“I felt like that pinhole that couldn’t let all the light in.”
Another season of journals (Aug-Dec)
I wrote over three hundred pages in my journal between August and December. Here are my favorite excerpts, lightly edited and arranged chronologically below.
AUG 10 2025
If you don’t want people to pedestalize you then tell the truth. Make it ugly because it is. The exact things I wish to hide are the ones I need to show.
AUG 11 2025
But then again, if you put your heart into it, there is no way it can be ugly. Even if it may be unpopular, it will never be ugly. Someone like me will find it, the way I like looking at dusty, discarded objects in flea markets and vintage shops to inherit another person’s cherished possessions.
AUG 18 2025
We lock up our wishes for ourselves in other people, and throw the keys away in the labyrinths of our subconscious.
AUG 20 2025
The problem is not when the work is difficult. All things worth their salt require sweat. The problem is when the work is difficult and it is not worth the difficulty for you to do, and you lie to yourself to keep it going.
AUG 21 2025
Your reputation will never be unanimous so give up attempts to establish certainty, give up attempts to establish identity, to do or be things and then be known for having done or been them.
AUG 22 2025
Some are born kind and wise, but people like us have to earn it like the pilgrims at Fátima walking on their knees facing the Capelinha, repenting.
AUG 24 2025
There is nothing in this life we are truly insulated from. We are exposed if we are to live and love others. There is no intimacy without the possibility of destruction.
AUG 25 2025
My hair still smells like smoke from the bonfire.
AUG 26 2025
I ask too much of the people around me. I demand them to see me without projection because that is the standard I set for myself and I spend an inordinate amount of time and effort seeing through my own distorted perceptions of people who mean anything to me. In a way it is all I do. But other people are not me, they are not obsessed with figuring out how their insides work, why we love and hate and suffer and how exactly we can stop it.
AUG 28 2025
You curse your sensitivity because you resist what is most difficult for you to feel.
…
How does it feel to say: I will love you no matter how you experience me? Even if you hate my guts, even if you find me prideful or annoying? How does it feel to set my sights on embodying the heart of Christ, of Tara?
SEP 03 2025
You’re afraid if you dig out your own darkness that it will subsume you. But it doesn’t. The moment you look at it, it loses its grip and mystique. There is a calming, a settling into deeper stillness.
SEP 06 2025
I slept with half my blinds open for the flower. I’d like to name her, but I’m not sure what yet.
SEP 10 2025
God was with me in those moments, those brief respites. He did not make many appearances in those days, but he showed when he could; I saw him. Weren’t those moments beautiful? Just as those times were painful, weren’t they just perfect? Do you see what I mean?
SEP 13 2025
There is nothing wrong with you. You are simply human.
SEP 14 2025
The people born in California so rarely want to leave. They really believe it to be the best—and what can we, those who moved from as far as across the country to settle in the Golden State, say about it? Who are we to disagree? ____ has never been to the East Coast. Her world is so small, just a sliver, a sliver shaped like a golden crew sock, a rich, bountiful one full of fresh blueberries, award-winning vineyards, and possibility.
…
If I want it I can have it. I just have to actually want it, not want to want it.
SEP 18 2025
To be intimate with someone means to join together into a larger system—their hurt becomes your hurt.
SEP 20 2025
The stakes are never higher, the system never more strained, the temptation to succumb to our worse natures more gravitationally apparent than when love is on the line. Because in those moments it is not merely love—it is survival. Of course you get angry, you get defensive. But if you manage to maintain goodwill and keep what is holy in your heart, if you accept the possibility of complete death and annihilation willingly and openly, if you lie down flat in the aisle waiting for the light to take you, I swear you become it. A miracle happens.
SEP 25 2025
Keep digging barehanded. There are no rules.
SEP 26 2025
I have been punished for impurity of intent far more than I have been rewarded for my ability to dissociate to get the things I thought I wanted.
SEP 28 2025
If you rely on your defenses to survive you will confuse tenderness in others for weakness.
…
Someone who cannot set boundaries secretly hopes other people will cross their own boundaries for them, and that this would serve as proof they are lovable, worth the other’s self-betrayal, worth crossing the perilous sea for. It is the hope for a fantasy.
SEP 29 2025
Without the gift of writing I would still be nothing to myself, a total and complete stranger.
SEP 30 2025
It’s not fame I want. I just want a piece of this world where I can feel my feet on the ground.
…
If I didn’t voluntarily face it now, it would only force me to face it later under the worst of circumstances, demanding principal, interest, compliance, everything. If you refuse to look at your past your future does not really belong to you.
OCT 02 2025
I wrestled with the costs of intimacy because it had been so long since I had seen its fruits.
…
I was in more pain than I was even willing to admit, and the words came out strained on paper. On many occasions my hands trembled like writing the wrong or true thing would result in lashes—who had terrified me so? Well, it was none other than myself. I had been my own worst enemy all along, and the lashing I had done privately behind the closed doors of my mind was now made broadcast and I no longer had an appetite for snuff films in which I was the starring lead because all she did was bleed and take it.
OCT 03 2025
Make the best of what is at your disposal, and stand by what you have made with grace.
OCT 06 2025
I am losing interest in talking about the thing itself—awakening, meditation, et cetera. I would much rather fully internalize the mystical experiences I have had and have that understanding suffuse my actions.
