Checking In With The Memory Tourist

I suppose it’s important to start by addressing the elephant in the room. Anyone with basic deduction skills will notice that the last time this website was updated was February. Considering that I once pitched The Memory Tourist as a website releasing daily content and then four times a week, it may be concerning to figure out just why I have been missing in action. 

March was a special month. It was the one-year anniversary. It’s also a time when vaccines are reaching a significant amount of arms and many restrictions have begun to be lifted. How could I not have something to talk about? 

The truth is that if I didn’t take off March, there was a good chance that I’d continue to spiral out of control. While I have alluded to my mental health at several points, I don’t know that I’ve ever really dug deep into what’s been bothering me. Oh sure, there’s plenty of anxiety lifted from the pandemic entering another year, but that couldn’t be all of it. There had to be a reason that March wound up being a time when I pulled back more than I have in years. I haven’t done a professional blog post since February and The Oscar Buzz has been on hiatus for even longer. Basically, there’s very little public output for almost half of 2021 so far. 

So, what gives?

I hit a wall at a certain point and became personally debilitated for months on end. Given that anything resembling a normal schedule where I could interact with regular human beings has all but disappeared, I’ve gone more insular. For better or worse, I’ve spent time rummaging through my brain and discovering a lot. I got hung up on past trauma, overthinking how it impacted my whole life. I thought through past relationships, feeling like I was somehow responsible for all of my “misery.” Where was this “misery” coming from? Considering that I am currently 31, I was having fears that my best years were behind me. I was going to die alone. Given that I began considering myself asexual/demisexual, it didn’t help (though I greatly respect the ace community).

An accurate look at how my brain was working.

All I wanted was to be around people, to have meaningful conversations to feel like somebody cared about me. I didn’t exactly know how to reach out, and it only made me more insecure. I realized that I had trouble giving compliments without fearing they would be rejected, tearing apart something fragile in my own life. To go deeper, it’s the general idea that my conflicts are far less significant than a lot of people’s. I haven’t lost any major family members this past year. I haven’t been in any major accident. It both made me feel better, but also realize that I excused and neglected personal needs to a dangerous degree. I had problems, but instead of resolving them I just put their tier ranking below everybody else’s – even though I’m not exactly a savior of anybody’s life at this moment.

The question eventually became: 

What am I doing with my life? 

To be transparent, I was at the point where I was looking at numbers on everything and realizing that 10 is less than 100 and feeling inadequate. I wasn’t some self-starting genius and audience interaction has been at times nonexistent. Even in the realm of expressing my sadness, it felt like my 10 to others’ 100 somehow suggested that nobody cared. Of course, that’s what comes when you judge self-worth from Twitter or website traffic. Even the idea of artists I admired having unboxing videos bothered me because I have been blogging for 15 years and so few have reached out with any gift of significance. Long-term friendship is great, but somehow monetary value sometimes threw a wrench in the emotional processing gears.

I considered myself a failure. The drive to continue producing work that wasn’t increasing my reputation began to feel useless. Was there an audience? Yes. But the thing about writing for eight months daily straight is that for as much as it gives you a schedule, it also is unobtainable. I wrote pieces eventually that I just didn’t care about. I exhausted myself and by the time that I eased up, the air was coming out and I realized that what I was saying didn’t even interest me. What was I even doing? Sure I wrote more content that I liked in early 2021, but with that wiggle room, I allowed myself to think of other things, notably that I just didn’t care.

This was first evident in The Oscar Buzz, which usually is a hub for some of my favorite writing. I love writing columns around this time, but certain things crept up. With an extended Oscar season, I was overwhelmed by the idea of staying on top of everything. I also didn’t find interest in what I was writing. The prognosticators were the first Twitter accounts to lose their appeal. Soon going online was just this blank void of reading dozens of comments that I didn’t care about. I kept hoping awards shows would get me to care, but none of it mattered.

