MY CHAOS

I feel like whenever I'm not in the mood for various/specific projects, or those times when my brain is on holiday, I can always do journal pages anyway. I mean, a big part of why I love journals and journalling is the casualness of filling them up. They're meant to be personal and messy and unimpressive - a way for you to figure out stuff or get things out of your head. You can be ill or sad and you can still just journal some stuff without thinking about it.

Sometimes I feel like I can't think at all. When I was a kid I used to like pretending I was a video game character. The protagonist of an RPG of my own life. I would imagine every interaction had a corresponding text box. I would imagine everything I picked up going into an inventory that I could bring up and check whenever I wanted. I think it helped me to feel like my life was more purposeful and controllable on any given day to pretend every movement and action was part of a video game narrative. That and I liked the particularity of the gestures the characters of Final Fantasy VIII made and wished my life would turn into a quest to save the world and ride huge yellow birds and read occult magazines (I love this game).

The point is, it was a nice way to avoid having thoughts for a while. My thoughts adhered to game mechanics and that was it. It was fun. I enjoy a chocolate mousse more if it becomes a key item, or restores health points. That's understandable, right?

I think there's something similar about journalling and pretending you're a video game protagonist. Both are ways to organise your thoughts and process your day/life, and both are ways of putting yourself on auto-pilot a bit. Or they were/are for me, at least. I dunno, I just know that I don't really need full consciousness to journal and I'm happy that there are things like this that I can do absentmindedly.