It is 2am, and I am not okay. Not worth trying to force myself back to sleep.  I still have a lot of heartbreak to properly process. At the end of the day, I only have myself. And that needs to be enough, even when it isn’t. What I need is just one or two amazing friends. And I’ve done everything I could to manifest them and it simply hasn’t happened yet.  No more hoping. No more yearning. It’s time I just put my head down and do my own thing.

[In the middle of the night,] I rewrote “Lost Lamb of the Middle Class” from Cloud Pieces and “Writing at Breakneck Speeds” from my Edit of the Art essay series for Life and Times of a Rambling Soul, my collected works project due out next year. When the sun finally woke me up again at 5am, I just laid there for a while… . I got up finally around 6 because obviously sleep is now a foreign land to me and I have no passport.  I saw that the articles I’d worked on had lots of embarrassing typos and awful mistakes with verb-noun agreement. Mistakes I used to make years ago. It’s like part of me has regressed while other parts of me are flying on ahead towards the second star to the right and straight on through the late afternoon.

While I was shuffling up my tarot deck this morning, one of the cards vibrated in my hand. I swiftly set it aside and hurriedly pile-shuffled the remaining cards. I flipped over the one that was vibrating and I was met by “XV – Demon Cat” (AKA The Devil.)

The advice: “Your demons have taken hold of you, causing a separation from your better nature. You may feel caught in darkness, unable to find the light. If you are not the one fighting the demons, consider this card a warning. Avoid situations where you may be tempted away from your proper path. If you feel fearful, turn and run the other way. Stay clear of the Demon Cat’s claws.”

I meditate on this card for a moment while I let my Cinnamon Toast Crunch go soggy. I ponder the snarling, hissing black cat standing over its victim, a hapless gull it just so happened to pounce. The brambles behind him are menacing. It’s not a pretty picture. I force myself to wolf down the soggy cereal while I contemplate exactly what I should do with this information.

Yeah, I’ve been battling many demons lately. But the advice here, to turn and run from fear, I don’t agree with. And as far as finding light, this was true until just this past weekend, when a new light emerged. Emily has discovered a new queer group in her hometown of Stamford (her second hometown, technically, but the one she still associates with today.) But while this is great news, the better news is I found a new muse, one who really only came to the forefront quite suddenly. And I find that my writing has suddenly taken on a much more diaristic confessional quality. I am allowing myself much more grace. I don’t need to craft a perfect sentence. I just need to let them keep coming from my fingertips.

I find myself skipping words, they are coming so furious and fast to me at the moment. I’m forgetting my basic grammar at times; this is an old problem of mine. Apparently I have slowed down in ways I didn’t recognize and now I’m for some reason speeding up again and making some of my old mistakes and falling back into some old habits. But the words that come aren’t the words of the distant past selves that made these mistakes. It’s that I was holding back much more than I thought, which is why I felt so trapped inside my own life. It is indeed normal to feel that way, which is why music is so freeing. And someone reminded me of this through a song recently. That new muse I mentioned. 

Music is magic, indeed. And that thing I read on Sublime yesterday that was an address to new students of Boston Conservatory was so perfectly timed. Talk about trusting the timing of my journey… I’m not one who can create quickly. That’s why I left content creation in the first place. I need everything to be a slow burn. Yes, I can whip something out in twenty minutes that’s halfway decent. But give me twenty years… imagine what I could do.

The fact this card was vibrating means that I’m finally ready to break out of this bubble I built for myself while I healed from Life the past few years. But I’m not going to just be reckless, either, and go on some social media site and buy followers and crap. I need to be intentional, particular, and specific with my next moves. 

In terms of Reaching Out, which I bought a book to help me with, I still need to know what it is that is my true motivation. Because I have no real incentives besides sheer boredom and loneliness, I have to figure out how to make the best of the time I expect people to have in interfacing with me. Because people don’t know how to manage the time they already have; meanwhile, I have too much time to manage, and yet, simultaneously, it’s running out faster than I’d like. 

We’re roughly 46 percent of the way through 2026, and while my goals this year were mostly undefined, I haven’t read nearly as much as I’d like, although my collected works project is probably about half done now, so it hasn’t been a total loss.

With that card pulled and considered, I’m not sure what comes next.  My energy is coming through in heavy waves and I’m ebbing a bit at the moment, so I need to let the electrolytes I’m drinking kick in.