It has, of course, been quite some time since an update. Nearly a year – how funny to think that time passes so quickly, yet each individual day seems to crawl. I feel an undue sense of nervousness in even making this post, as if I have something to answer for, or must provide a doctor’s excuse to validate my absence. Plus, there’s the underlying (if non-specific) expectation that there must be a profound reason for ceasing all communication. I suppose there is, though the excruciating details of which I’m as-yet unprepared to discuss at length, particularly in a public forum.
For numerous of reasons, I have experienced, initiated, and been forced into a variety of deeply difficult, challenging, and invigorating life changes. From roughly March 2010 onwards, I’d fallen prey to an ever-increasing malaise and melancholy, a feeling of internal restlessness and dissatisfaction that permeated the most important things in my life: my relationships, my academic work, and my own sense of self. This depression – in every sense of the word: emotional, social, intellectual, psychological – feasted happily on me, and I – too lazy, stubborn, immature, and avoidant to adequately face it – found myself having my deepest core elements destroyed and shredded.
And now, here I am. I’ve relinquished my role as graduate student, for now, instead focusing on the process of self-healing and recovery. If it weren’t so emotionally excruciating and turbulent to experience first-hand, I’d find my existence and life now laughable and epitomizing everything I find wrong with so much of contemporary culture. I wind up having massages frequently, taking a pottery class, reading things that make me feel good (but make me think nothing). And mourning the loss of what I had, and have no longer.
That said, it’s not an entirely hopeless process. I’ve seen great strides in my capacities, and while my functionality doesn’t begin to broach what it has been, historically, I try to be patient and kind with myself (a behavior both unnatural and difficult for me). In the most simple manner, I am grieving and – rather than fight to silence every emotional reaction and thought – I allow it to happen, and let it go. Without being too reductionist, this has been a predominantly “Zen” experience; I’ve found myself turning increasingly to H.H. the Dalai Lama and many Buddhist writings to help navigate the inherent difficulty of my life right now.
This entry isn’t so much ‘woe-is-I,’ but more a rehashing of where I am (though admittedly in the vaguest terms possible). I’m not sure what’s next, or if there even is a “next” in any meaningful sense of the word. When I slept last night, I dreamed of joining the military and begging on the telephone and having my parents support me. I’m not sure where those dreams came from.
