Youtube algorithm, as wonky and misguided as it sometimes tend to be these days served up this gorgeous nugget of.. inspiration (?), 16-year-old Josie nostalgia (?).. ek'hem, I mean, a video-essay about writing essays..
And it struck an old, somewhat semi-abandoned cord. Long past are days when Josie casually dropped daily paragraph-long mini-essays in Latvian version of a Live Journal, just to process some of the looping thoughts and/or emotions, or sit down with a piece of blank A4 page with the sole purpouse of brain dumping and figuring out, if there was any sense in what I was ruminating over at the time.
It got to the point that I managed to gaslight myself into thinking that I am incapable of knowing what I'm actually, trully thinking about any specific subject matter until I had pulled down and structured my otherwise nebulous, whishy-washy whimsical fairy dust of thoughts on a piece of paper. In effect - how can I know what I'm thinking if I haven't written it down?
A few months back mom gave me a book to skim over, written by a female author that mom had found fascinating and unique. It was a collection of short essays that.. how to put it nicely.. tired to be edgier than they need to be.. for an author in her fifties?
I gave the book back to mom saying - this is going to sound pretentious, but this is how us girls were writing online when we were in highschool. Tryng too hard to sound profoundly deep but cool and nonchalant at the same time.
There was a certain level of freedom in that freeform braindump expression of those days that I seem to fail to regenerate here on Hive, for instance, merely because I feel it improper to drop just a single paragrapgh for a post.. I mean, we have standards here in our polite Hive society, don't we..? xD
These days I don't feel like needing to prove myself in any way anymore, I am but a simple Josie. Tired of trying to pretend and prove to others and herself that I'm not dumb.. that was a big one, the cornerstone insecurity of my personality. I genuinely don't care anymore. I'm highly aware of my mental limitations now and I'm perfectly fine with them. I no longer need to torture my brain to no undescernable end, just to try and impress some men, my dad included. I'm just a girl, as they say.
So my mind might be barely at work, in compariosn to my tryharding days, but I have other, more nebulous, more whimsical, more pattern-y things to concern myself with these days..
As the video says I do feel like Josie is but a caricaturized version of myself, just as I feel like my embodied physical self is just a cartoon character of my true, whole Self. A projection on a flatter dimension, if you will. And this physical form IS indeed limitig.
But nevertheless, it does provide... EXPERIENCEStm..and experiences, I find, are more than enough to excuse an existence.
Where am I going with this? Exactly nowhere in particular, just that I miss the freedom of writing complete nonsense for no other sake than my own personal a/be-musement and that maybe, just maybe I should reclaim that part of myself. (Also check out the perfectly whimsical book nook I got as a Christmas gift ^^)
A'ight, I'll catch you later, and happy New Year, 'n all that good jazz..
(Also, also, I wanted to do a years review, but 2025 was so utterly unremarkable that the only thing I could think of writing about is - how utterly unremarkable it was..)
~Josie~