videophage.com

I wish I could go see a therapist, or even more interestingly, for better or worse, a psychoanalyst. Sitting down with a licensed professional to talk about the glitchy, rhizomatic workings of my brain would certainly scratch my intellectual itch to deconstruct and read into everything. But, maybe that would not be a good thing. I would not want to be told what to think about what I think, having my mental intrusions and dreams traced onto some preexisting top-down schema, but to have new pathways of understanding grow in addition. I certainly overanalyze my emotions, however, I don’t think I do that as substitute for feeling them. The chicken or the egg? The critic certainly came before the artist in my mind. I bring up these thoughts and questions because last night I wrote in my diary that, for me, it really only takes one person. I only need one person. One person’s belief is enough to get me off my ass. I put no faith in anything, but I expect godly devotion to me in return, but I only need it from one. I wish I could go back in time and fistfight my parents for making me someone who is driven by praise but not before sealing it with a lack of confidence and anxious character. I yearn to disrupt from my subjected state of paralysis. “Drive” is too strong a word, I get along just fine without positive affirmations, but it really does feel great. On my own, I am incredibly unmotivated to create anything and share it. The second person grounds me, they don’t even need to really do anything. Someone to study next to, for instance, someone to sit next to me while I work—even better if they have good ideas and input and interest in what I’m working on. In some instances, it doesn’t really matter who; does that qualify as using people? I just need a body there. I am an empathetic person at the outset, but the more I dwell on these questions that do not even need to be asked, the more I see myself as an opportunist, narcissistically manipulating people to my advantage, means to accomplish my ends. Perhaps, I am giving myself too much credit. To be fair, I have stopped caring a considerable amount about how people perceive me, but I could not bear to be thought as a narcissist. I might have taken it too far. I rarely talk about myself, much preferring to listen and observe, speaking only when spoken to and retreating once more after the interaction, I am quick to cut people off, I have forsaken social media and eradicated most traces of a digital footprint, for the longest time, I carried myself purposefully in a way that I would be as invisible to an Other as possible, becoming illusory and nondescript. When I set out to do things, I do them. When my parents became merely roommates, I vowed to become that invisible to everyone else. I don’t know, I’m trying to be my own therapist, but even if I come to the most correct conclusions, the catharsis will never be the same as a real session. I need another person. And so, yet, I think I may have finally shed the last bit of that modernist air of superiority, as if I unconsciously treated myself as if to have existed independent of all systems. I think most people are like that. You see, narcissism is the medium after all, I didn’t want to wholly accept it, but Krauss is right. I concede her that, but I throw back, an equally simple question to her own simple, brilliant thesis: “Who cares?” “Okay, so what?” It is interesting that I have such a love for video coupled with a crippling phobia of narcissism. I don’t know what that means and I’m too tired to work that out right now. I told myself I would stop doing this shit where I wallow in my guilt and all my ugliness, because it really is as simple as consciously choosing to no longer think in that space. I’m tired of whining to no one. Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a rockstar. I can recall one specific gray memory of childhood. It’s a couple days before my seventh, maybe eighth, birthday. My mother gifts me a necklace with a pendant that I wear currently on a new chain. It is after my parent’s separation/divorce, so maybe it is my eighth birthday. That would make it 2009. Or maybe it’s before, but my father just isn’t home. The details are not important nor the images, but the thought. I don’t know what prompted the daydream after that moment, but I imagined myself singing in front of an arena of adoring fans. (I probably was watching too much American Idol.) A wannabe object infatuated with objects. Why fight it? It’s exhausting and boring. Video is my narcissism and my foxhole—I need mediation between me and the outside. I hide behind my long hair, but not today. I will reappear only to disappear too soon, both aesthetic projects, orchestrations in their own right.