Distractions, Distractions
2025-09-24
I'm sitting at the Starbucks while typing and there are a few teenage girls sitting across from me talking about whatever teenage girls talk about. I'm curious to eavesdrop a bit on their conversation and I had to pull away from that temptation so that I could write today's entry. I'm glad that I did because I'd rather write my own thoughts than listen to whatever they have to say. Not that teenage girls are stupid or whatever (some of them are pretty smart), but I just wanted to build the discipline of writing and not getting distracted. I think that this temptation of getting distracted is a powerful one, and one that plagues many people aspiring for any kind of big thing in their lives. The narrative of "it's so easy to be great today" is still obviously untrue and lathered into so much propaganda, but it's still important to cultivate discipline and do things that are hard. The important thing about this, though, is that it's not good to do hard things because they result in better outcomes; it's good to do hard things because the act of doing hard things is good in and of itself. There's no need to get caught in any kind of existentialist motive. Doing hard things increases one's will to live.
I'm not here to report any kind of news (I hate the news) but one thing did happen today that hits close to home: the shooting at the ICE facility in Dallas. There are some friends of mine who had a personal connection to the shooter (childhood friends) and the whole experience for them was rather trippy. I don't really want to get bogged down in any discourse on the event because discourse about anything that's on the news is always going to be latent with some kind of propagandizing bullshit, so I don't want to fuel any part of that fire whatsoever. I'd rather try to focus on speaking my truths without having to let those truths be defined by any kind of exterior narrative. I don't want to let any intrusion of my thoughts from almost mythological actors (CIA, MI5, Mossad, whatever) come into my head.
For me, it's a difficult experience dealing with the paranoia that comes from media exposure. In psychotic episodes in the past, I've had delusions of being spied on and receiving "personal messages" from shit on TV. So weirdly enough, watching TV or anything like that actually creates a trauma response for me. My mom likes to always watch TV in the living room and it sucks because I can barely spend time with her sometimes because of certain things that come on the television. I don't want to get in the way of her enjoyment of it, though, so I limit my exposure to it when I can.
Among other things, I am thankful to have a good period in life right now, mood episodes notwithstanding. I hope that my mind/body complex will let me keep it up.