OCT 10 2025
My inability to stay in connection with you is, of course, my own inability to face myself—all the shame and disappointment that arises when I feel I have fallen short in the essential duties of being human. You make it unbearable to be myself. So you have to go.
OCT 13 2025
Your problems outline your eccentricities. Isn’t it funny how they’re always tailor-made for you?
OCT 14 2025
If my guardian angel were watching me, she’d wonder why I’m crying all the time, if life on Earth was really that bad. But it’s not that it’s bad, it’s more that it is too much, and what I can’t hold flows out of me in tears.
…
I love myself when I am crying over the pain more than I like myself when I am charming a room full of people I’ve just met and have them by my jokes, because in the former I am letting myself feel it. I am allowing myself to make contact with reality.
…
Either she has to give or the light has to go out. Something has to break.
OCT 15 2025
Isn’t this what you wanted: the ability to see the truth, the full-bodied thing?
OCT 18 2025
I’m willing to see it through.
OCT 20 2025
To yearn for the approval of people who don’t really care for you, to punish yourself because you are still yet to be (and frankly never will be) perfect, is to do injustice to your past and everything you did to overcome it.
OCT 21 2025
I am essentially doing mental surgery completely unaided and unanesthetized and getting great results but it is a real bitch—
OCT 22 2025
I finally found the emotion I’m feeling. It’s humiliation.
OCT 23 2025
When I heard you had overdosed on Nyquil, my immediate reaction wasn’t anxiety, it was despair. Despair at our lives and what they continued to bring against our will. I felt like that pinhole that couldn’t let all the light in. I didn’t want to lose you, I didn’t want to lose myself. But I was forced to contend with the very real possibility that both had a high chance of happening.
OCT 27 2025
Oh, for all that is holy please find the strength to open your eyes. One for the money, two for the show.
OCT 28 2025
Remember: the things you love and hate the most in someone are connected. It’s only the angle that changes; all looking has intention embedded in it.
…
Don’t worry about your words being misinterpreted. They will be—by the wrong people. You can’t say the wrong thing to the right person. Those who are on the same journey will get it, immediately and without explanation, even before their minds get a chance to catch up. You are not speaking to their minds. That’s like courting a vixen. Go for the jugular.
OCT 29 2025
My desire to dismantle the projections of others onto me is still rooted in my desire for control. I feel they are wrong, they have misunderstood me, they cannot really see me, so I wish to control it. But who really benefits when I do that? Me, in that tyrannical way.
OCT 31 2025
Truth will not make you popular, but any loss in likability is well-compensated by integrity and an authentic life. I want the austere clarity, the intensity under pressure, the beast under control. I want diamonds in clay, I want the rips in chambray.
…
I can be reborn again and again but it will never be like the first. If I have been my greatest tormentor I surely know how to bring about my own flourishing—just flip the sign. Only someone who knows all the right answers can manage to get them all wrong. Only the fool can become the wise man. Inhale sharply. Don’t you see? You are so close to the cusp of everything you know, of being. Keep going: the birth canal is only so long.
NOV 01 2025
The world will not comply; you are what must change.
NOV 06 2025
I beg God for a break, he says no, I say fine, I learn the lesson, I learn not to beg.
NOV 07 2025
Do I have to remain absolutely lucid in every moment?
…
Don’t you think you’ve grown enough? How much more do you need? It’s not in the amount, you’ll never be satisfied that way. You just want soft eyes, you want to be able to look and not have it burn.
…
Life goes on. People say things. You say things back. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they love you. Sometimes they can’t stand you. That is just how it goes. That is part of the fun.
NOV 17 2025
It was snowing outside—big flakes, slow and heavy, drifting down like shredded cotton. I stood by the bedroom window and watched them for a while.
NOV 26 2025
I found the shape of that fear in me today. When I touched it I was struck with fear and tenderness and I wanted to scream. It was in the shape of a rectangular slab, of stone or maybe of brass—it had a jagged, irregular surface on the top left portion, the rest was smooth. I ran my fingers over it in my imagination, I felt the scars and the pain, the long forgotten wound. And I embraced it. I held it to my chest, I let it enter and become a part of me, I made the thing I had wanted all this time, this license for existence, and gave it to myself.
NOV 29 2025
They’re selling Christmas trees in front of the hardware store already—when I passed them I caught a whiff of pine.
DEC 09 2025
When we expose ourselves we know there is risk—that’s why it’s scary. We know there’s a chance the other person will respond with indifference or even cruelty, that taking off our armor may result in our being stabbed, but we hope for it not to happen. So when it does, it hurts doubly—there is the pain of the wound itself but also the betrayal of expectations and wishes. There is the fear of what it means as our hardworking brains try to package the event into tidy explanations: it is because I am not worthy of love, it will happen again, I will have to design my life around this, around not being able to have something I dreamed of and really wanted to have. It is the sound of childhood dreams dying, the heart’s hard closing, the clattering of a metal shutter as the shop closes for the night.
DEC 17 2025
When you are close to the edge the only thing you can do is watch your feet.
DEC 25 2025
My own writing scares me. As it should.
After reading this post, please listen to the song “Creatures in Heaven” by Glass Animals.
Reading this made me feel less alone, thank you 💕
I wish you Well 🙏
incredible work! so beautiful, i really feel it and find it relatable. thank you for sharing. very inspiring.