i think i've finally realized a new lens to understand my feeling. as an angel, my eels often come hard and fast and i can't control them, but naming them and recognizing them for what they are helped a lot. this lens is in tandem with another one, but the other one is a little more blunt around the edges and it's not something i can deburr, really.

the blunt one is tunshi. i quite appreciate the proximity to tianshi, so it delights me immensely that the name i stumbled into had that relationship. tunshi is a sword that i harbor beneath my bed, and it causes me issues. i can't blame it though, i really do love it. but the issues are swirling and dark and cause my eels to roil in my gut, pulsing and hot and nauseous against my sides. tunshi lives inside me too, and i can't change that (or more accurately i should say i don't want that).

tunshi has always been a fluctuation, statistical uncertainty to a significant degree, if you will. it would cut into my flesh when we would fight together, swing true and strong and whistle in the wind for me but then in the next moment, oscilate and lash out with a stray cut that seemed to find my most vulnerable places. but i trusted, and trust, tunshi. so it is strange to me and continues to be strange that i hate it for the deep scar it left between my ribs.

i've been thinking a lot about lens and feelings, as i often do when i search for a lens or stumble into one, and i found myself coming back to the idea of hunger. in my logbook, the words "primal," "deep," "base" foudn themsevles recursing over and over. emotions when i'm on t are strange and foreign, and live in a different place (probably my truer self), which i'm worringly unfamiliar with. it's daunting, to be unable to locate them within myself (although i'm getting better). and so i settled into the hunger.

i realized that... i have been starving for a long time. and part of that starving was the inability to notice it, since it's been going on for my whole life.

i've always had issues being greedy. it's always been other people first, then survival, then luxury or comfort. i thought greed was a superfluous goal, an end note in the melody of career, life. but i've come to realize this unsettlement with tunshi, my relationship to my arts, the way i interact with people, i am insatiably hungry. constantly.

i suppose it somewhat extends to this blog even. to post and to hope, to pray, to beg to be acknowledged, to be seen, to be, god forbid, wanted. that hunger is the thrumming heartbeat that drives my eels. and it's not a superficial hunger, no. i don't like to parade my selflessness, but i don't wish for fame or grandiousity or adoration. it's a base need that i simply am not having filled.

when i think about it, even my parents, whom i love very much, don't sate that hunger. it's always been that i would do work excellently, perform flawlessly, pour my heart and soul and life into everything i do, and then just. nothing. no one confessing that my art made them feel things, no one telling me that they would ache or grieve if i stopped. everything i do is beautiful and gentle but i never even get any acknowledgement.

at table read today, colin met my eye as he looked up from his script, and a slight spark of joy shon in his eye. nothing was spoken, just a look. the fact that a meagre crumb like that brings me to tears is heartbreaking. but it's also almost as if knowing this, allowing myself to give into greed, holding others praise and love on my tongue and savouring it, hurts more.

because now i know the feeling is starvation. and there's no way for me to find food unless it's given to me.