500 WORDS, DAY 109: The Post That Almost Didn’t Get Written

You tremble as you sit in the dark contemplating your mortality. The invisible hand of God hovers over your head. Death is certain, and the time it will come is unknown. Unknown until it comes. Then when it comes, it stays unknown. At least to the human brain. I don’t know if we know how we died after we’ve died. So much is unknown. Sitting in the dark, in a quiet room. I’ve taken high doses of psychedelics before, but only with a group of friends when I was very young and irresponsible. I know about the heroic dose in the dark idea, but I’m not quite there yet. Sitting in the dark on a quiet night, my thoughts can get scary enough. I don’t need much help for them to consume me. I forget I’m stoned. Maybe I’m underestimating its influence on me. Is God there? Since I was raised in a Christian home, even now that I don’t really feel like I believe a lot of it, it’s still there in the back of my mind. I mean, everything’s a possibility. A dark, quiet night. Alone with one’s thought. What is all this? How is it that I have my wife’s love, how do I deserve this? Why is there even this idea of deserving or not? Trying to live on my own terms. Trying not to be controlled. Understanding people’s good intentions. Parents. Family. Connections of all kinds. Life is messy. Thoughts are messy. Even finishing this post is a mess. I don’t know if I can do it. I’m only halfway and I have nine minutes late. I stop typing. I grab my phone and scroll. I decide not to write anything, not to finish this post. It’s pointless and ridiculous. Wait. Then isn’t this scrolling a million times more pointless? Indeed, it is. I get back to my writing. I’m determined to finish this post even if I have to write about how I almost didn’t finish writing it. It would have been a stupid decision after more than a hundred days of continuous posting. After all, this is just a slump, and I know that inspiration will hit once again very soon. For the moment, I’ve set a challenge to myself, and as I’ve already written here before, we never know how our ideas and thoughts might impact whoever reads or listens to them. About a hundred words left to go, and I’m sincerely glad I kept writing. I realize that my thought about how pointless my writing was had a tinge of self-consciousness and doubt to it. That alone made me reevaluate the idea and decide against it. I shouldn’t worry about the value anyone else might place on what I write, because at the end of the day, these are my ideas and my life, and I’ll write them down because I feel like it and because I can. I appreciate anyone who reads this, but ultimately I do it for myself, to improve on my writing and to understand myself better, and to document my journey through this life while I’m living it.