LET ME OUT

This is just the proposal you can ignore this it just looked unbalanced without text that's why it's here.

Celebrations are forced points of enjoyment. In a typical sense they tend to be creations of over stimulation. Like giving a light bulb too much power and hoping it doesn’t blow. When it does blow smoke fills the bulb and then people get in fights and break down in bathrooms and the like. The pressure with which western society has overblown celebrations like birthdays and Christmas is stifling. Any once faithful celebration becomes a reminder of where exactly one stands in relation to the norm. I find myself ostracised by them, even my own birthday, thus choose not to participate as much as I possibly can. My own celebrations are no longer tethered to them, nor even small victories or successes in my personal life. While occasionally I appreciate the way rain makes the world green, or the way the sun sets and lights up the Royalla solar farm, these moments are fleeting and I wouldn’t particularly call them celebrations.

New Year’s is the only mainstream mass celebration that is spared (though not entirely) of my cynicism. This is for the self absorbed reason that in the recesses of my own mind, there exists a New Year’s where I feel I belong. And it’s in that corner of my mind that I spend the day, year after year. Of course with it being a pretty blatant marker of the passing of time, and tied with actual timekeeping, New Year’s becomes a way for me to let go of everything, deluded that this time the simulation will end for real, and the last few hours is a place for me to spend time just existing, with nothing required of me.

I wanted to capture one of the strongest examples of this feeling; the days leading up to the 31st of December 2019. The unavoidable arrival of Covid arriving in Australia was about to occur, and the air was unbreathable because of the bushfires. The sun that shone through the windows was literally blood red and the sky was orange. That year had been hell for me, and to spend the last few weeks of it in something pretty comparable to an apocalypse seemed like a good end for it. I have a writer’s heart, and as far as a closing chapter goes, it was pretty much perfect and I find myself annoyed that whoever is in control of my life didn’t just roll credits there.