Category: Non-fiction

It’s interesting what we can hide from ourselves. It was not until a while ago when I realized that the Swedish word ångest translates in English, not only as anguish, but also as agony and anxiety, that I accepted that I actually do suffer from ångest, but in the less severe form anxiety.

I’ve realized that my anxiety is not just ordinary worry, but something much more energy draining. The constant ruminations about present and possible future problems is not just thinking ahead, it’s overthinking ahead. Almost subconscious and always uncontrollable.

One reason for my constant stress, why I want to hurry so with publishing my novels, and why I want to finish all my creative projects asap, is because of a very troublesome thought that I can’t get rid of. I always have this relentless feeling that I will die soon.

Of course there’s no substantial reason for this apprehensive urgency to put my affairs in order. It’s a hypochondriac over-interpreting of minor issues that gets fed into the anxiety-loop and amplifies until I get this nightmarish dread of impending doom.

Sometimes I handle this by thinking nihilistic thoughts. If I’m about to die then nothing matters anyway. I’ll just do something fun and eat lots of chocolate until it happens. Sometimes I obsess and work myself into exhaustion to make the most of the time while I can.

Though I often claim to be very liminal this is an area where I’m always at the extreme ends of the scale. The massive amounts of energy needed to reach those ends are extracted through anxiousness and leave few resources to other endeavors, like daily life.

I don’t think my worries are any different from what most people wrestle with. Death, health, body, mind, parents, relationships, friends, work, money, existence and all. Like relentless carriages in a train. We’re all welcome aboard The Anxiousness Express.

Well, the first step is to realize that my anxiety isn’t my normal state. The second is getting an overview of the subconscious strategies I’ve put in place to hide this from myself. Third is to find ways to divert the energy pouring down this black hole into something more constructive.

Stay tuned to this journal to find out what happens next!

There is a lot of hidden thinking going on in my head. I feel thoughts and things happening in my brain, but they are not conscious, I can’t perceive them. It’s as if I’m shut out from some of my thinking. It’s grinding in the background and then suddenly I have an idea or feeling I don’t know where it came from. But it must be from these hidden thoughts.

I walk a lot in my apartment. Back and forth between rooms. I know I am thinking all the while, I feel something going on deep in my mind. It often happens when I know there is information to process, decisions to make. But there are no clear, conscious thoughts. Just me walking – as if waiting for a letter with instructions to pop in through the letterbox.

So I don’t think in words or images all the time. Sometimes it’s just a feeling of activity, maybe machine code being computed, and I can only access the result. Sometimes not even that. We all have lots of sub-conscious processes, but this feels more like I have a whole other consciousness parallel to the one that is “me”. Like a neighbor I occasionally hear through the wall.

Well, I have no conclusion to reach about this, no insight at the end of this journal post. At least not yet. But I wonder: Do anyone of you think non-understandable thoughts?

Hi, I’m Ellinor Kall. And I’m also not. Ellinor is a fiction, but she is also me, and I am her, and we are but clusters of personality traits among many overlapping sub-persons sharing a brain and body. I’ll try to explain.

As humans we all have different mindsets when we do different things. One state of mind when doing a difficult math exam, one when performing music onstage, one when doing heart surgery, one when cuddling a loved one.

We can do all these different things, but only one at a time, cause I could never even answer what 9+14 is if asked in the middle of a concert with my band or write a thoughtful poem while driving in a chaotic city at rush hour.

So what I’ve done is to give one of those mindsets a name: Ellinor. When I’m alone, in a certain mood, often with music in headphones, thinking about certain topics, when writing, etc, I get into this mental state that is Ellinor.

I’ve always been a bit outside the box, never really identifying as man or woman, and having a fluid sexuality, so adopting a female persona on top of my male body never felt odd to me, I only wonder why it didn’t happen sooner.

There is a lot of writing all over this website, and in all my writing, about me coming to understand that I have this strong feminine side if you want to know more about the process.

Sometimes it felt like a wonderful realization and freedom to not suppress a big part of myself, and sometimes it turned into a tiresome and depressing war with myself, and especially with the appearance of my body.

At the moment we’re at a truce. I try to accept that this body is what we got to work with. Ellinor have to live in the brain and on the internet. She is my internet-body. And she has to be a passenger out in the physical world (even if she is a bit of a cat person and hate not being in control).

I also keep two journals. One in Swedish, often more mundane, what I’ve done during the day and interactions with people. One in English, with more emotions and philosophy. This text started as a journal note for instance.

Why a foreign language in the journal? Well, it started with most of Ellinor’s friends being English-speakers on the internet. And then it does something to the thought process when thinking and writing in another language. You think and express a bit differently.

I usually like to point out in new internet-places that I figure in that there is this fictional aspect to me, that Ellinor is not a cis-female, so that no one will feel like I am trying to deceive them, cause that is not my intention.

While my parts are on the outside, my hearts are on the inside. The sum is some kind of non-binary, liminal, queer, why-do-we-have-to-categorize-everything, anarchistic conglomerate of fuzzy pieces that is me.

So while all this may sound complicated it is the best way for me to make sense of the patchwork of traits and personality clusters that is me. I am a state of mind that is called Ellinor Kall. And I am not.

