The blackouts have straightened my path — Wanna take a walk with me?

There is something about general outages that fills me with a little despair, but also a little inspiration. I am reluctant to say that the abuse that I’m taking is helping me build myself up. There shouldn’t be anything positive about getting struck time and time again by an abusive regime. But it happens, and while this does not mean that everything is great, it does mean that there is something to take away, and while I can’t say “I recommend that everyone live this”, I can’t completely regret being in this situation.

One of the small things I’ve realised is how little time I have to do each thing in every day. I’ve realised little by little, after every time when the light is turned off, together with all electrical pieces of equipment, including my computer and the internet, that there is a time to do everything that I need. For example, I cannot write after 7 pm because electricity gets turned off at around 7 pm.

I used to leave my phone without charging for two days, or leave it off during the night and charge it in the morning while I had breakfast, but nowadays it’s the only thing I have after the light is off, so I have to charge it whenever it goes below a range where, if the light were turned off right at this instant, I wouldn’t regret it. I had never felt the need to charge my phone at 78%, but I just plugged it in because it’s better to have it at 100% than to say “nah it’s enough”. Especially when it’s 9 am, a new day, and I didn’t charge it the day before because I thought it was enough for the moment, except the “moment” does not have a predetermined duration; it could be from a few hours to a couple of days.

I’ve been dividing my day into necessary parts like refreshment, writing, drawing, preparing what I’ll be needing for the rest of the day, and I’ve been leaving candles in predetermined places and lighters in order not to be dark if the light gets turned off unexpectedly. Another thing I’ve been doing is not writing on programs that don’t have autosave. I’m writing this on Google Docs because I know that if the light gets turned off right at this moment, I won’t lose a few paragraphs. Some autosave programs save every few minutes, but I write so fast that 5 minutes could mean ¼ of a whole story or article. Throughout my life, I have lost a lot of information, so I haven’t lost much during this event, and I’m making sure to learn of my mistakes to lose as little as possible.

I’ve also been training mindfulness because when the blackout starts again, I can’t be so surprised. The first times, I was scared, frustrated, my body was hurting and my emotions were very scrambled. I got bored really quickly and felt like I couldn’t take any more of it. Given that it’s not an ideal mindset, I decided to take steps to avoid this and now every time that it happens, my emotions are practically neutral and don’t change. I look for the things I prepared to do during the blackout and I’m not taken out of my life but just in another part of it. I think this has been one of the most important things, together with the reflections I’ve been doing.

In a blackout, you have a long time to think. You also realise how fragile everything is, how dependent you are on foreign powers, and how much you can do to solve your own situations. I’ve been thinking much more about my future and rearranging my priorities. I had promised many things, and I had planned many things, but I realised that I simply cannot do most of them without sacrificing a lot of things that I always wanted. I want to work on aesthetics, and I want to travel into worlds I create. I want to listen to music and travel into it. I want to travel around the physical world, and see many things, talk to many people and learn to form deeper relationships with people.

Those are my priorities. This means that I want to read, write, draw, appreciate art, listen to music, study a lot about philosophy, art and history, and travel. Given that these are my priorities, everything I’m doing changes, and I have already set into motion some restructuring processes for my life. I was living in inertia, thinking that I could solve all my problems by finding a niche and working around it, but I already have my niches, and if I choose something outside of it, I will die in a few decades without having even approached what I really want.

Therefore, I think I have to thank these blackouts and the corrupt tyrants of Venezuela for turning me back into a path of satisfaction. I will still be here on Steem because this aligns with my purposes, and I will still keep programming because I need money, but I will also look for things I can do beyond it, and try to become one with the road, so that I may travel more easily, and without losing my path.

How do I do that? I don’t really know right now. I have to think about this, but having planned everything out, I am more in harmony with my goals, and I’m sure that I’ll be able to think about this over time and perfect my plans and reasonings as I go.

Does this mean I’m not going to shitpost anymore? No, it means that I will be shitposting much more, because shitposting is art.

Will I be abandoning everyone? I will not be talking to a whole chunk of people, yes, but I will also talk to many others that are relevant to my life quest.

This message is part of the gardening series I started 10 days ago on this post. I will talk more about gardening in the future.