(Title is from Bobby Cole’s “Trance Music For Racing Game”. A true bop, if you will.)

(It’s actually not a bop, it’s genuinely one of the most adrenaline+anxiety inducing pieces of media I have consumed, please do not ever play it if you’re doing something that you want to take your time with because it’s literally just the same anxious theme repeating over and over and it grates into your head like a weight and oh my god-)

Day two of daily writing. Here we go. What happened today?

Hm, I’m not sure, actually— but then again, I have stated before that writing about the small things is what I’m doing this for, so it’s only natural that I don’t think of anything to write about immediately.

Does that defeat the purpose? In a way, I suppose it does. Because then I’m purposefully thinking of “small” things that I can expand instead of finding value in “small” things like I had originally implied I would be doing.

It’s weird, because then every time I write a post tagged with “Daily”, I feel like I’m failing. I always have to remind myself that I’m never “failing” though, because there’s no way to fail writing about small things daily (unless you stop writing daily, I guess). Besides, whenever I write about supposedly “big” things, I could be unknowingly slipping in “small” things that I won’t pick out until later. For example; my writing style right now might be completely different from my writing style in five years, and to me how I write truly is a “small” thing, but it’ll have matter in the future.

That’s why it’s important to keep diaries, and to write daily. That’s also how we learned most of our lessons, I think— people kept track of random events in the past that might’ve seemed “small”, but then it turned out that their writing gave us most of the information we’ll ever have of their time.

It’s like the Persians (I’m making this analogy because I’m studying the Persians right now in class. We have a test on them in a week): there’s virtually no writing about them other than the possibly biased accounts from the Greeks and the propaganda from the Persians, but in the ruins of Persepolis they found this one tablet that detailed the transactions of someone paying for wheat.

It’s from those writings that historians learned about currency, what was valuable, and what the standards for pricing were. To the person that wrote the tablet, it was probably just a throwaway thing; I doubt they realized how important their writing would become.

Is it selfish to write because I believe the things I do everyday could also be equally important? Well, yes and no.

I think we’re all really selfish. Artists on social media are selfish— and that’s not just me bashing a group of people I’ve never associated with, because I’m literally an artists on Instagram, so. But honestly, how narcissistic must you be to assume that your art is good enough to attract the attention of millions of people on an already competitive platform?

And sure, some people might be passionate and they might just want to spread their passion, but they still want to spread it. Why couldn’t they just be content on their own, brewing in their own love for something? Why did they have to join a platform where everything is based on likes, reshares, and comments?

Being selfish isn’t a bad thing, though. It’s how people get places. Believing in yourself is often the way people do things; if you don’t think you can do something, you don’t do it. But if you think you can do everything, then you do everything.

And if you’re not capable enough to do something, then you fail; but failure is often how people grow. “Pain is the greatest teacher” is a saying I’ve heard a few times from several different people; abusers with good intentions getting quoted, traumatized but mature individuals I follow for their blog posts. Failure brings pain. Pain brings spoken lessons that you have to listen to.

So yes. Selfish people do things, they fail said things, learn, rinse and repeat. It’s kinda interesting— I know of one person who is explicitly following this path, and they’re also someone I’ve been with my whole life, so I’ve got to watch them through their journey of this cycle.

I see them suffer a lot. I read their blog posts on their website as well, and recently they said “I’m lonely”, and it absolutely shattered my soul. I don’t know how to describe it, but genuinely those two words made me feel worse than I ever have in my life. It physically hurt, and it was with a sense of loss that I kept scrolling to read the other thousand words in their entry.

I wonder if I only worry because I’m selfish. I wonder if I felt bad because I was guilty that I didn’t talk to them more, or call them, or text them— I wonder if feeling bad was because I was ashamed in myself more than it was because I was empathizing with them.

This type of selfishness makes me feel the guiltiest than any other type of selfishness. I’ve accepted that by posting my art on Instagram and making social media accounts is selfish, but a part of my brain can’t accept that I’m worried about those I love because of said selfishness. It might be because of my raising— from Kindergarten I was told to be kind, to care about others, but now I realize that this kind of upbringing always produces the opposite effect.

Because then people start to be kind because it’s “right”, I suppose— because they want to be validated and in the “right”. And so the inherent morality of being kind is lost, ironically; but in the end, the positive byproducts of artificial kindness are more plentiful than the positive byproducts of genuine kindness, so I suppose it’s a… lose-win. I think.

Admitting this doesn’t feel terrible. I don’t feel guilty writing. I don’t feel guilty putting this out to the public on a place where people could easily find me— and that’s the most curious thing of all.

Perhaps this is comparable to atoning to your sins.

I wrote in another blog post “I pray to remember, and by writing I have said amen”.

Perhaps this is an example of “I wish to forget, and by writing I have atoned”.

I wonder if those two are actually the same— and if the definitions and connotations of those words are the only barrier stopping us from realizing that.