There are moments during your alone-ness where you reach certain revelations, or experience certain feelings, or you notice how the neighbor’s old cat who has recently taken a liking to your backyard (and has really made it its second home) started to announce each arrival with aged meows—and you find that no one’s around to share it with. Or perhaps there are people physically there, but none who would take it the way you want them to.
And whilst standing in the stillness of kitchen, trying to catch glimpses at the old Siamese cat named Coco from behind the sheer curtains, you eventually start to fear whether this moment really matters. Because, well, you’ve picked up on the pattern of this cat. Really, you’ve helped her develop the habit of dropping by mid-afternoon to laze about because you leave out the leftover cat food you still have from a previous pet in a bowl by the grass patch. Amidst the silence that fills your house, you start to hear weird yowls that you eventually identify as this cat’s meows, and you begin to wonder why it does that. It just, you know, sounds so sad. Like it’s yelping out for help or something. You’re never out there, like, out in the backyard. For all she (the cat) knows, the food just magically refills itself everyday. So you have all these theories on why the cat has started meowing like crazy every time it comes by—like maybe she’s teasing your other neighbor’s dog, but the thing is, that neighbor doesn’t have that dog anymore and maybe she just doesn’t know that yet—but it’s one of those small and negligible things that aren’t worth telling others. You just can’t find a moment to squeeze that in during one of your bi-monthly “catch-up’s” with acquaintances or friends. It slips your mind because you try to find other things, bigger things to share. Things that can really fill up this mental laundry list of qualities and achievements these people have of you.
When you have no one with you to go about the daily and intimate mundanities of life, well it starts to feel a bit pointless, doesn’t it? If no one’s around to notice that you’ve started to prefer dark roast over medium roast, that you’ve started eating breakfast regularly now, that you’ve taken down a poster or two from your bedroom wall, that you’ve read more books this year than the last, that your eczema hasn’t been flaring up on your cheeks anymore because of this new Korean moisturizer you’ve bought—then why do them? You don’t care for individualistic reasons. The bloated concept of self-care in our consumer culture is a joke anyways. No, you want to see how these small idiosyncrasies and routines of yours reverberate around you. You want to see how your actions—not those big ones you do sometimes, but the small ones you do everyday—affect others. You want to see if those little speculations you have evoke the same enthusiasm as your more substantial and conventional thoughts. But you’ve started to feel like you exist in a vacuum, even though you know that realistically this is a bit impossible.
So, how do you exist without the perception of others?
Do you start meowing like crazy?
Do you seek out this attention by starting a newsletter and writing horrible, stream-of-consciousness type posts?
For your sake and sanity, I’d say go for the former.
