I haven’t sat down to write in nearly a month. Overall, I want to give up. And I just might.

Soccer Mommy and MUNA both released new records today—spanning the spectrum of my melodramatic teenage emotions. And if one thing is consistent, it is the influx in experimentation and willingness to change. Both sonically and existentially.

Somewhere within this chasm of self-actualization and chaos, I sit with my idling sensibilities. Is the dissonance I currently feel caused by non-aligning morals and actions? Or is it more nuanced, like the complexities of identity? Or am I shitting myself, throwing out excuses to deflect any true accountability? Like most anything, I suppose it’s a combination of everything.

I wish there were profound realizations for me to confess here. Something literarily mesmerizing and beautiful. But depression weighs my body down. Anxiety weakens my cognitive functioning. My focus shifts as easily as one sifts through Instagram. My anger grows with the recently overturned Roe v Wade. My heart aches, my brain shakes within the confines of my skull—how is this the world which we live within? How much more dystopian can it get? Dare I even ask that?

There is much to dispel in this passage but I am far too distracted. I wish to purge all my problems onto this page and walk away. I wish to etch away at the emotions that have me so far intertwined that cutting them out would result in cutting a lethal part of me. But my heart races and I remain stagnant. I have nothing left to give. And I’m sick of myself.

Aren’t you sick of me too?

Yesterday marked one year since the release of my third poetry chapbook, Primordial Chaos. This was the first collection I shared with a shred of pride. Writings that felt equally soul-baring and artistic. A statement I had been aiming to make for the years preceding. For the first time, I felt as though I had accomplished something. I’ve always felt like my life has succumbed to the wrath of trauma and adverse developmental experiences; and that my twenty-two years has been full of wasted time and pre-cognitive abilities. I’m slowing starting to come around to the idea that this isn’t fully the case. And that the more I buy into this ideal, the more time I waste. I suppose this is as good a moment as ever to open myself up to the possibility of change. Change of perspective. Change of pace. Change of intention. Change to enact within and upon myself.