Well, I’m not sure if this rambling explanation actually explained anything, but I’ll post it anyway!

From my interview with an [angel]: “The quantum nature of the Universe? Ah, yes, I know, a bit embarrassing. It’s just because [god] didn’t know the difference between jpg and svg in the beginning. And now there’s too much content to convert it all.”

“Writer, demi-fictional pseudonym, non-binary queer boy≈girl, maybesexual, anarchist, liminal explorer, positive nihilist, syncretic polymath.”

The quote above is my current Twitter bio. For the benefit of the curious I thought I’d expand a bit upon what I mean with those somewhat cryptic words.

Writer – I write fiction and ramblings, philosophy and poetry. I just got an English language short-story published in print in the anthology Vast. Also several Swedish language novels under another name. Lots of reading on this and my Swedish alter ego-website.

Demi-fictional pseudonym – Ellinor Kall is not my legal name. But this is still me, with fictional parts, imagined into reality. I’m conjured, created from fiction, made part real. I’m a mind without body. Or maybe the alternative behavior of an existing body.

Non-binary queer boy≈girl – I personally reject the concept of gender identity – to me it’s just physical ins and outs, that’s all. I treat it more as just a personality trait and makes no difference in interaction or attraction. I’m neither Venus nor Mars – I’m Mercury.

Maybesexual – I’m not attracted to people on the usual premise. It’s more of a gray/ace/demisexual thing where friends and lovers are not two separate things but different levels of connection on the same scale. The sexual bit only happens very intermittently, so maybe.

Anarchist – Politics are like the remote control to your TV. You have no choice but to watch whatever the one who holds it wants to watch. Anarchists puts the control on the table for everyone to use.

Liminal explorer – I’m curious about the in betweens as you might have noticed. The gradients outside the beaten path. The shadows, the light. Where no girl has gone before. I don’t understand mainstream, I try to do my thing. In life and in fiction.

Positive nihilist – Nothing has inherent value or meaning. We can however give subjective value or meaning to what we want. But that has to be an active choice, we can’t passively wait for the meaning of life to appear to us. I’m a bringer of meaning.

Syncretic polymath – I work the arts like magic. Words, music, drawing, painting, photo, film, animation, etc. from any style, school or genre I like. I learn the rules so that I can break them in the best possible way. Diversity makes fiction stronger.

The scent of her presence always upbeated my heart. The cogs in her mind ignited the ones in mine – it’s called cognition. I long, but memory is short – her sharp tongue could sting and hurt me like nothing else.

I remember our time together. It was like the tale of the fox and the scorpion. I was swimming with her on my back, trying to get us both to shore, but you couldn’t help stinging me, cause that’s your nature.

Maybe I’m ready to move on now.

Yesterday I was logs of tar wood burning from all the things that were wrong and beyond my control. Today I am the transcending flakes of ashes with their Brownian motion in the gusts among the oblivious living trees. Tomorrow – maybe I can be a seed in the newly fertilized soil?

2019 in review
I expanded a short-story that got accepted into an anthology (due out 2020). I also recorded some music and kinda finished the novel I’d been writing since forever. I continued up the tree, visited Geburah and did some writing on magic.

I made a peace treaty with my body. I declared that I’m a binary star. While I fought my old foes fatigue and depression I got stuck in boy-mode. I didn’t have energy to get close to anyone so I kept mostly to myself, reading, recuperating.

2020 in preview
I wanna quickly edit and publish two almost done novels. Then move on to writing more short stories that won’t take ten years to finish. Gonna record more new music, solo and with two different bands. Get dirty with some visual arts, both ink+paper and digitally.

I wanna find energy enough to get close to someone for snuggling, giggles and stuff. Assert myself and grow as non-binary. Probably get a tattoo. Definitely care more for my body. Maybe move on from just having a peace treaty with it to actually liking it again.

On a rotating speck of dust, leaning away from the local fusion reactor on an arbitrary amount of orbits, an interconnected accumulation of deoxyribonucleic acid ignite chemical reactions in the lower troposphere that via electromagnetic waves triggers a release of monoamine neurotransmitters.

Visiting the past is always a revelation. This year I found out there is nothing of me left in that shallow world where time stands still. Nothing – but an empty shell mistaken for a person I’m not. I can’t create my present reality here, the past is petrified.

The voices in the past repeat the same sentences for what seems like an eternity of a single moment. They’re at a shore, attempting to chew the rocks in their mouths instead of trying to talk to the ocean of time that is raging and frothing in front of them.

“What’s the point of talking to water”, they’d say if they could. Not seeing beyond. The past is not a place, it’s the inside of people.

Soon I’ll swim back out to my boat where time moves again.

I just woke up from a nightmare where I was forced to put my left hand into a wall-mounted medical device designed to perform emergency amputations. My heart was racing from the panic as I braced for the cut.

This could also be my 2019 in review.

You never see your own faults the same way those close to you do. And they never tell you. On the other hand, they never see the flaws you hide from them. The darkness of absent light, the sharp broken shards of your heart, the empty container where your happiness should be.