been thinking a lot about how i want to dedicate my time moving forward. i've been going through a lot of memories - thinking about what child-me thought about the world and their place in it.

at a certain point in my youth i wanted to be a "scientist" - which, as my memory serves, was conceived of as a sort of "innovative problem solver". But of course, the more i grew up, the more i learned that a great deal of science was often not about innovative problem solving, or at least not in the naive view i had initially. the bureaucratic/academic side of things continued to feel further and further from the reality of the situation on the ground. solutions proposed from capitalist funding, and thus, a capitalist framework, felt more and more constricting before i even got started anywhere.

at a certain point i was heavily inspired by certain characters like Gandalf; wizards, knowledgeable and wise, with a heart towards good living together. i still, also, enjoyed the more naive side of magic users and finding ones place with certain witches like ghibli's Kiki. these sort of influences certainly had a part in encouraging my own initial work of witchcraft. but still, even then, i had failed to live up to any standard. i had fallen into some of the exact problems of disconnection. i started my witchcraft journey while i was a software developer. it was part of a naive attempt to imagine something better than the endless days of software development, instead of being part of an attempt to learn any of the land i was living on (because i didn't believe the apartment complex to be any sort of complex living), and the different overlapping lives infinitely smaller and larger than mine which make any of it possible. my witchcraft was mostly just me doing some practices of self-reflection and attempts to access knowledges of emotional association between objects.

for a long time in my youth i thought i would make music. it was a life rhythm i could connect to, it had it's own flow i felt like i could follow - but when i learned no one close to me wanted to follow that flow with me, i felt forsaken and disconnected from the only part of the world i had any strong connections to... then i got into software development as a way out. and ever since then i've been looking for something to make the world feel real again.

only in the last few years have i felt like i've gotten close. and i'm ready to chart the next course.