Tuesday, July 11th, 2023, 22:16

Mood: Lethargic

My last post on here was so whiny holy shit. I'm almost mortified I actually had the audacity to share my neverending first world problems to the literal internet. Here we are, though. And, I mean, I guess my issues are not "first world problems". Trauma is universal. But anyway. I think part of why I overshare, in addition to my innate neurochemical shamelessness, is because I want people to feel not alone. I was telling Patrick earlier today, we are as guilty as every other person of defaulting to staying at home and not seeing people. Everybody is anxious. Everybody is depressed. But there needs to be somebody brave enough to talk about it, and I am.

I'm trying to be more intentional about my free time, as I have so little of it that it's a big waste for me to spend all of it scrolling TikTok and Facebook and then someday I'll die. I have, for example, read eight books this year start-to-finish, with only one of those being a reread. I also partially read three books, one being a reread, and I'm currently in the process of one. That's really not that much reading when you divide it by the amount of time I've spent reading, but it's a lot more than nothing. The previous book I was reading was The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace, which was about the Silent Twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons. That link contains spoilers of their biography, by the way. No offense to Ms. Wallace, but there was just something not as enthralling about their story as I had expected--at least, anyway, not the middle of it. I stopped reading it whenever they had spent several weeks in jail, awaiting trial for a series of petty crimes they'd committed. I've just seen, however, that they made two movies about the twins, so I may force myself to finish The Silent Twins in order to permit myself to watch. (A rule at my house that both Siren and I have to follow: the book comes before the movie.)

The book I just started today to break up the monotony of The Silent Twins is The Long, Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson and his ghostwriter Neil Strauss. I've kept that one on my shelf for a while--I found a copy of it at the thrift store across from Woodman's West in Madison for $1 in like 2021--and I've referenced it several times, as proof of Manson's own admissions that he commits really serious violent crimes, but I've never read the thing cover-to-cover. So far it reads about as I expected it to. I think he's probably playing up the tortured and abused artist thing and downplaying that one side of his family came from money. Anyway. Also, it's pretty fucked that we were all glued to our screens last year watching the media tear Amber Heard to shreds during the Depp v. Heard trial, yet Googling for this blog post is the first I've heard about the defamation case against Evan Rachel Wood being dismissed. No justice for women survivors in this country, I swear.

But yeah. I'm trying to read more. I'm trying to blog more. I'm trying not to catastrophize, body-shame myself, or live in fear that everything Siren does will kill her and leave me suffering without her. (I am not as good at those last three.) I hope I can use this platform to both express myself and find a community, which was the cool thing that TikTok gave me. Anyway, Pat and I are going to hang out now. I'm fortunate to have someone so cozy at my side.