If Sound of Metal wins ALL The Oscars, then maybe I will be happiest

How could it when the basic functions of art wasn’t allowed to be consumed in normal ways? This is the first year since 2005 where I haven’t seen ANY Oscar-nominated Best Picture candidate on the big screen. What is so special about this year, especially as Zoom interactions continue to be shoddy and I keep thinking there’s more important things to talk about out there. 

What about the 500,000+ Americans who are dead from Coronavirus? What about the D.C. terrorist attack in January? Or the rise in Asian hate crimes and that terrible Anti-Trans Arkansas bill? Even as Joe Biden became president, I felt a bit miserable and hollow. What did anything matter, even with his hopeful inauguration speech that in the moment made my heart flutter?

I was a mess. To run down the timeline, my depression first hit hard in Late-November when suddenly I felt alone, desperately needing to connect with people. I felt overeager, needing validation on Twitter. It was more manageable then, but it was only the start. By December, my close friend had contracted COVID-19 and I feared for his life. I stayed in bed for 17 hours, paralyzed with concern that I was about to lose my reason for a lot of living. As of this publication he’s still alive, but the sense of being alone in the world was not an idea that sat well with me.

I thought by February I was doing better, but then something else became clear. I was feeling better because I had given more into the depression. I often stayed in bed until noon. My days became considerably less productive and I sometimes starved myself. By March I had one of my worst panic attacks. I was also numb, worried that I was suffering from mild dissociation and needing to feel anything. As a result, I harmed myself a few times – enough to form an addiction that I’ve been working on stopping. Once I noticed how much I’ve done, I decided that it wasn’t helping my case at all.

I also rewatched Euphoria

To put it simply, I didn’t know why anything mattered anymore. Not in a suicidal way, but just in terms of ambition. I took to excessive journaling in private, needing to work through a lot of issues. Between November and April, I have written over 70 pages that help to visualize every crazy idea in my head which ranges from my own personal history to what I want out of my identity. An issue with being autistic is that I overthink a lot, which means I sometimes think of every scenario both bad and good, becoming paranoid that people hate me, and suffer from invasive thoughts that refuse to talk rationally without considerable effort.

Deep down I was wanting someone to reach out and help me. Was there more wrong with me than I had originally thought? I had some good days, but largely I was existing in this mild state of nothingness. I tried to focus on family, whom I love and care about deeply, but something was missing in me. I could be there for them, but why wasn’t I there for myself? It’s a desperate need for external friends who will humor me for an hour a week, who will make me feel like somebody cares if I have minor successes on a weekly basis. This isn’t to say that my family lacks care, but again… it’s different. They’re supposed to care and they do greatly. 

It doesn’t help that I maybe went too far into my problems. Because I’m often independent and self-driven, I get to work at my own speed. Outside of school, I don’t have a lot of commitments – which is more of a curse when you’re trying to find motivation in your subtext. All I had were nights of going to bed at 2:30 AM for months on end, becoming too obsessed with how comfortable my blankets were. I could mow the lawn next week, or next next week. I needed to conserve energy because I had nobody who cared if I changed the world. Even then, trying to find validation on Twitter sometimes lead to brief moments of adrenaline followed by the realization that in all of this time I hadn’t worked through uplifted trauma and concern that I had not a single clue what my future looked like.

I’m going on three months straight of a strange feeling. I lack the desire to be a film critic anymore. I love film, but I just don’t have the energy to write out my thoughts on everything I see. What does it matter? Many have written similar and better pieces about this. Their work has lead to more sustainable work. I’ve done so little to authenticate myself. While I feel great about my fiction writing, my film criticism has ceased to hold interest. As a minor part of The Memory Tourist now, it eventually felt wrong to continue discussing things.

I think to some extent I remained caught up in comparing myself to others. It’s the numbers. It’s also the fact that my life is comparatively boring. I didn’t have a great addiction story, nor am I on any medication, or really had a great story about love or depression. My relationships are uneventful. What do I even have? 

