the art of letting go

~xandra

late at night, i'm the most productive. and when you used to be able to smoke inside, writing, smoking, and drinking is probably the best combination for successful prose on paper since liber and mercury bestowed us with their gifts. but even still, there is not much cooler a vibe than a writer at the end of the bar at a local pub, scribbling in a notebook in between sips of their beverage of choice—and it does say a lot about them, doesn't it?

a pint: probably a more lover of language who writes for the hell of it. a dirty martini: some emotions are a bit built up in that one, there. an old-fashioned: who are you kidding? i see ~bartender shaking his head; i must've gotten that all wrong, but generalizations are more fun to write.

it's tough these days as a writer; then again, i think it always has been if you listen to the writers. these days, it's hard to be judged based on your work when the ones being read are the trendy titles from social media starlets. what's the new barometer of success: the end of a drink or a sea of your book covers draped across chairs on a crowded beach? for me, this pint of cider will do.

i've been thinking a lot about what i want to learn, especially in between sending out resumes. i've wanted to put it down in words, the things i'm taking in to my brain and finding home there. lately, at least for the past few years as a virus has changed our lives, i've been dealing in the art of self-improvement. it's hard to talk about improving yourself, though, because it feels like navel-gazing. that's an especially hard hurdle to get over if you don't want to come across as self-absorbed. neurodivergence makes me think about interactions a lot; what social interactions mean, what facial expressions are truly communicating, how people interact—all of these fascinating facets of the human experience that i tend to not understand but want to. don't worry—inside of my torso, i see the universe.

my self-improvement often comes from studying others (though a therapist does help). i find myself wondering people's motivation with no care of the degree of triviality. i've been seemingly obsessed with the idea of choice throughout my life: why do people choose the things they do in their actions, words, gifts, or activities? i used to chock it up to bring a writer, but since my diagnosis a couple of years ago, i've reframed what concepts of obsession actually have been: hyperfixations, a difference of neural pathways, my brain operating differently than others. and, with that, comes the weight of holding on too long; memories staying fresh, a difference of neural pathways, just my brain operating differently than others.

it starts with forgiveness, the concept of letting go. the first thing i ever learned in this journey was that forgiveness isn't for others, it's for you. i never really knew what that meant, despite hearing it before, but put into practice in my life, it ended up ultimately being the forgiving of myself for no longer punishing someone who might deserve it.

this translates into smaller things, too, and sometimes, punishment has nothing to do with it. learning how not to sweat the small stuff is an ongoing project, and one i'm grateful to my partner for. i have to bestow forgiveness on myself for things not being perfect or going according to plan. the house won't fall due to some splinters in the hardwood floor—especially when we're too busy dancing slow on rugs.

sometimes, the grudge that's held is because i messed up (as is wont to happen with humans), and how can i get over that? the forgiveness there is that, yes, i will make mistakes, but how do you learn from it? what do you then take away as the lesson? there may not even be one. and that has to be okay—because the universe is random, the roles aren't carved onto stone tablets, and you might be the villain in someone else's story, if only for a moment. it's okay to let those moments pass, for you to grow as a person with that as a distant memory, to refrain from dwelling on the things you cannot change, and to just choose to use your brain for something else in the limited time we have on this planet.

looks like my glass has reached empty. ~bartender, how about another?