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Journal 3: Apathy & Loneliness

12-19-2023

Apathy

I have been struggling to feel anything short of apathy chopped up by brief intense bursts of emotion when I’m not around others the last month or so. It seems to be getting worse too. And I’m not sure if it’s seasonal effective disorder or what but I’ve been really struggling with executive dysfunction. My dishes have been half or not done for the last month. I will do just enough work to make them not gross, no food that could rot, make sure there’s no standing water or things that could mold and then I *REALLY* struggle to move beyond that without outside pressure. So it’s like a tidy pile of dirty dishes that shifts and moves slightly as I Theseus’ Ship my way through the pile. Incredible.

You can really copy paste that same sort of vibe onto other things: vacuuming, cleaning, dusting, laundry. All minimal effort put in to keep a safe mostly tidy living space. I don’t understand why my brain works this way. It’s not like I’ve been doing anything in my free time, I have no motivation, desire or drive to really do much. And I have a strong desire to fix these things but it’s like I have an incredible mental block every time I try to get up and do the dishes, or throw my laundry in a basket. Why? Why can’t I just fucking fold my laundry. Or run another load. Or wash some dishes while my rice cooks rather than write this stupid fucking journal entry. I’m so fucking angry with my own inability to just function like a normal person, I don’t get it.

Instead of doing most anything productive I instead sit down at my computer, stare at it for a bit. Maybe watch something for a bit, fail to get engaged, open a game, immediately feel a wave of… I’m not sure… sadness, depression, a feeling like I’m wasting my life away? What am I doing? Why am I here? What is the point of me being on this stupid fucking planet if I’m going to go work a brain dead job for 9 hours with a 1.5 hour commute both ways. Then do absolutely nothing to work against the litany of horrors that exist here? I look at my boss, my coworkers, even some of my friends and I feel overwhelming despair. Some of them seem like they are just biding their time until they die. I don’t want to be that. But how do I change? **How** do I do better? Do I sell everything I own and move to a low cost of living country? Go to work for change? Do I switch careers into non profits working for sustainability? Do I quit my job, get some roommates and throw myself into politics? I don’t know. It all feels so fraught. And there’s no easy answer. I’ve never had a mentor, never had an older person who was willing to take me under their wing in any meaningful way and truly help me. And I yearn for someone to lean on in this respect. Guidance.

Loneliness

I recently lost one of my closest friends. He’s still alive but the friendship slowly deteriorated and now snapped. I still have close friends. But I don’t have many, and they are not near me for the most part. I mentioned this in a previous entry I wrote: I am finally starting to build some level of community here in the city and I have never felt more lonely in my life. Some nights I feel like going somewhere or doing something and my entire being just rejects the idea on some visceral level. There are so many bars, movie theatres, restaurants, shops and other cool places near me. And I just struggle to even explore beyond the lens of my camera.

The era of online community separates and secludes us in ways that are insidious. There’s an illusion of easy community but it is as hard or maybe even harder to build it to a level where it fulfills to any similar level as in person community does. This is the struggle I find myself in, as I work to distance myself from virtual communities and find or build connections and community with those around me. But it comes back to the same problem as before, everyone else also works, they have their own lives and priorities. And community is often not one of them in America. Maybe it’s just becoming time for me to leave this country.

[a-space-to-take-a-breath]

Journal 2: Love

10-23-2023

Emotions, love, intent, passion, crushes.

Lately I’ve felt like I feel very little of this as it relates to other people. Sometimes I feel attraction and/or sexual desire and I *want* to feel intimacy and passion with someone. However, no matter how much I might want to feel these things, no matter how much I might want to love someone, it does not come naturally - or maybe even at all.

I have often wondered if maybe what others describe as love is just something that I was overestimating, something that I should never have expected to be better than what it was. Now I think that maybe I just don’t feel these things as strongly as those around me. I have been criticized and called out in past relationships for being chill to the point of coming across as uncaring. And sometimes when I examine my feelings I struggle to find the ones that should be thereabout caring for the people that I should love.

Sometimes it makes me feel sort of sad. Alone. Strange. Othered. I don’t understand why when I think of the woman I’m dating at the time I feel empty, or when I think about close family I feel next to nothing. You would think I would at least have *SOME* emotional response to these thoughts. Maybe I am just so conditioned to bury my feelings that I cannot ever truly feel without breaking some core part of me.

