Welcome to My Domain
Hello, welcome to my website, Spiritual Trickster. This is my space to share my poetry, thoughts, ramblings, essays, and generally speaking, be an exhibitionist on the internet. Here my soul wears a fig leaf, I am trying to show you as much as I feel comfortable with. Actually, more than I feel comfortable with. My goal is to use this place to progressively become as shameless as possible. There is a big difference between giving no fucks and giving a few. It’s like an inverse function. To optimize it, you want to get as close to zero as possible, without becoming undefined. Like, you want to give 0.00000000000..1 fucks. If you give even one whole fuck, then you only get one on the Y-axis, and it only goes down from there, rapidly approaching 0. One of what, you ask? I don’t know. I’m not really sure what it is I’m optimizing for. I just know I want that number to be big.
But why? Why would I do that? I’ve dealt with anxiety, shame, and depression for a while now. I’ve always been a bit of a sensitive people pleaser. I was recently diagnosed with bipolar, and had my first, and hopefully last psychotic, manic episode. (It was fantastic. And retroactively horrifying.) Here’s the thing - a lot of dark shit goes through my mind. And I mean a lot. It’s a spiral - you get more repressed, you become more discontent, angry and resentful, you see those ugly emotions in yourself, and then you feel even more ashamed of yourself. And you start entertaining insane, desperate ideas (at least, that’s the case for me). What is the nature of reality? Is there an afterlife? Is there a loving God, or an overarching principle of the universe which makes everything okay in the end? All questions quite pertinent to someone feeling suicidal.
There is a kind of gushing, poetic, spiritual, realer-than-real creative impulse that accompanies my quiet desperation. A kind of emotional masturbation that is about linguistically provoking myself with all my deepest fears, hopes and desires. I pursue this intense beauty, the kind that overwhelms you, disarms you. I write my poetry, articulate my ideas, some people like them… And privately, I feel dirty. I know how the sausage was made. I become more and more desperate to prove to myself that I’m beautiful on the inside, as my mind becomes more and more of a nightmare. I write something, I feel embarrassed… I feel like I have something to say, I say it. I critique myself - I see a rambling network of loose associations written with a kind of mystical conviction, straining to sound all too profound. But that is what I want want to share. More than anything I am embarrassed by my own poetic tendency, I iterate and iterate in the hope that it will disarm you like it disarms me. A gut punch to your emotions that makes it all just make sense. I look back on it and I feel pathetic - but If I see you like it, then maybe it’s not so pathetic. Or maybe you’re just as pathetic as I am.
I want to show myself trying to show myself. But I am still twisting all the knobs - am I showing myself showing myself, or am I showing you what I what I want you to think me trying to show myself looks like? Is authenticity impossible? Don’t overthink it, Alec, you’re not that smart. And I want to share my darker thoughts. Not mostly or only those, but it’s important to me that I share them, just so that they’re not bottled up. Remember - total shamelessness is the goal. Maybe people will think less of me. Maybe they’ll think more? I care, but I want not to.
I don’t want to be ashamed of anything, and that includes being ashamed of being ashamed, resenting myself for not being strong enough to let it all out, regardless of what anyone will think of me. So, here we go. Here I am, pressing the big red button. Whatever happens, happens.
Before you continue, maybe you’d like to read the social contract.