Writers ARE supposed to be interesting, and I feared that I’m not. One of my coping mechanisms has been to read psychology papers as well as various forums that let me in on how others were dealing with depression. While it eventually lead to some concerning Quora posts (I didn’t visit them, but they were on the front page of Bing’s search), they allowed me to understand that I wasn’t alone and that people have been able to get through this and live “normal” lives. There are even people that I have more interactive friendships with that write blogs I’ve been consuming. Their clarity on matters is astounding and I admire them as much for craft as I am their deeply rooted honesty and self-awareness.

But again, I was nothing compared to them. I was always scared of losing control. And yet, I had subliminal thoughts of getting drunk and freeing myself of emotion. It was only because I read posts on the dangers of addiction that I knew how to rationalize saying no (that and years of not caring lead to a lack of accessibility, allowing it to pass slowly). 

I’m scared that I thought things were pushing me away from control. Even as I fail to project this in any active way, in my head it became difficult to keep everything aligned in nice boxes and just go about my day. As some would say, I wasn’t “sick enough” to receive care. I’ve gotten myself out of so many other problems without a single interference and that’s both the worst part and a thing I’m proud of. It makes me believe that no matter what, I’ll figure out how to save myself… even if what I really want is a friend to hug me and say it will be okay.

I also formed a strange addiction to TikTok, which slowly began to wrap an algorithm into mental health videos. A lot of it was more clinically based. Some of them were therapists while others were suggesting ideas of what to explore regarding traits. These were helpful, but unpacking trauma only meant that I was more insecure at trying to figure out just who I was anymore. Then I would get to the people who were downright sad. They talked about suicide, self-harm, this fear that maybe played too much on my vulnerability. Naturally, I was concerned about their personal futures and sometimes left videos a bit nervous. I always believed that I could make it out of this, but would they? Maybe I was giving in to their sadness and feeling worse as well. 

Was I experiencing behavioral contagion? Was I doing it for attention? I don’t know how the latter would be true given that I have been conservative in who I share that information with. Whatever the case may be, watching so much content related to or adjacent to death before bed, and at 2:30 AM (you really do lose track of time), only implants ideas that make getting your next day started difficult. Doing that for almost a month straight and you become addicted to those stories. Are they helping you? To be fair, there has been an uptick in videos promoting “Get well soon” behavior, and that has helped a little.

Given that I was also going to school online (which lacks any special momentum), lacking an active personality really threatens to set you back. I had trouble reading books, comprehending lectures, and I often turned my video camera off so that I could lounge or walk around. I wasn’t being academic, and I was disappointed in myself as a result. What have I learned? To be honest, I have gotten a bit out of classes, but everything crashes together succinctly. Get bored with one vice, you move to TikTok or Twitter, looking for stimulation. Being stuck in a house with fear of going anywhere and be “at risk” when you may need to emergency babysit has been a real concern. What could I even do?

By the end of February, I was reaching a breaking point. Thankfully, I have found people on Twitter who respected me enough to share personal advice. Contrary to the doom-scrolling term, I try and go to social media for good vibes. I love the people I met there and they have made my year much more significant. It’s just that without live theater to stimulate me, or to have any sense of spontaneous gallivanting to a social venue has really hurt me. Movies on a small screen suck. They may be good movies, but there’s no routine to turning on a TV and pressing play. A lack of change of atmosphere for this long has hurt my mental health.

So in March, I gave up Twitter believing that it was quietly hurting me. I was seeing dozens or hundreds of daily posts from things I didn’t care about. I wasn’t wanting to hear about The Oscars or an upcoming release of Justice League (2021). All I wanted were the few people that made me feel seen. Even then, I wanted someone I could be more personal with because, despite my sometimes too-candid candidness, I know that certain things don’t need to be online. I want advice, but I can’t exactly do it in a medium that could accidentally blackmail me.

So, what did I do in March? As I mentioned, it wasn’t a straight arrow to recovery. It was a lot of tangential thoughts that sometimes produced dead ends. There was enough there that I reassembled the view of myself. At the end of the day, that was my biggest problem. I “hated” who I was but I couldn’t entirely explain why. My memory had blurred the past into a series of misfortunes, and all because I have trouble keeping friends, rewriting memories with more faulty outcomes. 

