As if you’re this fixed self in the world
The Muse Letter No. 189
On Tuesday I wrote a last note, logged off my Instagram for good and stared at the wall for a while. For months I’ve had this phantasy of going dark. Of simply vanishing or disappearing from social view. To not be perceived for a moment, to not think about what I could post next, to not perform, or create an image of myself but, “to just be a pair of eyes floating, like a little cloud with eyes.”, as the author Emma Cline said in an interview with the LA Times a few years ago. “In the best moments you’re just this observing consciousness, and it’s disconcerting for that reason to have anyone talk about you as if you’re a fixed self in the world.”
– Then I took a walk without my phone, lay in the park and watched the clouds from below. Letting my eyes follow their slow movements, trying to make out shapes, the lyrics of Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting entering my mind. Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen. I don't know when. But just saying it could even make it happen.
I’ve been thinking a lot about whose life I want to live anyway lately. It’s so easy to fall into a rhythm, to tell yourself that these are your options and now deal with it. It’s easy to blink and now you’re 40 and one more you’re 45 and one more you’re 50 and oh is this depressing?
Over the last two years I wrote a book about change whilst in the process of it, but it seems that it is in the silence now, in stillness, in the interruption of being out there, that I can finally understand a fundamental truth about myself.