[:January 20th, 2022:] • Feeling not good today. Continued depression, I think. • Hey, it's the 20th: 1 month from Grace's birthday, and 6 from mine. Hey, it's my half-birthday! • Anyway, I figured I would try starting the day with a practice (January 1st, 2022). But I think I want to incorporate my thoughts from January 18th, 2022 into it. • Let's go. The time is 11:00 AM. • Relax: I'm sitting on the couch, cross-legged, with my back against a cushion. I am distracted, but not by anything in particular. I feel tension in my left shoulder and upper arm. Breathe in and out, deeply. Using my right hand to massage those muscles some. My body feels mostly neutral. My stomach is not tight with anxiety, but nor is it light with elation. Nor is it hungry. It's a touch heavy, perhaps. • Explore: Feeling muted again. I sit and observe and nothing comes up: no anger, no gripping fear, no childish joy. I feel some kind of excitement for my first therapy appointment tomorrow, but it's muted. I feel a stronger excitement for the work social today. I feel some sense of desire to do work today, and to perhaps go get coffee. And then there are emotions I know are there (or have been), but no longer seem to surface: grief and anger and desire and pain and missing surrounding Olivia. But right now, I feel taken by nothing. • Seclude: I've taken this apartment for granted. (Is that an attachment?) But I will be gone one day. I'm attached to my electronics, perhaps; at the very least, they take much of my time. But that's a choice I need not make: I can do anything in the day. I assume my friends and family will continue into the future. Again, not so: they could die, or leave, or I could leave. Who knows who the future holds. I am attached, I think, still, to some sense of Olivia. This is the hard one. But it is true that she is not guaranteed. In fact, at this point, it's possible that she and I will never interact meaningfully again. And yet I hold on to what was, and I hold onto the idea that it could be again. Now let me meet with the concept that, even if she is gone forever, I will be okay. I do not require Olivia in order to live out my own energy to the fullest. This is true. I just desire her. For some reason, I am not comfortable or confident continuing in this detachment, so I will stop. My cat. Like my friends, she could fall sick and die, or I could choose to let her go. She and I are with each other, temporarily. Moving on for sake of time. • Disidentify: Instead of trying to recognize myself as truthfully beyond my human experience, let's try to cultivate a sense of beyondness. Note that I am massively malleable and plastic. My opinions change, my personality changes, my emotions change. My circumstances change. Joy comes and goes; pain comes and goes. Everything that I am experiencing now (and experiencing things I am) is not an insurmountable truth. When experiences arise, be they joy or pain, I cannot stop them, but I need not let them take me. I may recognize them, acknowledge them, and then choose how to act. Lift myself up out of my emotions into a higher place of directing. Own my body, and own my pain. See that it is temporary, even when it is not: even a life-long pain, which will never be gone, need not hold us back. I am impenetrable in the sense that I need not let my experience overwhelm me. • Play: And given this safety, I have agency to fling myself back into the world and engage with my full self. To act and to feel and to be joyful and to be pained, because I can step back out of those emotions when the time is right: still experiencing them fully, but letting myself also be beyond them. So perhaps today we can play. The opportunities in the world to play are bountiful, but our human selves recognize only a few choices. Let us open the world -- • I got interrupted by a LE classmate to do an [essence choice](essence choices) that we had planned. I don't know what made today so good, but it was really amazing. I think I broke through to myself somewhere on the level of self-love and self-affection. As we did the meditation, I just allowed my body to move, and at points I found my hands on my legs, and on my stomach, and on my chest, moving, gripping, feeling. It felt amazing. It was almost like they were the hands of another: my arms wrapped around myself, and it was almost like I was being hugged by somebody else. I wonder if this is me giving love to myself and accepting that love. Additionally, my partner and I seem to coincidentally align on certain circumstances, which made me feel more connected to them.