This post was written to be a post but was also an entry in my journal, which means there may be a lot of tense and person switching.
I love flipping through this journal, not even reading it really, just flipping through and seeing the filled-in pages. There’s something aesthetic and valuable about seeing the words so neatly written on the pages. It’s a perfect example of how small, repeated actions can amount to something beautiful. My daily two pages of entries add up to a beautiful book that’s a recounting of my life for a certain period of time—a sort of glimpse into my brain, its thought patterns, my most pressing worries, and celebrated successes.
I finally committed to the new journal book I’d bought and wrote down my number and name on the “Please return to” page. I’d been putting it off, I didn’t want to fully commit to writing in it because that would ruin the pristine condition it was in. Now that I have, it’s incredibly freeing. It’s mine now. I can use it and mess it up however I want.
I don’t think I’ve truly ever owned anything. I’ve always been overly cautious, unsure, even treating my journal as if I need to keep it pristine, you know?
I remember in school, I despised the kids that would drop their notebooks into the bag without a care in the world—fraying edges, breaking spines, and creasing pages in the process. I’m that kid who carefully packs things, slotting my hand flat between the books to make sure there were no folded covers or papers sticking out. This even carried over to how I’d treat books I read. I would keep the pages barely open like they were fresh off the press, often to the detriment of my reading experience.
I know there’s a beauty to keeping things clean and looking new. However, with that also comes a certain detachment from the fully owned object. If I own something, does it not also give me the right to damage and destroy it freely? Might be a trivial thing to overly worry about, but I do worry about it and so I can’t help but allocate mental space to it.
A quick online search tells me that ownership is about the right to possess and control something, while also having the responsibility to foster and maintain it. Maybe I just secretly enjoy breaking things, but I don’t fully agree. I feel like the right or ability to completely destroy something should be considered more important than the responsibility to foster and maintain.
Additionally, what of ownership when you can no longer enjoy your possessions? What if you own a guitar but it’s stored away because you no longer play it? Do you own it any less than when you could play it? Isn’t the only thing that remains during the absence of a way to use your possession, the ability to destroy or discard it?
I’ve been trying to literally reconnect with my surroundings for a while now. It is really hard to train the tendency to overprotect something as if you’ll lose it out of yourself I wish it was, but it isn’t as simple as not caring about breaking a spine or two while reading. It’s a conscious restructuring of how I interact with objects.
I have to force myself to even write my name down in the “please return to” section of my journal. But I did it, and that small action was so freeing.
All of this, I feel, is part of a larger whole that is our sense of belonging in this world. Some people seize the day, in every sense of the word while others like myself struggle to. It’s an internal battle that manifests on the outside in these small small ways and worries.
What if some of the clumsiness some of us feel is the side effect of navigating our environment with the fear of leaving a mark of our existence on it? In order to truly live, I think we need to stop being afraid of and instead start leaving a trace. Be connected to the world in a literal sense. To consciously be a force of cause.
I know it’s a lot of words, but I swear there’s something to it. Maybe getting there means breaking a thing or two. In the simplest sense, I think what I’m trying to get to is the unapologetically me nature of middle-aged dads.
I wrote the whole thing above before I got diagnosed with ADHD, now that I think about it, yeah, what I’m trying to describe is a mix of background anxiety, fear of being perceived, and the simultaneous feeling of underwhelm and overwhelm due to insufficient stimulation. I still wanted to post it in its original form though because I think there’s something to be gained from the raw perspective it provides.