'you must not know about me'

Today, I looked at the work of a friend who's in a graduate art program. It was so stirring, so engaging, and so meaningful. What a strange reminder: how to look at art. Using muscles I'd forgotten, and nerves I thought had died away.

Strange, too, that, more and more, vacation time just amounts to actively missing everything I used to do, and all the ways I used to identify. I spent the better part of today reading transcripts from colonial trials and trying to somehow divine and distill them into plays. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. In this whole last year, I have yet to finish even a one-act. It's been a dry spell, to say the least.

The same goes for poems, essays, letters, knitting, reading, a couple of relationships, and most friendships. Things have stagnated this year in a way that I wasn't entirely prepared for. And part of the collateral damage, as Tripp mentioned, has been this site. I have been so busy working, and trying so desperately not to feel the way I actually do, that nothing else has progressed. What a sad, strange anticlimax.

And all of this, perhaps unsurprisingly, leads back to the question of whether or not I'm doing anything that's personally meaningful. My job, as a part of the work it supports, has deep and broad impacts–there's no doubt about that. But I do wonder how long that ideological satisfaction can last before I look around and realize how disconnected I've become from a life I'd hoped to lead, from art and intellect, and from all the possibility that comes from being 24.

I don't know how to make this into a meaningful post, or to bring it to any kind of conclusion; it's just been on my mind a lot these last few days. So here it is, for better or worse.