I don't want to take care of my mother

a series of recent realisations I've had about the current stage of my life.

Tomorrow will be my mother’s 50th birthday. I’m writing this on the 22nd of May. It’s a hot day in the eve of summer and my head is hot from the air dryer I’m sitting under. It’s wash day and for me, that means I have to retwist my hair every time I get it wet. The house is empty, as per usual since I’m the only person in the house who doesn’t have a purpose; a thing I can do to occupy my days on a daily basis. My mother goes to work and my younger brother goes to school. It’s that simple.

While I’m home, all alone, I do nothing. Ok, I’m being dramatic. I have little tasks that I complete for my sanity just because it would drive me mad to be home and alone with nothing to distract me from my aloneness. I call them little because they are insignificant in the same way waking up and brushing your teeth is a task that bears no weight on your psyche. It holds no potential meaning. I hunger for the potential of something small and insignificant growing into a bigger thing that produces fruit of meaning and purpose but since I have no degree, I’ll settle for something bigger but still meaningless.

Today, that thing was doing my hair, only because it took longer and needed my sustained focus.

My mother is getting old and she has more needs than before. Her legs don’t work like they used to and as a result, she can’t exercise like she used to by going on long, exuberant walks. Most of her life is characterized by a hole that grows and eats everything up. First it was the one on her leg that was carved in by the doctors at our local clinic back in Kenya and then it was the silent lull of my relationship to her withering away. I know there is a hole because I hear it when she talks and I see it in her eyes when she looks up at me from her shortened height. Her back is slouching more than usual and it sickens me to think this is what my mother has become because no other emotions rise out of me when I think about her other than disgust and pity.

The hole murmurs in the distance whenever I observe her inability for closeness and then it festers like a sputtering gargle coming up from the back of her throat, every time she asks about our day, with it’s leer of inauthenticity. I murmur back to her every time, the same monotone reply because I can’t fathom anything more in relation to her.

This isn’t about age—I’ve always felt this way about her, this dry hatred. I suppose when I was younger, because of my neurobiological incapacity to view my primary caregiver as a threat to my survival, I could pity her and the feel compelled to try to fill the multiple voids I saw tearing through her skin with myself, hacking away at my own flesh to try to patch hers together. Now as an adult, because I have the luxury of independent thought, I stopped cutting myself open for her sake and began despising her, but I’ll never let that show because it would be a sign of weakness and she wouldn’t know what to do about it.

I don’t want to take care of my mother.

capitalism is finishing me (rant)

Today, I’m feeling especially spicy about critical essays.

I’m tired of all the attention span essays because frankly, I don’t think they apply to me. The only time I sit in front of a screen is to gain something from time in exchange for me labour and attention. I use TikTok to farm dopamine from anime glitch edits because I’m schizophrenic and can’t biologically produce enough of it on my own accord. Full disclosure, I don’t think dopamine is the only thing I’m farming from these degenerate tiktok edits hehe.

I’m not even sure if I’m schizoid, that’s just what the doctors say. At one point, I was bipolar with psychotic features and then I had borderline. Wow, I was a cacophony of diseases. It make sense to call schizophrenia a syndrome, in that case, but that’s just an afterthought. I’ve also been really defensive of late, can you tell?

I don’t remember when I began watching videos in relation to my labour but I reckon it must have been around the same time I turned into a tool that could produce it. Labour here doesn’t actually pertain to paid work, I just do chores around the house. I clean when I can and then I read when I must. Reading has become homework and I don’t like it anymore. I’ve been feeling especially susceptible to brain washing recently—I think the TikTok is finally getting to me. I feel a porosity softening my brain. Getting on substack and reading other people’s opinions about world issues makes my brain hurt because I feel like I can’t think for myself. It’s a me problem, in any case.

Media is no longer enjoyable because it is an accessory to whatever chores or tasks I have to complete. When I’m doing my hair, I’ll put on something mildly entertaining just to occupy my eyes so I don’t feel the weight of time as it drags along. The house is empty today, as it always is, and my wet hair makes that constant feeling of emptiness that I stomach more unbearable than most days.

