A Just Creative
2026-10-07
I'm not a liar, just creative!
I've been feeling more restful lately, coming down off a tangential heat of mania, but still needlessly worried about dumb situational things that don't matter. Yet despite my worries, I still get back in the saddle to write about them; though they don't go away, they do quell themselves a bit after some kind of blanketed release that I can't quite explain yet. The workflow here surprises me still. For a long time, I set a timer to help myself get into the groove of writing—an atomic habit, if you will. No timer today, though. Over the course of the last year, I bumped up the timer gradually from 15 minutes to an hour, but found myself going from draft to post in no more than 20 minutes. I've wanted these entries to be a bit shorter recently anyway so that I have more energy to do nothing. Man, I love my nothing time. The last few years have been a deep experiment in bettering my relationship to technology, and while there have been many bumps along that road, I find myself better off than I was a few years ago. From deleting social media to a dumb phone prescription that lasted a year, I've wanted nothing more than to get my sanity back.
No, I don't care about reading more edifying literature or hacking my way to success. All I want is to be functional, to be someone that others can count on, whatever I can make that look like. So far, that's mostly just been an act of emotional labor—being funny when I can, lending an ear if I am needed, or just helping someone see things from a different perspective. I could've been a banging-ass consultant if I felt like being an asshole, but I don't. We don't need more thinking, and we most certainly don't need more knowledge. You look down that barrel long enough and you realize it's empty anyway.
What am I to do with my time, particularly when my brain goes faster than my body allows? It's an odd liminal space to be in, and while I know that I have some kind of work ethic, I falter at the idea of maintaining, well, an ethic. I bemoan the fact that the jobs are fake and the money is faker, but sustenance still has to be earned somehow. It's a tricky situation. I have to tell the government I'm disabled and that I can't work, but when all is well and my brain is being kind to me, I delude myself into thinking that the good times will last and that I'm capable of going back to some kind of gainful employment. But it's tough being where I'm at, not being able to accurately predict the state of my personal affairs. I'm smart enough to forecast trends elsewhere, but am bound by a different powerlessness internally. It's a truly sordid irony, but it's a cross that I must bear. Either way, I live just for today. The troubles of tomorrow are reserved for the next sunrise, but I still worry about how I'm going to get through today. Even in the throes of plans, aspirations, and false ambitions—I still sit here, moment by moment, perplexed at how I have not keeled over yet.
Whatever. Nice weather today.
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