April Littrell
Trying to get unstuck
Are we all living our own fantasies? Is that thought worth having if it’s almost definitely been explored in great depth by philosophers past and present?
What does it mean to be a storyteller today? It sounds romantic but how harmful is it to tell stories that sell someone’s own version of the world, or even a microcosm, for one’s personal benefit?
How can I get past the torment of wanting to archive my old writings here and wanting them to have a consistent format, which necessitates editing, which necessitates a style guide or cohesive stylistic choices, which sometimes alter or bring into question the original intent of the writing, which leads to me wanting to re-explore old ideas and polish naive thoughts, which leads me to question their accuracy, which opens endless rabbit holes, which invites the use of AI to attempt to fact-check and relieve myself of certain tedium, which alters the piece and renders it inauthentic, which counters the original archival task, which then leads one’s archive feeling poisoned, which it most certainly has become.
Deleted the Pinterest, Instagram, Bluesky, and Reddit apps from my phone again. It’s difficult because in some very specific cases they are useful, but otherwise they burn time.
I don’t want to talk about AI on here but it’s zeitgeisty and I shamefully sell it through my work and it’s so controversial it made someone I care about upset that I wanted to try to make money with it and it’s poisoned my archive and it’s unavoidable in a way.
I recently had a long-term, really long-term goal reach a brick wall and it sent me spiraling and questioning the very core of my being and I want to believe something about it being about the journey, and I do cherish the highly unique memories associated with everything leading up to the wall but I wasn’t expecting the wall at all and there it is and there’s no going past it and now I don’t know which direction to go.
I was invited to go mountaineering this weekend and it was incredibly difficult to refuse, but my knee is injured from a 15km race last weekend and I know I’d make it worse by climbing and possibly have to defer the San Francisco Marathon for the third year in a row because of injury and I’ve been working hard training for it. Steep snow would really clear my mind right now.
Leaving San Francisco is so appealing, but I love meeting people, and I recently met someone who quickly became special to me, and it dampens the prospect of boxing everything up onto a truck and heading towards new perspective, maybe because this person is providing new perspective and it feels very good and maybe it isn’t about moving but not feeling good and throwing darts at the cause and shrugging and deciding it must be all of this, this place.
Is self-compassion as hard for you as it is for me?
After hitting the wall all I think I want is to care about something new as quickly as possible. It’s not something that can be forced. Like finding a new love in another human being. But it requires making yourself available, which I think I do. All I am is available. Maybe I need to stop being so available. It’s samsaric.
There are jars of peanut butter, so many of them, and cans of tuna, almost equally as many, in my kitchen cabinet, because they last so long and I enjoy them. But time passed and they’re past expiry and I can imagine myself grabbing them off the grocery shelf and looking at those dates and thinking about how unfathomably far they were, what would happen in between then and now, and now the time has passed.
It’s so difficult to realize you can’t possibly experience everything in one lifetime. Everything is so interesting. I’m envious of people who care about something so much, because I don’t know what that’s like, and I can only imagine caring about something as much as I care about everything. But maybe those I perceive to be caring about something or who themselves perceive as much only pretend to because they, too, care about everything and it’s too overwhelming, and it’s so comforting to latch onto something, anything, but something.
I used to have a world map in my bedroom in my parents’ house and I missed it, so I bought a world map to put next to my desk. It’s here now, next to me, and it’s big, and I love it. It’s big, but the text is so small and I need to stand up and stick my nose right up to it and shine my phone flashlight to read Abu Dhabi, but I still love it. There’s so much water.
Sailing is so prohibitively expensive, and sure there are ways to do it without spending so much, but if you’re not spending money, you’re spending something else. One of my few early memories of sailing was on my Uncle Vince’s boat in Delaware. I hated it. Or I was bored. Or I didn’t hate the sailing itself but something about that day and it soured me on sailing. Then I met a boy in San Francisco, well a man with a mustache that’s nice to kiss, and we started sailing together, and I started to like it more. Or maybe I didn’t like the sailing itself but something about that boy and his mustache and saltwater kisses between tacks and jibes. It’s a romanticized version, however. There was no time for romance with Captain Dave barking orders between spits of chew into the bay.
Writing is making me feel a little less lost. I do still wish I was on the mountain, though. And I’m worried about where my mind will wander when I stop writing. I should get dressed and get coffee, because sitting here in my undies after noon doesn’t feel very responsible. If I had all the money in the world I’d probably be sitting here in my undies after noon. Maybe not here. Maybe Istanbul. I’d be having a full pot of Turkish coffee, writing to no one, staring out at the seagulls over the Bosphorus.
This is where we’ll pause for now.
Oh, and here’s a song.