Shiver at the Center

I appreciate that my dad spent a lot of time writing in journals around me for my whole life - it’s a helpful habit that I am grateful to have picked up. Currently, there are 3 types of notebooks in my house that I use at least on a weekly basis, but mostly daily. One is a journal that I use more for remembering. It’s full of specific dates and details, names and feelings and things to work on in therapy. It’s probably the one that most resembles teen girl diaries full of secrets and longings and “you’ll never guess what happened today”’s. I like these to be smaller and beautiful and I am very intentional about filling every page chronologically. An archive of my life. Another that is new to me this year is more about the physical body and noticing our internal cycles and feelings - this “Cycles Journal” is where I track things like specific emotions and fatigue and energy and pain. It gives me the data behind “wow how long have I been feeling like shit?” Shout out to Genevieve for recommending this incredible tool to me.

The last notebook I use is more specifically dedicated to song-writing, free-writing, prose, garden notes, emotion expressing, and a lot of other little things in between. I rarely put a date on these pages and they’re often not in any specific order. These are usually some sort of composition notebook and I have many from different years in every room in the house for easy grabbing in a moment of inspiration. When I’m in a really good creative phase in my life, I’m often waking up early and doing some artists’ way type of bullshit and just free-writing immediately before I’ve ever really woken up fully. This is why these notebooks are my favorite to reflect on. Often I’ll find writings I don’t remember - thoughts that I know I eventually turned into lyrics or conversations, but they exist here in their raw form. I wanted to share a couple of those that I stumbled across this morning. These are just from February this year, and I only remember the feelings and not the act of writing them:

I like this one a lot because I like to follow some of the thoughts from their source. This one is easy because I told myself who I was listening to. The title song on the new Mount Eerie album has a line about “so what if no one ever finds this notebook.” It made me think about ego and audience and the importance of writing just to write. And obviously (to me), I listened to more than one Mount Eerie album that day because the “sleeping at the bookstore” line is from the song Widows on Lost Wisdom Pt. 2. Sometimes I worry that I listen to so much music that my own memories and thoughts are too intertwined with lyrics to be able to full tell the difference between what is mine and what is something I loved. Maybe they are the same thing. Maybe that’s the point.

Here is another one from what looks to be the same week:

I like how these sorts of writings flit between a place of diary and prose. This free space in my brain where I’m not looking for the song yet but I’m letting my feelings grow into something more than just documentation.

I’m coming off of a couple of months of feeling very outside of my body - in that piece of writing above, I’m basically disgusted that someone looked at me with awooga eyes at a party, which just tells me wow I was feeling crazy uncomfortable in my physical form. In February, a medication I have been on for years was increased and affected my hormones in a way I wasn’t prepared for/aware of for 2 months. I’ve been dealing with fatigue and dysphoria in a way I never have before. It’s been getting better for the last two weeks and I think the bulk of the issue is now resolved, but it left me in this disconnected space that felt really unfamiliar. One of the ways I like to get back to myself is by reading these notebooks all over my house. Little lifelines from my past self to say “hey! here you are! look where you have been and look at all these sounds that make you.”

I’ve been picking up old songs I thought were finished and giving them new edges. I’ve been painstakingly picking up precisely one million little rocks in the yard and cleaning them and moving them and figuring out where to put them next. I’ve been preparing for my best friend Jordan to be here in a few weeks and play at Kilby Block Party with me and the band next month. (!!!!) I’ve been thinking about these cycles of arrived and departed and arrived again that I’m trying to get more comfortable with. How lucky to experience them at all.

I have been really loving the new album from Dutch Interior. Every time I think I figured out what else they remind me of, they change direction. It feels appropriate for this season. I also have been really loving revisiting Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville lately. I think it’s the perfect chaotic springtime album.

I’m reading “The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett and Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine. 

I’m trying to only read the news after 10am. But no time block can protect you from the heartbreak and violence this country is inflicting on our neighbors and loved ones every day. I am dreaming of a world where a free Palestine thrives and we are encouraged to cross boarders in search of better lives into welcoming arms. Where we can change anything we want to about our external selves to better align with how are hearts and heads see us and are met only with applause. I hope you are dreaming and writing, too. As long as there are dreams inside of us and a drive to stay connected to ourselves and our hearts, we cannot lose.