Offering You Solace From a Moonfull Mind
The glow of tentative writing, while seeking connection in a wide open digital space. (a short-form prose exploration)
In honor of the Full Blue Moon in Pisces, I want to practice radical honesty.
Yet there is a great painlessness of this contemporary conundrum. We aren’t confronted by their absence. Rather, we notice only the ghostly non-presence of the humans that click.
Our numbers are driven by internet phantoms that are all human beings living (and clicking) somewhere else in space. Yet, like most platforms, the results aren’t exactly real-time. You won’t know until later — moments or maybe days — how many visited or for how long.
Good results are when people stay. When they engage. When they wait, watch, or read, before they click away. The goal of humans creating online is to delay the click away.
And most humans that click also create something of their own online, too. It’s usually not as voyeuristic as we might want to believe. We are all simultaneously asking one another not to click away.
Or, at very least, to spare a moment or two before doing so. We are begging, as click-people, for other people to not click so quickly.
Maybe it was one episode of a now long-gone podcast, or a few posts on a quote page that you hoped to maintain. The discouragement of our own internet specters feels all-too-real, even with so little to hold onto. It flits and fleets, like the cosmic cycles. Like a small asteroid, rushing quickly away from orbit.
I type and I edit, hoping that I’ll write well enough to have a chance at some kind of life (read: more sustained housing). I break the fourth wall, admitting this. I stand up, hands aching. I walk a few paces in the room where I stay today, and look out of the window at the August blue moon. The moon glows right back.
I sit down. Reread. Think about the pain of the early clicks goodbye. But why, right? Why do we need the eyes to stay before they leave?
Often for money. Or self-esteem. Or, for the ephemeral promise of money down the road. Maybe we’re just supposed to want the views.
As for the youth, I’m not really sure. Probably some combination of building their sense of parasocial identity or feeling uncertain to question the status quo. Or, very possibly, because young people have only even known this. Nothing more nothing less.
I want to spend time with the moon. But I can’t until I know where I’ll live. I want to explain myself without giving too much detail, but my parasocial insecurity about psychiatric diagnoses pushes me to say more. I don’t want to say more.
The secondary irony is that there is no promise of success. Yet as someone who can’t work most jobs without direct medical failure, promises of success are rare either way. So, I bargain with the universe for usefulness. I offer up this request — out toward the moon, the ice sky, and the sharpness of the stars.
I ask that my writing finds the humans that need it most.
Even in its rawest, most ragged, and tangential forms, my writing has helped me. My thinking has also helped me. My resilience, what’s more, has kept me alive.
And yet, the discrepancy between my internal fire and my external creations is stunning. I am sent into utter inaction by all that I have left to say (so, so much).
I have hundreds of books to write. I don’t know if I have the physical or medical stamina to do so. I will find the stamina, though, despite the burning in my fingers and wrists and back and my eyes, and despite the rest of the problems, too. I mean, we all have problems.
Don’t worry, though, because the pain is not contagious. My obsessive compulsive disorder wants me to remind you, dear reader, that you are healthy, in some way or another! Your body and mind, like mine, have places of wholesome and sustainable good health. I promise!
In many ways, I am also healthy. Like the sky, dotted with both beauty and discrepancies. We all have places of healthfulness.
There is always, much like in the dips and divots of the moon, some beautiful silver area to be found. I seek the nuances, nestled into the grey of shadows beside the brightness of speckles of light. Cool, soothing dark silver nuances, to balance everything.
Luckily, my enthusiasm, optimism, and gratitude are quite catching. Thus, I hope that my words might catch you from ever falling into the internet abyss. We don’t need to fall. None of us do. We can weave the threads together — rather than sit, alone and tangled, within the web of empty thoughts unseen.
The rare full blue moon in Pisces reminds me that some occurrences are healthy, special, random, and only known by their announcement. Maybe breaking the form of relatable writing is similar.
Maybe I can hold the reader such that they want to stay. Maybe I can create a safe and gentle set of moments. Maybe I can benefit people, even as phantoms, floating around the internet, such that they will feel safe to lean in, to learn, to listen, to share, and to ask.
Sit down, my love. You are welcome here. Stay for a while, in the light of the full blue moon.
Full Moon, Being Human, Prose, Digital Philosophy, Mental Health
.JPG)