warning: mild suicidal ideation
Alice’s note! ///Hey I didn’t expect to write a history of myself but by the nature of this document, it was likely. I am taking my practice of daily writing that has always been private and making it public. I know this page is not promoted or thrown at an audience but it is possible to be found.
This is the first day of switching from my notes document to this site, just so I can feel a little more connected, less like I am intentionally alienating myself.
Below is where I started with my daily stream of consciousness writing, thinking to myself that I would just explain my process of notetaking a tiny bit. Eventually I realized that I would want to go deeper, hence this little top note +warnings///
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Hello. so I have decided a thing. Here it is. I have historically kept personal notes documents that stay in a cloud until they mysteriously disappear. And Before that, I kept personal journals that I would hoard until I had a massive pile. And I would keep writing over old text if I ran out of space. Then I would draw and augment those texts for the future. And I wrote just to write because it was a release. And it still is a release. Each thing is still the same. I still write in my notes on google drive. Not everyday but as often as I can. I set a timer then just write for 10 or 15 minutes, talking about my dreams or whatever things I’m thinking about in the morning. Morning pages or something of the like.
This used to be one of several writing practices. I would write in school. I would write in college. I would try and write scripts even. Oh wait since I am sticking to this stream of consciousness thing (as I would for myself) I will notice that I was about to go somewhere that was incomplete. I forgot about a key detail of my practices.
Between the physical notebooks and my notes document, there was an in between time. And that in-between time still lasts to this day. I keep individual notes in google keep. I havee thousands of notes in google keep. I do not know how many notes but since I was 18, it is almost every day. At least more than 50% of days. I am 25 now so I will do a calculation. 7 ish years. and lets be conservative and say I write only 100 days a year. That would be 700 notes. So although that is probably less than the actual number, lets assume that I have approximately 700 daily notes in google keep.
At first when I started with these notes, it was an obsession. I would get stuck on thought loops and the only way out was to try and put them down somewhere. Put those thoughts down. somewhere. I started with those notebooks that I would scribble in. And I would put on each page before I went to bed: listen, be empathetic, be vulnerable. I kept that up until I went away to college and that’s when things decayed. I step away and suddenly it’s all a mess. I am not myself. I was not myself in school. I was a kid that went from a loving family and friends into a void that I did not understand. I did not feel real.
And I left school, slowly but surely, I failed myself out of college. And I am not too proud of myself and how I acted back then. I feel like I was not fully there. I had not decided to fully be present yet. I hadn’t figured out if I wanted to live or how I would go about that process.
Up until college, it had been this lovely mess. My family was this beautiful and sticky net of love that always held me close. Even my friends loved me in their own silly teenage ways. But I was getting to the point where I was stuck in thought loops too much of the time.
I realize now that I am traveling backwards. I am okay with that direction. At least backwards is a direction to choose. Back to the beginning!
These loops started far earlier than college. We have to go back and back and back. As a very very young child, I had this obsession with memory. I wanted to hold onto every single thing. I knew that it was difficult but I knew that I wanted to hold on. I would dream of being smaller than I was. Things would get distorted and augmented. I still remember that practice while in bed. I would start falling asleep and try and hold onto things that had happened when I was just too small to have a sense of things.
And so we enter school. I remember all the things. Not all of them but most. I never had a photographic memory. I’ve always had a memory deeply tied to strong emotions. I was very lucky to have many means of expression very young. My sister had a friend who’s parents where both classical guitar teachers and performers. I started lessons probably around 5 years old.
Most of the memories from this early time were positive. I would play and i would run outside. I had my guitar to play and I loved my drawings. I loved my books.
At the field museum I could experience the start of everything and the change as well. Sharks were 400 million years old. Nobody knew that. Why did nobody talk about that? Sharks are dinosaurs. Not literally but… you know what I mean. And I would get so excited to hear about the way that everything is atoms and how we would touch this and that but that it was this magic thing where each atom is so tiny and there is actually space in between. And that life started out so small. And that we are so small.
I would draw as well! I was so drawn to these books and to these creatures. I was not too good at first. I was very small… But eventually I decided on sharks. The more I dug into it the more I found. Did you know that that there are more than 300 types of sharks? Did you know that they have no bones? Did you know that they predate bones? Did you know that they can sense electrical impulses and smell blood from miles away? Jaws was not on my mind. Sharks don’t stay on the surface because they would be far too obvious! Silly movie… And I could learn the differences in the way they were shaped, which were the fastest, which were the strongest, which were the friendliest.
I still got a little excited just now thinking about sharks even though the last time I seriously researched them was probably at the age of maybe 8 or 9.
And I had many things like sharks that i could be interested in. Some things were harmless. But I am not here to talk about the harmless things. If I want to describe why I got into writing, I have to dig into things that hurt. Questions that I could not get an immediate answer to…..
-Okay I was gonna go more in depth onto things but I don’t have the energy right now. I will go and live my life! and tomorrow I will continue from where I left off!
