Some things are just difficult to write about. Some things I wrote about in my diary I immediately scribbled out. I know what it says, but I can't bring myself to stare down the words.
In my diary I compared it to Slenderman. Don't look right at it.
I thought maybe I should write some words online, like in my diary, but
the web isn't a platform I can scribble words out from.
Strikethrough doesn't carry the same weight as scratching out words until
the page wears thin. The words are still there on the screen; I can read them no
matter how hard I try not to.
But I can sort of scratch out the words, can't I? I know JavaScript, I know OpenGL shaders, sort of.
html2canvas paints DOM nodes to canvas pixels. Those are my thoughts, in screenshot form. Some basic GLSL knowledge is enough to adjust distortion shaders off Shadertoy to my liking.
Now I don't have to look at anything I don't want to.
Close to ten years of my life are obscured in my memory by distortion, like this text. I call it the decade I spent asleep. My memory cobbles it together as one summer, but it was really about 3,000 days. The worst part is I still don't know if I blocked out memories, or if nothing memorable actually happened in all that time.
This was also hard to write. The code, I mean. There's a lot of moving parts to it, it wasn't a simple matter of gluing together functions that came pre-built. There is artistry here, hidden in the source code of this page.
I had to inspect html2canvas's inner workings, find the right amount
of abstractions to write, interrogate my *real* use cases (not the ones
I imagined I'd want), and optimize. It was a lot of work! But I could
stare at and internalize the code without feeling the need to run out of the room.
I don't think all that effort just went toward coding. I am drawing some parallels here, you see.
The thing is, I think I spent long enough developing this code snippet
(it's called beglitch) that I learned to read through the distortion
anyway. Reluctantly I'll toss it.
I never expected my life to take me anyhwhere, or that I would end up alive, or even happy. I fully expected to lose my home, live on the street, let my life's momentum wind down, and just not care enough to keep going. At that point, I already didn't care enough. I wondered, a lot, when I would just lie down and choose not to get up again.
Trying to figure out why is a trip, and it's one I haven't been able to delve into, considering all the scribbling-out I've been doing. All I remember is it all made sense. The world made sense, as it was explained to me. I just don't belong to the world. This is a lie the world convinced me to tell myself.
I'm really glad I spent time learning how to write GLSL to make canvas effects. It's fun, and rewarding, and I enjoy knowing it. It feels like a worthwhile skill, and it's an oddly theraputic way to examine depression without letting my brain know and freaking it out.
What I really fucking don't enjoy knowing is why someone would want their life to end. I hate having that sort of reasoning, to be able to think, “yeah I do understand how that would have made sense for them.”
... Well, it's cursed knowledge, and I'd quite like to leave that shit in the garbage where it belongs. But since I can't, I'll use it to remind anyone who needs it—including me—to find outlets for your brain to unload its shit, especially if it's the type of shit it can't examine head on. And of course, stick around.