![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prescience or self knowledge?
May. 28th, 2008 07:53 pmI've had a thing for d(D)issolution most of my adult life. Despite my mother's fears, and ample opportunity, I was chemically straight edge until my college years, until I was sure it might be something I wanted, and that there was pleasure in the process, not just rule breaking and status.
It felt (feels) like a liberating release, of shedding weights or bonds, of being temporarily, safely free. I was, and probably still am, prone to grandiose pronouncements when in the midst of it all. I issue indulgences, blur the lines between possible fact and amusing fiction, and generally wield what I've tended to view as my willingness to dissolve as a razor sharp cudgel. I think it's safe to say I tend to intend benevolence, but sometimes get caught up in the moment, or my own take on my own cleverness.
Over time, it's gotten harder to engage as naively, to pretend that it's just chemically or temporally bounded, or that claiming some affinity for dissolution didn't mean Dissolution has some claim on me. Maybe it's just give and take, but I've taken for years and years. Lately, I've come to feel like Dissolution's bitch.
Because stuff like this follows you out; you track it in after every excursion, every moment long or short, and it accretes. Openings stop looking like just opportunities for some fun, maybe a quickie with insight, but as a reminder that while you see it, it sees you, too. There's a slow seeping in around the edges of self, a making porous or permeable of borders assigned as inflexible and mandatory, and that seems OK at first, but it never stops at just one.
It's not like there aren't pleasant side effects. Compassion and desire both benefit greatly from this inexorable removal of borders (now, if only action were as simple as its generative sources...). Ideas seem freer in my head; some days it feels as though my brain is working better than it's ever worked before, and that amazes me, but it also gives me pause; what's it for? For there's definitely a sense of purpose there, but I don't know if it's in- or evoked; probably a bit of both, naturally, but still I worry.
I'm beginning to dissolve. Wait, that's not quite right. Large parts of who I am, who I've been, are starting to dissolve, and it scares me. It also makes me really sad. I kind of like me, but it feels like I'm only realizing this in time to lose it. In a sense, I am ready to lay some burdens down, but if I do, what will fill those gaps? If struggle to be becomes struggle not to be becomes struggle to be indeterminate becomes struggle to be off the scale becomes no struggle... is that full circle to acceptance of assigned position? Because if it is, I don't think I can take that. I can take a lot, but that feels like a death in a lot of very meaningful, metaphorical ways to me.
"Me? Oh, I'm aaaaall about dissolution and border crossing..."
No shit. You should have paid closer attention, drunken 20th century me.
It felt (feels) like a liberating release, of shedding weights or bonds, of being temporarily, safely free. I was, and probably still am, prone to grandiose pronouncements when in the midst of it all. I issue indulgences, blur the lines between possible fact and amusing fiction, and generally wield what I've tended to view as my willingness to dissolve as a razor sharp cudgel. I think it's safe to say I tend to intend benevolence, but sometimes get caught up in the moment, or my own take on my own cleverness.
Over time, it's gotten harder to engage as naively, to pretend that it's just chemically or temporally bounded, or that claiming some affinity for dissolution didn't mean Dissolution has some claim on me. Maybe it's just give and take, but I've taken for years and years. Lately, I've come to feel like Dissolution's bitch.
Because stuff like this follows you out; you track it in after every excursion, every moment long or short, and it accretes. Openings stop looking like just opportunities for some fun, maybe a quickie with insight, but as a reminder that while you see it, it sees you, too. There's a slow seeping in around the edges of self, a making porous or permeable of borders assigned as inflexible and mandatory, and that seems OK at first, but it never stops at just one.
It's not like there aren't pleasant side effects. Compassion and desire both benefit greatly from this inexorable removal of borders (now, if only action were as simple as its generative sources...). Ideas seem freer in my head; some days it feels as though my brain is working better than it's ever worked before, and that amazes me, but it also gives me pause; what's it for? For there's definitely a sense of purpose there, but I don't know if it's in- or evoked; probably a bit of both, naturally, but still I worry.
I'm beginning to dissolve. Wait, that's not quite right. Large parts of who I am, who I've been, are starting to dissolve, and it scares me. It also makes me really sad. I kind of like me, but it feels like I'm only realizing this in time to lose it. In a sense, I am ready to lay some burdens down, but if I do, what will fill those gaps? If struggle to be becomes struggle not to be becomes struggle to be indeterminate becomes struggle to be off the scale becomes no struggle... is that full circle to acceptance of assigned position? Because if it is, I don't think I can take that. I can take a lot, but that feels like a death in a lot of very meaningful, metaphorical ways to me.
"Me? Oh, I'm aaaaall about dissolution and border crossing..."
No shit. You should have paid closer attention, drunken 20th century me.
