talking about it (on text) I just kind of lost it like the conversation was so bittersweet.
I understand completely and it’s not like I dated this guy so I’m not like heartbroken, but I definitely was really upset about the shitty timing and missed connection and all that. It’d been a while since I had an experience like that, or was that attracted to a boy (physically, mentally) and it sucks that we couldn’t do anything now, but wow what a beautiful experience?! Pain is so beautiful. It reminds you what it feels like to be a human, and the amount I cried and the amount I pined just served as a reminder to myself that I am real and this is real and love is real. And he showed me that love like that is out there! So that’s pretty exciting.
I’m running out of space, so I’ll send another one wrapping up the email. Just some pictures and song/film recommendations :)
See u there ^___^