Author: Olavia Kite

My mind has been feeling a little bit eroded lately, language-wise. A smooth, sandblasted brain. I’ve been unconsciously sneaking Japanese grammar structures into my English sentences, and don’t get me started on the way my mind seems to drift off mid-sentence, because there are holes where entire phrases used to be. Sometimes I’m looking for a word in either Spanish or English, and my mind serves me a smorgasbord of possibilities in Japanese, French, German… everything save the language I actually need. So this is day 1 of me writing every day to try to save my mind from utter obliteration.

I wonder how I survived in Japan with absolutely no one to talk to. Well, social media was not as pervasive back then, and I still had to go to school and participate in class, which counts as talking. Oh my god, is this what they call brain rot? I definitely feel an unusual sluggishness when trying to respond during conversation. Have I brought this upon myself due to overconsumption of social media? Is there such a thing as a healthy dose of social media, anyway? I’ve already written about this, and the answer is no. Not for me, at least. There must be a way to make it more educational, though, like following accounts in my weaker languages only. Ha! That’s where I’m one step ahead of you, says social media. I’ll make it impossible for you to see only the things you follow. I’ll make you crave more novelty, and forget about your original noble (albeit very naïve) intent.

My weakened language production skills have brought about an unhealthy habit of second-guessing every word I say. Is this idiom correct? Is this sentence structure correct? My mind is negating decades of written and oral communication in my two main languages. Meanwhile, my third language is neither regressing nor thriving. Ha, what a fancy way to say I’m stuck.

So, to make the jump from whining to action, in addition to these writing exercises, I’m ramping up my water intake because hydration is also vital for optimal brain function. Nothing can come out of a shriveled up brain.

(I also need to talk to actual people on a regular basis, but life in this century is making that particular endeavor especially hard.)

Why oh why, why on Earth am I still playing the charade of doing basically all my web surfing on incognito/private mode? It made sense maybe ten years ago, when I realized I was using my browsing history to trace my every move online just to remember what I was doing on a certain day—probably an anxiety-induced frenzy. I decided to go full incognito in an effort to kill that urge, or at least the possibility to fulfill it. So now I go on opening tab after tab after tab because it will help me remember that I will need this later, as if an open tab were an item in a to-do list, until months later something insignificant happens and boom, in an instant all the tabs are gone forever. And then I feel like half my brain and life history have blown up in smithereens, because I absolutely cannot remember what any of those tabs contained, but surely they were really important, otherwise why would I leave them up like that, and their presence there must have conveyed something about who I was and what I was doing and thinking about back then (when?), and earlier than that, like a slice of earth and its rock layers.

This particular batch of tabs, the one I’m mourning right now, feels like I’ve just lost some souvenirs from a wonderful trip. Lord knows the real loss was exponentially worse. Still, the real memories of recent marvelous travels remain intact, as does the joy of them happening.

I told Cavorite while we brushed our teeth that I had a bunch of old tabs close on me.
“Good!” he said.
“Cold water is healthy,” I replied, “but it’s still a bucket of cold water.”

Writing about writing gets old really fast. And yet, that’s all I’ve done the last few months (years?). I write about writing because my brain can’t seem to churn out anything else. So here I am, meta-writing as a last-ditch effort to regain my attention span. And still, I’m actually writing this because I’m procrastinating a long email, and I don’t want to fall prey yet again to the life-devouring, time-sucking monster of social media.

When I ditched Twitter and Threads came along, I foolishly thought I had finally found a safe space for distraction, one I could use sparingly. However, that’s like expecting a new flavor of Takis to be healthier and less addictive. It’s just a new variety of the same garbage I can’t get enough of.

I hate, hate, hate what social media has done to my mind. I used to be a good writer. Even if I had actually been a bad writer, I used to write. I used to have real hobbies where I had agency, rather than letting time fly out of my life, idly scrolling down, taking in whatever the algorithm wants to throw at me, no questions asked. Last weekend, while sipping coffee, Cavorite pulled out his journal, a tiny notebook filled with quick scribbles in pencil. There, he painted pictures with his words, and for a few seconds I felt as if I were joining him at a café in Antigua, Guatemala. How beautiful, a life recorded. I wished I had something like that.

But wait—I do! It’s right here. All I need to do is focus. When I was a kid, I used to dream that I had the ability to fly, but was only able to actually do so when I believed I could. That’s how writing feels now. Judging by the number of paragraphs preceding this sentence, maybe I managed to lift my feet off the ground, if only a few inches, and only for a little while.

Maybe this blog has always been my grounding space. Maybe I was far less anxious when I was a regular writer of solipsistic observations over here. What I failed to see for so long—I didn’t know myself that well—was that this was never meant to impress anyone. I was never meant to make it as an author. I fancied myself a great writer when I was a kid, and when I eventually came to the realization that I wasn’t, I mistakenly believed there was no use keeping at it.

There’s also that part of the story where someone weaponizes my own writings against me and I become paranoid about my privacy. Fortunately, nowadays my online social life is in a post-Roman situation where everyone’s retreated to their remote villas and I have nothing to worry about anymore. I step out of my mental cottage on a crisp morning to gaze at the vast valley of silence before me, and I feel contented.

As I type this, I’m realizing my period of not writing is not unlike the time I spent away from drawing because I became convinced that it was somehow required to receive formal training in order to make something worth sharing. My boyfriend back then, who was not exactly gifted when it came to putting pencil on paper, gave a passing glance to one of my sketches one day and declared: “you need to learn to draw.” And I believed him. God, what a waste of time. And it’s not even his fault. It’s my fault for taking it the wrong way and falling from my pedestal of perfectionism and shattering to pieces, over and over again. Of course everyone needs to learn, whether to draw or to write or to sing or to bake or whatever. We can learn by doing, and that’s where the joy of it all resides.

Oof. It’s only the second week of the year and the ground under my feet’s already shaking.