Honestly I Nearly Forgot to Write This, by Chill

hey.

so they asked me to write a blog. i said yeah sure whenever. they said the deadline was yesterday. i said that's cool.

i'm Chill. you probably guessed that from the title. or from the fact that i haven't used a single capital letter yet. punctuation is a vibe and i'm not always in that vibe.

morning

i wake up when i wake up. no alarm. alarms are aggressive. Angry has like four alarms and they're all set to maximum volume. i can hear them through the wall. every morning. that's Angry's problem though not mine.

breakfast is whatever's there. cereal without checking the expiry date. toast if someone else already got the bread out. sometimes just a glass of water and a long stare out the window. windows are underrated honestly.

Excited tried to get me to do a morning routine once. cold shower, journaling, gratitude list, stretching, affirmations. i said i'd think about it. that was three months ago. i'm still thinking about it.

afternoon

people assume i don't care about things. that's not true. i care. i just don't panic about things. there's a difference.

like when Anxious is spiralling about something that might happen next week, i'm the one who says "yeah but it also might not." and Anxious looks at me like i've just solved world peace and also ruined everything simultaneously.

i think my purpose is balance. when everything around you is loud and fast and stressful, someone needs to be the one who says "it's okay to just sit with this for a minute." that's me. i'm the sitting-with-it one.

the headphones thing

yes i wear headphones basically all the time. no i will not be taking them off. they're not even always playing music. sometimes they're just... on. it's the principle. the headphones say "i'm here but i'm also somewhere else and that's fine."

when they are playing music it's usually lo-fi beats or rain sounds or that one playlist that's just waves for four hours. Angry called it "background noise for people with no personality." i told Angry it sounded like they needed to listen to more waves.

what people get wrong about being chill

being chill doesn't mean being empty. it doesn't mean not feeling things. i feel everything. i just process it differently.

when something bad happens, Angry explodes, Anxious spirals, Sad cries. i go quiet. i sit with it. i let it pass through me like weather. it's not that i don't care — it's that i've learned that most storms pass if you don't fight them.

that said. sometimes i'm too chill and i know it. sometimes "sitting with it" is actually just avoiding it. sometimes the headphones are on because i don't want to deal with something. i'm working on that. slowly. at my own pace. obviously.

evening

evenings are my favourite. everything slows down. Tired starts yawning around 8pm and honestly that energy is contagious in the best way. Sad puts on a film. Anxious finally stops pacing. even Angry turns the volume down a bit.

that's when i log my mood. not because anyone tells me to, but because the evening is when i can actually hear myself think. tap the character. sometimes write a line or two. nothing deep. just a check-in. "today was alright" or "felt a bit off" or just "waves."

that's enough. it's always enough.

final thought

if you're reading this and everything feels like a lot right now, here's what i'd say: you don't have to fix everything today. you don't have to feel better right now. you don't have to have it figured out.

sometimes the most productive thing you can do is absolutely nothing. just breathe. just be. the rest will sort itself out.

or it won't. and that's okay too.

— Chill 😌