I held my own life in my hands, and it was suddenly too heavy to be left there.
Elyn R. Saks – The Center Cannot Hold
Well now.
I started typing to get through anxiety and it worked for a while. Emptying my head … gardez freakin’ brains.
Here is a thing I hate very much. I don’t see my lovely friends enough and when I do, I talk waaaaay too damn much. Sometimes it feels horribly beyond my control. Thank fuck they’re cool with it. You bipolaroids know the (pneumatic) drill, I know you do.
Then, having had a really good time, regardless of my own motormouth, I drive back home with sudden and full-on anxiety, for no reason other than whatever soup is bubbling through my brain at the time. Freaking hot day and I’m boiling all over except my forehead, which has developed a cold sweat. Lower ribs aching hard, fucknose why. Ughhhhh.
I remember reading with relief a blogger who said he suddenly said stuff without any thought or planning. Like, he’d say to himself, “kill yourself”. For the longest time, involuntary iloveyous and ihateyous have been my thing – only when I’m alone. Sometimes it varies, if things are really bad. I have no idea who I’m saying it to. Sigh sigh sighhhhh (passive aggressive sigh). I’m seeing my psychiatrist fairly soon, I’ll mention all that crap.
Boring boring boring …
And I was on the beach at 5am with the dogs, surely that has to take me out of my echoing head a bit.
This is why, when viewed singularly, as I am viewed these days, my tattoos don’t seem nearly as profound as I claim them to be. To the squeamish who can’t quite bear to look at me, I’m a mere curiosity; to those who do look, really look, I must seem the most isolated of souls.
Jill Ciment – The Tattoo Artist
(Seriously, the above is a wonderful read.)
Ugh … blah blah fucking blah. I distract myself for a while, even when it’s by thinking about and around the mechanics of the things that I am frightened to face … but of course the fact remains, I am so, so, so unhappy. If you said well here’s three wishes, be happy, I wouldn’t know what or how.
I don’t feel remotely capable of anything much; everything is a battle. Oh yeah, Sisyphus. I’ve been thinking about this quote on and off for the past year or so …
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camus
… and today I have decided that it’s a load of codswallop. I don’t think we have to leap from absurd to happy. I get it and I frequently agree with Camus, but this one is just way too noble. And though absurdists may be convinced they located freedom, I suspect … ugh I’m shutting up about it, or I’ll just end up going hang on a moment, arguing the whole thing the other way and twisting myself into an exsistential absurdist pretzel. Fuck that.
I started this blog wondering who I am, now I don’t even understand my own question.
Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?
Job 38:11
(I quite like bits of the old testament.)
Back to Camus (haha). The whole who cares if life has meaning anyway thing ought to fit me like the proverbial glove right now and I guess if I was 17 it would. I can’t (won’t?) make that Sisyphean leap of (il)logic. Eh, meh … im/patient Job and un/happy Sisyphus.
I have a placeholder answer, taken (completely out of context) from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding.
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report.
PS: Nick Cave – where do we go now but nowhere
Aaaaand breathe …
