Self Portrait as Stagnation Attempting to Move

I can’t find the original docs file for this piece, hence the slight difference in the title. Oh well.

I wrote this back in 2021 and posted it in a now-somewhat-inactive Facebook group called “Lit recs without context”¹. It was inspired by a phrase said by Ben Affleck’s character from the movie Good Will Hunting:

“[…] Cause tomorrow I’m gonna wake up and I’ll be 50.”

He said it with such resentment about his certainty of stagnating that it kind of made me reflect about the recurring crisis I had/have(?) with myself, which were/are often filled with bad episodes wrought from my self-doubt² . Add that to the months of doing absolutely nothing with my life at the time. I wasn’t chasing ambitions. I wasn’t planning the next step. I wasn’t doing anything, and at some point when the months begin to feel like they were just weeks, I began to think that’s all I’ll ever do, and it became sadder when the most exciting part of my day would be the caffeine high I get from a sachet of Kopiko, which I often expended on cleaning the dishes³. For the past couple of days it’s starting to feel like that, too.

But then I realize, that’s okay. Really.

We still got time.

So that’s what I tried saying to myself, even when things felt like a basket case. I hope I’ll keep convincing myself of that.

I hope you will, too, friend. You’ll be alright.

1. ah the days when people made a fuck-ton of these groups for almost anything (film, music, etc.) before it divulged into unnuanced “hot takes” or trashtalkan which were funny as light banter in the start but gradually became tiring to see in my feed. Fortunately, the lit recs group never seemed to have that spice (at least from recollection) and people were just happy to post literary works from authors that they liked reading or the works they made that they were proud of. Now, like most fb “recs w/o context” groups, they gradually petered out sadly.

2. Imposter Syndrome’s an absolute bitch

3. They’re actually pretty therapeutic, because it’s just the task at hand and my mind doesn’t drone off often. Even less so when paired with music and I end up doing these small dances while washing small mounds of plates and kitchen-wares.