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This one requires some explanation, on many accounts. And since this will be the last thing I post to Tumblr, there’s someone I would insist read it through; I don’t know why I’m writing this explanation, but it seems to me to be the right thing. It may be an apology or an analysis, whichever you decide it most to be like.
Before I begin, I have tagged the person in this, but I’d like to clarify why. It’s not to guilt trip her and force her to read this, but because I still maintain the belief that she’s a good person and thusly deserves whatever good comes her way. Check out her blog, give her a follow and let her share with you the kindness that I was shown for just under 4 months (8 more days and it would have been 4 months, I did the math but then I have dyscalculus so maybe?) If she is reading this, I’d ask her to give the apology a chance first. Check out her pages @tranquilitude and @shadowysound
As I’ve stated before, I don’t like hurting people; I take it seriously when I do and try to change things. I knew I was hurting Maeve and Gabe, and because this is an emotion I’ve never dealt with before I couldn’t offer any guarantee that the guilt I was feeling over things wouldn’t seep through to just casual conversation, or that I wouldn’t end up using them as selfishly as I tend to. For that reason, I cut them off – in some part, I tried to make it obvious to them what had happened, I suppose, so that I could be held to it, and so that I couldn’t regress back into speaking to them and making them feel bad. Burning bridges, again. And further, what I imagine people don’t see (or specifically, one person) is that everything I publish here is ad absurdum. If something I post seems extreme, it may be because I think that the most interesting way of portraying something is to radicalise it. Further, if something seems melodramatic, the chances are that it is intentionally as such. Ultimately, I don’t dislike people. I think there are a great many inconsistencies in character that can make them difficult and frustrating, but in the end, we’re simply humans trying to live in accordance with our principles, whatever they may be. We live with a specific view of ourselves. We want to be a certain way, and so follow certain trends, speak a certain way, and dress and act idiosyncratically. These attempts to be a certain person can be inauthentic; this is not shameful, it’s a part of the sad reality of being human that our identities are hidden behind a thin but opaque veil, and in attempting to glimpse them, people turn towards reinventing themselves. This is something of which I think everyone is guilty somewhat, whether it’s in attempts to be thinner or lighter, stronger or cooler, I’ll confess that my rhetoric of trying to be a good person is likely derived from this also, that in disgust of what else could be there, I try to portray a certain identity which oftentimes proves itself to be false. This permeates still to things like fashion – some women I know get haircuts which they believe will make them more masculine in dislike of femininity, or to even appear ‘butch’. This is an account I give of many people, not just one.
Onto the hard-hitting stuff, and I would ask you, reader (whomever you are) to begin at least non-judgemental. Whomever I am on Tumblr is not who I am in person, and this is likely the case for most people on here, whether they know it or not. Because Tumblr has this ambiguity, there’s nothing to hold you to being anything other than your ideal person on here, or to being inauthentic. Difficulties arise when you try to be a specific person on Tumblr, but it has links to your reality. If people you know have your URL, the person you portray may seem offensive to them in its mischaracterisation of you. Or even more so, the person portrayed may be offensive in its own right because with the ambiguity of Tumblr it’s easy to speak your mind. The things I have written in poems etc. I don’t hold to be true; perhaps a permutation of the truth, an artistic rendering, but in themselves are not generally true. When I have written before, it’s been with inspiration from a small event in my life which I have chosen to explore in greater detail, which can include fabricating things or pulling in elements of other archetypes. I am currently dealing with a difficult break-up; my first, in all honesty, and I will own that it’s not something I’ve dealt with well. Throughout none of this has it been my intention to transfer guilt onto anyone (this I can’t emphasise enough) but it seems to have happened nonetheless through the ‘artistic renderings’ I’ve constructed of things, or in my attempts to process emotions by externalising them. I have never denied that what I have subjected people to has been unfair, or said that I don’t regret it, but it’s a path I’ve travelled without hope of return from. Being on Tumblr has been strange for me, and my continued presence has been an agitator for someone I cared about. I suppose it may be because of how personal a medium poetry is – we used to write poems about each other (not much, but on occasion) which may be why the poems I still write seem so personal to her.
It has helped me to be able to externalise my emotions, to express them, and receive external acknowledgement of them as they are noticed by people and read. It’s made them real so that I can process them better, but clearly this isn’t the right medium for it. Tumblr was hers and I suppose it was disrespectful of me to have thought that I could have a continued presence on here irrespective of her. I thought that, because this was her (3rd?) relationship, she would have moved on almost instantly; evidently, she has still been reading my posts, and shamefully I have been doing likewise. I’ve held myself back from doing so habitually, maybe just once every two weeks, but it’s something I’ve still been doing. Unwisely, as many of the things she’s written were under the same pretence as I have been writing under – that we weren’t seeing each other’s things, and so some of the things she’s said I have found hurtful also (I’d imagine that identically to my blog, they weren’t meant to be hurtful, just a commentary).
To get this off of my chest, the previous poem I wrote wasn’t exclusively about you, it was mainly about myself, and how I’ve realised that Tumblr has influenced my personality and preferences, how it’s enabled me to be so introspective that I could be in a ‘glass house’ and never look outside.
If she does elect to read this, I apologise, to her and to Maeve and to Gabe. I trust she will have the decency not to share this blog with them because they have links to my life and I would rather keep this blog separate from that. But it is for the reasons above, because this site permits this inadvertent harm to people I care about, because it permits portraying an identity which is so false and fantastical, because it was never mine to use to begin with, because it isn’t helping me to move on, because who I am on here is so false and misleading, because it has helped me to be a worse person, and because there are things in my life I should think are so much more important than it, that this will be my last activity on Tumblr. It may not be for all people, but for me this site is cancer now.