[a-space-to-take-a-breath]

Journal 1: Intro

10-9-2023

This is my first day doing this, and I don’t really know what the outcome of these is going to be yet. Anyway, for now I’m just gonna write them as if you - dear reader - are reading them.

I really struggle with emotional honesty in my life and that’s something I want to get better at. Whether these stay with just me or get shown to someone, I need them to be an honest unfolding of my feelings or I don’t think they will be of any use to anyone (least of all me - who they’re for).

Anyway, let’s talk about today. Logistics (an applications at work, don’t worry about the specifics) has been having some issues after a major release that was a bit rushed this last week. So we’ve spent a week of harried work trying to put the disparate pieces together. It’s incredibly frustrating to be put in a position where you are expected to do the majority of the lift for something like this and then have it not go right because someone overlooked something major. That isn’t to say that there weren’t mistakes made by the development team. I know I made some mistakes, I know some of the devs working under me made mistakes as well that I didn’t catch or in some cases didn’t have a chance to. Often these experiences would be good learning experiences, but we don’t have good processes set up for a lot of these things yet so we end up stressed, rushing, with no alternatives. We’ve been working to push management to implement better processes but it’s telling when the workers are the ones pushing for process to improve the quality of the work being done. To top this all off my co-lead on this development team is an antisocial(which is fine), egotistical(less fine), douchey(also less fine), insecure(sad), prick(ill let you decide!). This leads to a really toxic environment as you can probably imagine. He creates awkward situations, hoards work that he finds interesting to the detriment of the overall team (and, to be clear, he is smart), and gets incredibly upset if he isn’t ‘included’ in everything. Don’t go to lunch with a work friend and not invite him lest he find out later and berate you for your “SECRET LUNCH PLANS!”

…anyway. I really need to quit. I probably spent an hour or more today considering the possibility of quitting. And - in an effort for the aforementioned emotional honesty and just honesty in general - I also really really wanted to punch Ben (the douchey coworker) directly in the face. The whole company just radiates this energy that makes me want to shrivel up and die, and maybe this is just an issue of corporate America being so absolutely anathema to my ideals, I don’t know. Obviously many of my coworkers don’t feel this absolute revulsion at the company and the things it does, so it has to be something about me. Something about the things I believe and ways that I feel.

Well let’s move on from work. I imagine this one is gonna be kind of long since it’s my first one but no need to extend it more than it needs.

Where to start. Well I guess the biggest thing that’s happened today outside of work: a woman I’ve been seeing let me know she didn’t think she was interested in talking any longer. She did the “I don’t think I want to date right now” which is fine, it didn’t really seem like it was going anywhere anyway so I think it’s probably for the best. I do sort of wish that she had taken more initiative to push to see each other more in the time we were talking or said “I’m not interested” faster. We had recently had a pretty intimate conversation where she said that she basically has no experience and is too shy/nervous/guilty to do anything sexual. It struck me as interesting cause she was incredibly comfortable initiating further conversation or flirting about sexy topics but I did have a sense that she was pretty innocent. Anyway she also told me that she had gotten too shy and basically ran away from every relationship she’d gotten close to recently, I try not to make a habit of ignoring when people tell me who they are so I sort of expected her to… run away now that things had gotten deeper.

(Small Addendum: I talked with her briefly cause I was curious if this was the case. She said that her sole driver now that we had started to have more intimate conversations was that she didn’t feel like she had the time and energy to go on dates. So not what I assumed but also not surprising.)

Well I won’t belabor my dating woes too much. I’ve been recently trying to date more kink and sexuality first. Or if not first, at least with it as a primary element since it’s important to me. And that has seemed to help. In the evening I matched with someone on an app who seems to have similar kinks and interests and similar reasons for dating so hopefully I keep meeting new and interesting people.

Overall as of late I’ve felt melancholy, depressed, overwhelmed. I’ve struggled with basic self care, whether that’s hygiene or keeping my apartment clean. It’s not that I’m NOT doing these things but just that my frequency has flagged in a way that feeds further into my seeming depression. These feedback loops create really degenerate cycles that I feel like I’m adept at identifying but whatever executive dysfunction I’m suffering makes it incredibly difficult to combat it. It’s frustrating because I feel as though I’m finally starting to make some friends and build a little bit of community in the city, even if it’s mostly through this one TRPG community, and for some reason I still feel lonely, unmotivated and sad. I realize that these things don’t change over night, and that nothing just fixes your emotions. Maybe I need medication.