Category: Non-fiction

Yesterday I wished I was a ball of yarn, rolled up into myself, like a warm, cozy little self sufficient world.

I’m an introvert gone supernova. I need time alone, and that includes time away even from my partner. We have had rough times for a while and I’ve tried to make it work by acting extroverted, talking for the sake of talking and always trying to do things together. That, of course, only made things worse by draining me without giving anything to us. But I didn’t understand, so eventually I got stuck in that mode.

I had moved to a new city and left my few but close friends behind. And in this new setting I entirely forgot that I am an introvert and that when I am social – which I really do enjoy – I must get time to charge my energy in between. But I was trying to fit in and got desperate somehow to make everyone around me happy. Except myself.

I didn’t understand why my energy got so low and never recharged. I became, like a star burning it’s last fuel in a bright flash before dying, a supernova. This is my most recent insight into myself. It was just the other week I finally put the pieces together. Introvert and never alone. Of course I’ll get fatigued. Now I try to make sure I get time by myself and though it’s a long way back, I’ve started to recover, I think.

Being someone you’re not is exhausting.

I have so many messages I need to get out. But my communications array is overloaded. It’s the middle of the night here and I can’t sleep. There is a chaos waiting to be formulated, put into words. Like I want to harness my feelings, making them real by shaping them into words. While they are still undefined those feelings have power over me, freezing my conscious self while the unconscious runs amok. I have to make them tangible. Need to write them down. I’ll try.

Addendum: Every fragment I write captures some thoughts, piece by piece. I’m just afraid I’ll discover that every piece comes from a different puzzle. Or maybe that would make me relieved — then there’s an explanation to this mess that is me. Thinking of it, now I’m kind of curious.

There is a rare kind of woodpecker living in the wall of the old house where my father lives. Every morning while I was visiting, at 6.15 sharp, it woke me up with a noise like a small machine gun. But since this particular species is an endangered species my father doesn’t want to chase it away. In fact bird watchers go there to watch it.

First morning, vacation and all, I just wanted to shoot the damned thing. But then after a few days I got used to it. Last morning it didn’t even wake me up. Now I am on a train going home and I have accepted that even noisy birds must be allowed to live and do what they do best. I suppose I’m a noisy bird myself.

Cease the day, roll out the night, as I discreetly move in the fringes of the second dimension of time, I push the borderland, I embrace the unknown, the abstruse, dives further into idea space to find the stem cells of the mind, the malleable words that simultaneously creates myself and the world.

She softly gives me a great idea and while I happily plan how to take good care of it she throws ten more, related ideas, into my unprepared, fumbling arms and says while laughing hysterically: “Now you also have to take care of all these! Good luck!”

First I write my name into existence; then I write my life into reality. I am Ellinor Kall! I spell the secret words that unhides the truth to stand here naked among you – kindred spirits, wonderful writers and magnificent magicians!