Hello.
Well. Here is another new blog. I've tried to maintain blogs before, and so far they have all started with gusto and then slowly dwindled into quiet death. A fresh blog is like a fresh notebook, with all the delectable potential of those riches of soft white pages. It's hard to resist a new notebook.
But it's not just the blog that's new. I feel I am new. Well, no, I am not new. But I am closer to the truth of myself than I was before. Now, I am a survivor of the meantime.
The title of this blog is a word invented by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and "the meantime" is another one of his invented phrases. Or I suppose, an appropriated phrase, in this case. The meantime is defined as follows:
n. the moment of realization that your quintessential future self isn’t ever going to show up, which forces the role to fall upon the understudy, the gawky kid for whom nothing is easy, who spent years mouthing their lines in the wings before being shoved into the glare of your life, which is already well into its second act.
A little over a year ago, I experienced my meantime. I realized that for most of my life, I expected that one day I would mature into the more perfect future me. I believed that one day I would find the key - the key to myself, the key to my career, the key to my inner passions. If I found that key, everything would be better. Everything would be easy. And as I progressed through life, and things never became easier, I assumed it must be because I was doing something wrong. That I hadn't found the key. That I had better abandon the current course and go find the right one.
Of course, a la the monkish child in The Matrix wisely proclaiming that there is no spoon, there is no key. There is no magic bullet that will transform me into some perfect machine that will never be bored, never be stressed, never find anything about life difficult. I had abandoned all the paths I had tried to walk in life and found myself standing alone in the middle of nowhere. For a while I just stood there, unmoving. But finally I let my delusion go, and I just started walking.
Does this mean I stop trying to improve myself, to be a better person? No. But it means I stop holding my breath, waiting for something to drop out of the sky make me perfect.
So. What is jouska?
n. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.
Whether my hypothetical conversations will be of interest to anybody else, I don't really know. They say you have to write for yourself, you have to enjoy what you're writing because if you don't enjoy writing it, certainly no one else will enjoy reading it. They also say you have to know your audience, and if you don't write well enough for them they won't read you. They say a lot of things like this and it can be hard for a girl to decide what to do, especially a girl who is obsessed with making the "right" choice. When faced with an ambiguous choice that girl would rather do nothing at all. But that was before the meantime, and I've already decided I don't want to spend my life standing still.
So. What will be the content of these jouska?
Basically, the things I care about, and that because I care about them, swirl about in my mind and won't leave me alone. Even if I wish I didn't care and that they wouldn't swirl. (I will at one point write about another Koenig word I have come to embrace, liberosis, that is related to caring. I will probably mention it a lot. I will probably mention Koenig's words a lot because there is a part of me that really desires to understand sadness.)
I care a lot about the fictional worlds I retreat to on a daily basis, so I'll write about them.
I care about science. There will probably be some of that.
I care about people. I care about trying to be a good person and trying to respect that 99.9% of the people I share this world with are just trying to be good people too.
I care about being honest with myself. About trying not to lie to myself about what I feel, what I believe, what I want, and who I am.
I care about figuring out who I am, which some days feels well established and other days feels like a journey that will last as long as I live. (I bet Koenig has a word for that already.)
And with that, this notebook is no longer empty.
