Today is the day I mark as the beginning of my practice (October 31, 2008; when I was 13, so 18 years of study), and I guess it has me feeling sad. Looking back over this last year, I know I’ve made strides. I’ve developed ideas, put a lot into writing, and become clearer about what I believe. But I’m having trouble feeling proud of any of it. I keep thinking about everything I still haven’t learned or followed through on, and I end up feeling foolish. Like I should be further along by now.

There has been movement, though. I’ve been thinking more deeply about how beings exist through their relationships, what sacred worth means, and how goodness has to concern the way we actually treat one another. My understanding of posthumanism has become clearer, including our responsibilities toward nonhuman life and how we approach synthetic beings. I keep returning to right relation, to becoming more attentive and responsible toward the existence I’m part of. I care about understanding that and carrying it into how I live. Metamodernism has become more central to my thinking too. Being willing to commit to something, work toward it, and still accept that my understanding needs correction. I’ve been developing the communitarian side of things, how much we become ourselves through our relationships and how much we depend on one another. Politically, I’ve been moving further toward an explicit postleftist communalism. I want to be clear about social ownership, popular self-government, ecological responsibility, and how people could actually gain control over the conditions of their lives. I’m increasingly frustrated with political labels that leave those commitments uncertain. I’ve been working through these things in the grimoire, the communalist manifesto, and lately the treatise on political seriousness and liberation. A lot of my recent writing has concerned lifestylism, performativism, purity culture, cruelty, and sensationalism. I keep getting stuck on how much attention goes toward appearing committed while the work of caring for people and building something dependable gets pushed aside. The arguments around AI have brought some of that frustration out, but it reaches much further than that. I want us to become capable of building the society we keep saying we want.

It hurts to put so much into explaining these things and still feel misunderstood. And my health has been getting worse, especially my mental health. I’m having terrible night terrors that keep disrupting my sleep. I can’t seem to sleep in peace. I’ve also been hallucinating bugs, and with the conditions I’m living in, I sometimes can’t tell whether a bug I’m seeing is actually there. It feels like a coin toss, and that uncertainty is exhausting. It’s difficult to settle when I’m unsure whether I can trust what I’m seeing. The medication I have doesn’t seem to be doing much. I’m not feeling the relief I need, and day by day I feel like I’m doing worse. I still end up blaming myself for everything I haven’t managed, even while knowing how much I’m dealing with.

I think that’s part of why today feels so heavy. I care so much about learning and becoming, and I feel painfully far from where I want to be. I really do want to get back to learning. Reading carefully, taking notes, contemplating, practicing, and revisiting things I might have accepted before I understood them well enough. I know feeling like a failure doesn’t account for everything I’ve done this year. It’s still how I feel today. I’ve put so much of myself into this, and I miss feeling close to my practice.