Oh my, there's a lot of dust in here. I thought I would just pop in, do a bit of sweeping. Open the windows and let some new air flow through.

This journal feels like an old house I grew up in. It's been locked up for years; I've missed it. Well, the house was first LJ. I moved here later. This HTML box where I'm typing these words is comforting in its familiarity. This is me sinking into a beloved armchair. An archived version of myself.

I want to come back. I want to sit quietly in the shafts of light, away from Instagram, away from Twitter. Those platforms feel like Work. I try to be "authentic"—a word that has lost much of its meaning these days. What is authenticity, anymore? Everything is performative. In those places I can only be a sliver of myself.

This place looks and smells the same. The old ghosts still linger here, in my ancient entries, made private long-ago. I can't bear to look at them right now. But maybe someday I will.

What is this supposed to be? I don't even know.

I just miss when social media felt like a lifeline rather than a nightmare high-speed slideshow.

I think I'll come in to update this occasionally. I can hear my agent saying to me, kindly, his voice a hug through the phone line, you don't have time.

But thing is I have spent the last few years really sitting with the discomfort that is my mental health, and I'm trying to be mindful of holding in place some bumpers for myself. And that takes time. And I think this could work well as one of those supports. We'll see.

"MIRROR"

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

~Sylvia Plath