Writer's Diary
I wrote a few weeks ago about how mornings were muses, but I was destroying my mornings. And now I know why. I was waking up and going on Twitter on my laptop, which I guess most people do on their phones (but which I can’t because I don’t have a smartphone). Cut off from the option of logging on, my mind feels free1. The last few months, generally, were very strange; I was in a sublet, which was cramped, and I had none of my own stuff, and it didn't get good sunlight—or, I don't know: it felt a bit like a cave… like I was not really at home, and my impulse was to live on the Internet where there was some sense of comfort. It was behavioral. I lost all semblance of discipline. Now it's so simple. I wake up, I feel at home, and this exciting mental charge is back: the charge of ideas. Not that long ago I used to love waking up, because there would be a window of time about an hour after the first sip of coffee in which I'd have all sorts of good ideas, read, write. Arguably this was the time in my day where I fashioned myself into something other than what the forces around me were trying to make me into. Mornings were the moment to build myself up: the mental gym. So, I was feeling the loss of that hour, because I was feeling the loss of myself as an individual.
There was definitely a shift in my mid-20s—which I can only recognize now in retrospect—when I stopped really seeking love and respect in relationships and started seeking antagonism and started craving the emotional punishment I intuitively wanted (feeling like a failure in life). I started to align with people who would destroy my