I feel recently as though I have been struck with an introspective mood, perhaps because for the first time in a long time, things are just... good. I love my job, I love where I live, I'm emotionally and financially stable - little day-to-day things come up, but compared to the past few years... yeah. It's just. Good.
And it's hard, in its own way, to know what to do with that. I don't want to spend the good times just waiting for the other shoe to drop, but there's also this looming anxiety: Is this what it's supposed to be? Is life supposed to be this easy? Am I allowed to just... be happy?
That's a pretty tragic thing to say, I guess, but it's true. I feel guilty for how good things are, as if all the terrible before didn't happen, as if happiness should be earned, as if good fortune is an undeserved reward, unrelated to hard work and perseverance.
On a completely different note, it's now just past the ten year anniversary of what I think of as the start of my novel-writing... phase? Experience? I wrote about it extensively here, just before the eight year anniversary, and re-reading that post back today I'm struck by how wise 22 year-old me is. He had a reeeaal rough two years ahead of him, in which he went back to barely writing and making no art, and I feel like I only now have the space to begin moving forward again. And by moving forward, I'm moving backwards: back into who I was two years ago, before I was knocked so hard back into trauma and doubt.
It's okay, my friends keep reassuring me. It's okay to react like this. You spent over a year being deeply traumatised. You're still recovering. You recovered before and you'll recover from this. I fall back into habits I thought I'd left behind, repeat bad cycles I worked years to overcome. Things are a lot better, but I still feel further behind than I did two years ago. And that's okay, that's okay, that's okay.
It's a back and forth.
I think that's where I am at the moment. Back and forth. In time, in my own head. My Chemical Romance is back and listening to them again in some ways brings with it the headspace of ten years ago, when I had barely started writing The Red Prince, and in other ways is a whole different experience shaped by what's happened in that decade. I listen to Panic! at the Disco for the first time in a few years and think about characters I haven't thought about since they slid out of the front of my brain. I see North from Dying Ember in a whole new light, feel my chest clench up with an understanding I didn't have when I actually wrote him. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is the best time of my life and it cannot stay and what could go wrong and things never stay right. I do not have to repent for happiness.
I do not have to repent for happiness.
Historically, things have always changed for me in September. Between it being my birthday and it being the start of the academic year, it was always a much more significant indicator of change than the meaningless transition from December to January - I even managed to keep that pattern after leaving education, getting my first full-time job in September, then changing it next September. The September after that was quiet and I planned to not change anything else again until the coming one, but things did not work out that way and everything was instead uprooted at the end of March. Like, March? What the heck ever happens in March?
So, I still feel like I'm waiting in a way. Like this is the interstitial period, like nothing good can stay so don't worry lad, just hold on another two months or so and it'll all go tits-up again. I am trying to be more optimistic than that, though. I will endeavour to hold on to what is good, to let go what does not serve me.
Re-playing games I first loved two years ago. Writing the novel I started five years ago. Re-listening to music I loved eight years ago.
Putting away the harmful habits of six months ago. Leaving behind the trauma of one year ago. Planning, for maybe the first time in my life, the future two years from now.
Back and forth.
I should do another digital portrait again soon.
