An Open Letter

Today was the gymnastics / powerlifting social, which normally would have been amazing since I’m part of both of the clubs, but since I’ve gone out and drank the last two nights in a row I just want to sleep tonight. I bailed on the plans, and got to take a calm day to myself, where I caught up on some work and played games with friends. I’m ready to sleep.

She's over again tonight and so I apologize again to myself for not really journaling. I'll get back to it soon

I think I've romanticized struggle in my mind, but right now I'm content in life. I like my girlfriend and I'm so lucky to have her. I'm happy.

I poorly managed my time and so I’m still super tired and exhausted and about to go to sleep. I really like therapy because I slowly get to figure out these big problems that I never would have considered, and because of it I slowly get to build a healthy life one piece at a time.

It's a problem until it suddenly isn't

One time in middle school in PE when we had to run a mile, right at the start I tripped and got crushed by the rest of the kids and had the wind fully knocked out of me for the first time. While several other people came over to make sure I was okay including the teacher, I was desperately trying to breathe and I could not. I didn't know what was happening but I thought that in that moment something happened to my lung and I would die, I have no clue how I could possibly breathe like that. I was struggling to get air for what was about a minute but felt like forever, but then slowly I was able to breathe a little bit more and more. Soon enough I was completely back to normal aside from the fear of what had happened, but I of course fully recovered. In that moment I didn't know how I could possibly get better but in just a little bit of time it works itself out and you continue surviving.

Just got home, exhausted. She is right now fast asleep with Hash by her side, and after my shower I join her. I never thought I would struggle with vulnerability but I think I should be the one to make that jump soon.

Now that I'm finally recovering, I'm again infatuated with my girlfriend. This entire week while I've been dying to strep, I've been kinda depressed and had somewhat withdrawals from caffeine / my ADHD medication which definitely wasn't helping. Because of that, and because I was feeling nothing but depressed feelings like exhaustion or numbness, I automatically try to figure out what's causing these feelings. And so I get in my head and think about what's happening in life and I scare myself by thinking it's because I am now in a relationship. But no, it's because I'm sick and have been bedridden for a week. It's never that bad.

I had a watch party with L and N, and since I have strep I streamed it over Discord. The fight was fun to watch as a group, but the outcome fuckin sucked. But afterwards we just watched random UFC videos and then later N started showing me some football things and was explaining how the game works to me and showing me some famous plays. It was actually really interesting and I’d like to get more into it, as there’s a lot of cool strategy and also just a fun pastime. It was a great day.

I’ve been using OVHCloud as a VPS since 2022, but I finally decided to bite the bullet and shop around. I found Hetzner, and I got the same machine for half the price! I did this because I wanted to set up a new machine so I can install Coolify, which is a self-hosting project, kinda like Vercel but you are the cloud. I spent a lot of my day today just learning it and moving over some of my projects, I got the REST endpoints setup with a docker container, one of my discord bots moved over, and I’m working on getting the frontend working. It’s nice to have some kind of fresh start, like a brand new clean machine. On my old VPS I had a factorio server running, a Minecraft server, a few discord bots, and also a couple webapps. That poor machine was getting abused lol.

After a bit of being in quiet I decided to put on some music, and youtube autoplay gave me some beautiful midwest emo gems. I’ve been kinda just playing “still save a seat for you” by Otuka on repeat. The kind of repeat where you keep clicking restart once it goes to the next song. It’s one of those beautiful songs where someone tries to pour out all of their pain into their art. The art in it is how the artist has a fairly deep, monotone voice. I think they only go through a total of 5 notes or so, and so in compensation, the rest of the instruments scream for him. It’s that kind of beauty that shows up after living in the dark for weeks. It feels like being on the verge of crying for several months and finally, something bad enough happens that you’re justified in just breaking down sobbing. It feels like it captures that male feeling of being told to not show emotions or being punished for that. I guess that’s why I love it so much.

The song almost paints a picture so vivid in my head it makes me sad for a memory that’s not even mine. The song feels like a teen boy in a basement alone facing the wall, with an electric guitar plugged into headphones so he can be loud without being reprimanded. I see that kid blasting the chords into his headphones, almost to the point he can’t hear himself think. He can gently say the words along to the song, all with the guise of writing a song. But I think it goes past that, I think this is one of his only ways to put those feelings outside of his head. I see him closing his eyes and shaking up and down with each strum, fully in his own world where he is heard, or alone – I’m not sure what he wants or what he should want. I then see his mom coming down, and shocking him without him noticing her coming over. She would probably say something supportive of the music, but to him instantly all of the vulnerability and courage to confront those emotions instantly goes away to the facade of being closed off to the world, after all, emotions are punished and how is a kid that’s never been properly heard supposed to know how to speak? And suddenly he needs to do something else because he is afraid of being perceived. All until it gets bad enough and he gets a moment alone where he can continue all over again. At least that’s what the song sounds like to me.

What an insane rant to go on! I must seem crazy.