This post is by Greg Nussen (Krooked Kop). More of his writing can be seen at http://krookedkop.tumblr.com/
...
Every so often, when I get in bed, I get a strange sensation of vertigo.
I lay there, feeling as if a ghost is holding a video camera and zooming out further and further away until I see myself, through closed eyes, from the furthest possible vantage point. Periodically I will open my eyes and remind myself that I am here. I am not elsewhere. I am not there, with you, where I may want to be. I am here.
This strange, out-of-body experience seems to be wholly unique to my life. I have shared the feeling with others and been met with skeptic eyes, questioning glances. And it seems I have it more often lately, as if I cannot believe I am here and the only way to digest my daily life is through the safe and distant lens of an imaginary camera.
Most days, I cannot understand how I got here or why. On these days, I feel like someone has picked me up from where I was comfortable and put me in a place where comfort is a rarity, as if to say Fuck you, who are you to believe in peace and comfort? This is a test and I am rapidly failing. And being present in my day-to-day life is a concept I am learning how to grasp.
We face psychological changes everyday, the eighteen of my M.F.A. class, who have been supplanted and chosen to eat ourselves alive on a daily basis, and the struggle to deal with rapid changes in such short periods of time is a struggle we have to learn to cope with. Being present is a skill, not just a product of merely turning up at a certain place and time; its a state of mind that requires the pushing away of external factors.
When even the question of where we will be this very winter has to be answered before we can even answer where will we be in three years, and how did I leave where I was and even was this the right decision, the right decisions, the right choice and choices, it is increasingly harder to say, once again, I am here. It seems that acknowledging our failures is easier than understanding our privileges, and, I think, one of our biggest challenges as aspiring artists is remembering how lucky we are to be here.
…
Seven years ago, with very little understanding of the world outside my privileged upbringing, I went to Poland with only the minutest knowledge of what the Holocaust was or what happened during World War II. I saw Auschwitz and Maidanek and others and what struck me most, beyond the horrors that I and others have already oft described, was the plethora of ignorant tourists who treated the camps as if they were standard monuments from any other city; pictures of families smiling underneath the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign and in front of piles of shoes and hair as if they were on the Ponte Vecchio or at the Tower of Pisa. People who go to a certain place in a foreign country and look in their Frommer’s Guide and see a monument, believing it to be the same as any other.
I feel bad for these people. I feel sorry for their lack of comprehension of the place they are in and for their inability to question their own actions. But I think that this is, on an admittedly graver and stranger level, what I have been doing since I got here. It is a deflection; its the choice to ignore my surroundings in favor of something different, whether for the desire to be somewhere else or for the need to act as if whats happening isn’t real to preserve mental stability. What I saw on those days were people who smiled and joked in what, at least I hope, were attempts to not deal with the reigning sadness and devastation. But what I have been doing, and what I am fighting against, is the sometimes deliberate choice to go to a place of melancholia in the face of having the incredible luck of being where I am, because telling myself I can’t do something or that I should be somewhere else with someone different or being frantic about the future feels easier than saying:
I am talented. I deserve this. I am in the right place.
Regret is easy. Wondering about the past is easy. Beating oneself up into a pulp is the easiest. Having doubts about the future and believing that our goals are unattainable is child’s play. It is staring down the present, living in the now, putting yourself in a room and a place and a time and saying: I am here. I will get the most out of where I am at this moment - it is this that makes us better and stronger, and perhaps more than anything else, this is the part of the learning process that needs to be embraced the most.
And so next time that I get this vertigo and see myself through a camera that pulls away, I will try to reach out and grab it and pull it with all my force back into my brain and my body.
I am here. I am okay with who I am. I am in a new place, with new people, and my shit is all over the place and I will not try to pick it back up.
KK
...
Every so often, when I get in bed, I get a strange sensation of vertigo.
I lay there, feeling as if a ghost is holding a video camera and zooming out further and further away until I see myself, through closed eyes, from the furthest possible vantage point. Periodically I will open my eyes and remind myself that I am here. I am not elsewhere. I am not there, with you, where I may want to be. I am here.
This strange, out-of-body experience seems to be wholly unique to my life. I have shared the feeling with others and been met with skeptic eyes, questioning glances. And it seems I have it more often lately, as if I cannot believe I am here and the only way to digest my daily life is through the safe and distant lens of an imaginary camera.
Most days, I cannot understand how I got here or why. On these days, I feel like someone has picked me up from where I was comfortable and put me in a place where comfort is a rarity, as if to say Fuck you, who are you to believe in peace and comfort? This is a test and I am rapidly failing. And being present in my day-to-day life is a concept I am learning how to grasp.
We face psychological changes everyday, the eighteen of my M.F.A. class, who have been supplanted and chosen to eat ourselves alive on a daily basis, and the struggle to deal with rapid changes in such short periods of time is a struggle we have to learn to cope with. Being present is a skill, not just a product of merely turning up at a certain place and time; its a state of mind that requires the pushing away of external factors.
When even the question of where we will be this very winter has to be answered before we can even answer where will we be in three years, and how did I leave where I was and even was this the right decision, the right decisions, the right choice and choices, it is increasingly harder to say, once again, I am here. It seems that acknowledging our failures is easier than understanding our privileges, and, I think, one of our biggest challenges as aspiring artists is remembering how lucky we are to be here.
…
Seven years ago, with very little understanding of the world outside my privileged upbringing, I went to Poland with only the minutest knowledge of what the Holocaust was or what happened during World War II. I saw Auschwitz and Maidanek and others and what struck me most, beyond the horrors that I and others have already oft described, was the plethora of ignorant tourists who treated the camps as if they were standard monuments from any other city; pictures of families smiling underneath the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign and in front of piles of shoes and hair as if they were on the Ponte Vecchio or at the Tower of Pisa. People who go to a certain place in a foreign country and look in their Frommer’s Guide and see a monument, believing it to be the same as any other.
I feel bad for these people. I feel sorry for their lack of comprehension of the place they are in and for their inability to question their own actions. But I think that this is, on an admittedly graver and stranger level, what I have been doing since I got here. It is a deflection; its the choice to ignore my surroundings in favor of something different, whether for the desire to be somewhere else or for the need to act as if whats happening isn’t real to preserve mental stability. What I saw on those days were people who smiled and joked in what, at least I hope, were attempts to not deal with the reigning sadness and devastation. But what I have been doing, and what I am fighting against, is the sometimes deliberate choice to go to a place of melancholia in the face of having the incredible luck of being where I am, because telling myself I can’t do something or that I should be somewhere else with someone different or being frantic about the future feels easier than saying:
I am talented. I deserve this. I am in the right place.
Regret is easy. Wondering about the past is easy. Beating oneself up into a pulp is the easiest. Having doubts about the future and believing that our goals are unattainable is child’s play. It is staring down the present, living in the now, putting yourself in a room and a place and a time and saying: I am here. I will get the most out of where I am at this moment - it is this that makes us better and stronger, and perhaps more than anything else, this is the part of the learning process that needs to be embraced the most.
And so next time that I get this vertigo and see myself through a camera that pulls away, I will try to reach out and grab it and pull it with all my force back into my brain and my body.
I am here. I am okay with who I am. I am in a new place, with new people, and my shit is all over the place and I will not try to pick it back up.
KK
perfect.
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