This is where I tell you that one of the greatest things you can do is journal. You don’t have to be a writer, but I highly encourage you to do it for your own sanity. One of the things I eventually did was look at all of my old journals and see how I perceived myself throughout the past. I found writing going back to 2002 and it was such an amazing experience to notice that things were so far from my perception. Sure you make mistakes, but others you find you were always this way – trying to self-improve while being full of insecurities that ultimately make you a good person. The poetry was bold, exploring things about myself that I didn’t realize I had been struggling with since high school. No matter what, I had these documents now to tell me that my life was okay, projecting just how fine I was going to be.

Does this make everything better? 

Not even close. 

However, there is something wonderful about reading yourself and coming away with a POSITIVE reaction. I allowed my past to not be judged, and it was such a relief. I told myself that I loved myself and that everything would be okay. I allowed myself to think of the positive memories. To some extent, I’ve even allowed myself to go beyond trauma as an emotional blocker and look at the time around then that was worth celebrating. It’s helped me to think of my past in ways I hadn’t in a long time. I was always awkward and sometimes dumb, but I was alive.

I’m not perfect. To some extent, I realized that I’ve had a rotating depression since 2009 that should be of small concern, but I’m still able to function. I’ve found ways to explore optimism within my condition. Even as I write “Remastering” and “That Familiar Circle,” I try to pack the sadness with silver linings, suggesting that the world gets better. Considering a lot of my writing deals with strength in absence, I’m suddenly aware of how everything that I’ve been doing helps. I’ve been in control of my emotions even if I didn’t always regulate them that well. I’ve forced myself to be honest enough that I can see into my past through every word. Do I understand it all? NO. But, I get enough context.

Hero

I also want to personally thank Courtney Barnett, whose album “Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit” has gotten me through these tough times. That album is amazing and I think that she is a genius. Here’s the line from “Small Poppies” that summarizes me right now:

I don't know quite who I am, oh, but man, I am trying

I make mistakes until I get it right

An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye

I used to hate myself but now I think I'm alright

Did the time away actually help? To be totally honest, I think that it did. I personally encourage everyone to work through their problems in healthy ways. I know in some ways that I didn’t and I regret it. However, processing it all has hopefully made me stronger, able to enter May and every month to follow with a better outlook on life. If you continue to be impacted by depression, I wish you luck on the road ahead. You can do it. Take care of yourself. Just know that there will be a balance eventually. For me, it was on and off for five-ish months, and I’m nervous to think that it’s over yet. Still, I’m feeling more active and positive now.

With that said, I have some unfortunate news for anyone who saw this as some major announcement. I am not actually returning to The Memory Tourist just yet. I do not have the heart to return to regularly-released content that will hopefully entertain and produce authentic thought. I am still struggling with stray thoughts that threaten to throw me into a vulnerable state. I’m able to fight them now with some success. Even then, certain drives are not back yet. I loved Shiva Baby (2021), but I don’t know if I want to write a review about it. I still need to regulate myself until I feel comfortable admitting that I feel stable AND happy.

To those who have been checking in on me, even in very abstract ways, I want to personally say thank you. It means a lot to feel included. Sometimes I know that I ignore that about myself and it hurts the overall worldview. There are points where it even makes you feel selfish and that makes things worse. While I don’t think this will be the last time that I’ll ever be depressed, I hope that I’m at a nice balance. I need to enjoy life, take care of schooling, and other behind the scenes writing. 

When will The Memory Tourist be coming back? I can’t confirm. As it stands, I still feel so flummoxed that I may take all of 2021 off. Hopefully, something clicks by then and I’ll be fine. Otherwise, I felt the need to come forward and share where I am mentally. It didn’t feel right to leave you in the dark for as long as I ended up doing. I’m sorry for doing that. I hope that your time has been eventful and full of joy. If not, I believe in you and hope you’ll get there eventually. Stay strong. I know that I’ll try to do the same.