I am tired of my own mind but I can't let it drown

one small step for me is just dust for the world, but it is sparkly dust and that's what matters

Hello hi sweet wonderful reader,

I hope your month has brought you radiant moments of joy and clarity. I feel a little rusty writing to you as I have been filled with brain fog and too many thoughts screaming for attention. But I am here, and I have missed this.

I have always been a trapped-in-my-own-head kind of girl. And in the recent years I’ve been combatting that by never having time to actually live in my head during my idle time. This has led to me filling my time with endless distraction and miniscule dopamine hits. Spoiler alert, this is damaging to your attention span and general brain function.

On this episode of little ways I’m hoping I can improve by being more present and less brain foggy, I’ve decided to app block my doom scroll apps for the better part of my day. I’ve also set a time limit to the window that its open so I actually become more intentional about my consumption. It has not been too long but I hope this helps me brain better.

I am a greedy monster when it comes to escapism. I am a big fan of getting lost inside fantasy worlds so I never have to actually look my problems in the eye. I keep forgetting that escaping my problems is stupid since the universe already gave it my address.

I am tired of my own mind. It loves its little spirals and gaslighting me into believing I am no longer loved. My mind betrays me too many times to count, I think it secretly wants to drown. I refuse to let it.

(Un)fortunately, being unable to access mindless distraction has opened the stark white antiseptic light in my room. It has since been illuminating all the garbage around me I wasn’t paying attention to. All the things I’ve been chucking out of sight has piled up into little mountains. I am slowly having to sort my way out of it. One tiny pile of smelly garbage at a time.

One of the piles is filled with nonsense.

Every corner of my brain is littered with nonsense nowadays. Thoughts that have no real place to land on. Just endless chattering of words going cold from not remembering what it was I was trying to say or do. I got so good at finding flourish and embellishing sentences, so good at throwing glitter into word vomit chatter, I am now unsure if I’ve ever actually made sense.

Of course sifting through the nonsense means finishing as much of my half-baked, half-assed projects that have been thrown into the ether. Fishing them out and untangling the mess so I can find where to connect new strings of thought is tedious, but necessary work. I am after all trying to be more present.

One of the ways I feel more attuned to my thoughts and ideas is through conversing with creatives who are awake enough to remember who they are. I say this because I think every person has creativity in them, its just been squashed down by the system. Imagination and creativity is a threat after all, but that’s a conversation for another newsletter.

In my favorite group chat of creatives, we have fixated on a line written by an attendee of a monthly writer’s meet we host, the line goes, “big eyes, small brain” and we’ve been saying it at every opportunity. This line is from a poem written by someone who does not consider themself a writer. He wrote it about a panda. It holds so much humor and freshness, we cannot let it go.

I keep thinking about the labels we allow ourselves to have and the ones we are too chickenshit to accept as it may raise the bar (this is a self callout, but if the crown fits…). I am a writer. I am a singer. I am an actor. I am a creative. These labels shouldn’t feel confining, they should feel freeing. A way to easily communicate your ink stained fingers, your constant drum of thought, your insufferable mouth. These are labels that explain why you are the way you are.

My mind is a field full of untapped discoveries about myself. The thoughts I have thrown haphazardly in my junk box is glittering once I actually get around to polishing them. Does this mean I no longer doom scroll, of course not? But it has lost its sense of doom and has just turned into just mindless turn off brain time. But hey, baby steps amirite?

To a month of baby steps in the right direction,

Dhan xx