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I don’t understand the angle the substack essays and video essays are taking when discussing art consumption and its relation to the capitalist modes of production. I don’t think a large number of people look at art pieces in the first place and neither do they critically consume and digest the underlying themes of most of the movies and shows they watch so it feels like a mute exercise. The answer is simple: too much time is being wasted doing work. AI should’ve fixed this but obviously, technocrats don’t respond to the actual needs of the consumers that make up a market. That’s just something we write in our economics exams.

I’ve always viewed the enjoyment of art and literature as a niche interest, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s becoming more niche over time. It is, however, mildly terrifying. The advent of technology and mass media production makes it so that there’s too much to do, too much to watch and with all the time there is in the world, why would anybody spend it looking at a painting unless they’ve committed themselves to a life removed from the rest of the world?

The way I see it, art and literature are like mindfulness exercises. Everybody knows the benefit of doing it but sometimes sitting in silence is uncomfortable and impossible when the rest of the world whizzes past you in their high speed cars. My phone is barely an issue for me because I get a text every two days from the same person (Love you, Angie) and that’s about it.

Maybe my perspective is a little off from the rest because I don’t come from the west, where you’re taught from a young age that your art, philosophies and products are the best, but I’m still of the opinion that the general public won’t really care for say Hellenistic art or Clarice Lispector—pieces that you need extensive time and space to mull over and then carefully contemplate.

I think a lot has already been said about capitalism and how it pollutes the potential for leisurely time and recreational activity, and how that worsens the likelihood of picking up an interest that doesn’t produce capital so it feels like these essays are rehashing an argument that we’ve already discussed and settled on.

I’m done ranting.

anxiety as growing pains and the need to be rescued

I remember joking about never getting growing pains as a kid, even though I did get chicken pox at age 9. Nonetheless, my child body didn’t experience any physical pain as a I grew up as a result of said growing up, though I did get beaten up by my parents a fair amount. So, naturally, all that spanking and slapping was accumulating and being stored in my nervous system as anxiety and it has began flaring up in my young adult years.

I don’t know if it’s the uncertainty of my life that’s making me feel queasy every morning after I’ve woken up and my feet have touched the ground or it’s the fact that I have no support system in my vicinity. I have friends but they’re all the way in Kenya and they’re all busy with their lives. I feel all alone and like I can’t handle this brave new world on my own. I need to be rescued. Clearly, the same hand that was spanking me in my years of youth won’t suddenly learn how to land softly across my face, cupping it instead of smacking it red.

The fact of the matter is that I’m growing. I have grown, actually, and I will continue to grow. This frightens me because am I ought to grow in a foreign land? This is something I’ve been considering for a long time. It’s not that I feel strange and foreign through some metaphysical reasoning, I just feel uncomfortable and removed from society not being able to express even the faintest of words such as, “Yes, please come to the 2nd floor.” I’ve tried explaining this existential angst to other people but I don’t get the response I need.

Another thing that causes me anxiety is my sudden disillusionment with dialectical materialism especially in the Marxist vein. I’m not sure what it was that sparked it but I lost my capacity to interpret dialectical materialism as well as I could. The last thing I wrote about it was,

One thing that my Marxism has taught me to do is to ground myself in the material world since materialism is the founding principle of the Marxist school of thought. It’s the conscious decision to focus on what can be seen and how that affects our lives today and in the future. It’s the practice of divorcing all mystical ideologies from our lives today because they more often than not, maintain unequal hierarchical systems of distribution like the Divine right of kings.

Even though Marxism itself is not to be worshipped and should not be treated as dogma, I’ve found that the more I carry out material analyses of the world around me, the less I think about god.

…

My life is made full by the gaps in my makeup. To be human is to be imperfect and to make imperfect things. I think the beauty of fucking up is exalted when you accept fault and work towards improvement. Not perfection <3

But this only came to me after I discovered Marx, an alternative to what we have been taught all our lives.

and then I lost my mind.

Now, dialectical materialism doesn’t register in my mind the same way it did. I’m like those guys that study too much and then lose their minds except now I can’t recall much from my studies and I’m not that smart. It’s become part and parcel of my every day life so I don’t recall it so I’m trusting it will make sense when the time arises for it to be put in praxis.

That’s all the realisations I have for now.

Thanks for reading! <3