Repetition
Selby Sohn
My bed is my nest, where I find my husband. I want to make art. I have not been making much art. It is the quarantine.
I hate myself. I love myself; therefore, I hate myself because I can never fully live up to myself. I also worry that I am not a good enough person. But isn’t it that if you are the one asking that question, you are a good enough person? That the question in the first place predicates a kind of longing? Is feeling bad is the essence of being good? If that is true, that is terrible. Why can’t I float through space, unabsolved, not worried about the invisible, inexistent, ticker symbol above my head determining my worth?
I have never been religious, but it feels like religion predetermines my life. That there is a codification I was born into, and I find myself slipping on the wrong side of the code, suddenly trapped in a deluge of wrongness, and they determine that I am bad. I am terrified of finding out that I am bad, but I long to be bad, which is a bad way of putting it: I long to deviate, to be a deviation — to stray from a course where I find myself stuck in repetitions.
Why do we repeat the same things day after day? It is almost as if time becomes solid. It keeps rotating on itself like a spinning wheel that becomes an undifferentiated circle. It is now a loop. It becomes noticeable, mentionable. We can refer to it as that thing that we do — that thing that we like to do! Our actions become stand-ins for ourselves.
I am thinking harder right now. I know I should be writing, but I want to think. There is something about the commodity fetishism of our actions that I can’t put my finger on. How repeating things, displacing ourselves onto our actions, becomes escapist. Maybe it is that the faster we move, the less we have to be ourselves? No. It is more than that. We are not only losing ourselves but also building ourselves, a false sense of ourselves. The more that we repeat things, the more we construct a false sense of authenticity, a fallback, bullshit “this is me,” when really, we are more than just that thing, so much more than just that thing! By narrowing our scope, we have branded ourselves, displaced ourselves, and we live out our lives according to this narrow rubric that adheres to societal expectations. Because we know that that thing we presented before, that thing was okay. It passed. We did well. Other people liked it! We should do that thing again! Other people might continue to like us! That thing is me! In some sense, this ‘doing well’ makes us feel that we are ‘good.’ We redeem ourselves in the eyes of others. We are saved from ourselves! So maybe repetition is the answer to Judeo-Christian-self-sacrifice in the modern era. It is how we, truly, have commodified ourselves.