my-garbagethoughts-blog

[my-garbagethoughts-blog]

“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death”.

I start this series of reflections by stating the condition I find myself in at the time. I am currently at a time where my professional and personal ambitions and expectations took a substantial and violent re-configuration. This left me with no discernible path for what lays ahead, which has forced me to evaluate my past, my present, and my future.

I am privileged that I can sit down and delve into the buildup of my being, and try to understand what is going on in my mind before I proceed with the next stage of my life. It’s been frustrating to admit that this is indeed the stage that I’m in. It makes me fear I am losing time, but that in of itself feels like a somewhat silly notion. Losing time that I could be using...for what? Getting to know myself better feels important as well, but I can’t deny it also makes me feel anxious. It makes me feel guilty, as I have an urge to acquire economic independence, and it is frustrating to not meet it yet.

That being said, time spent in developing as a human being is time well spent. It is hard to admit, but it is true. One wishes to impose and control what the usage of our time will be, but it cannot always be done. One must simply ensure that time is being used efficiently in developing further as a human being, and not wasting it in pointless endeavors. I must simply ensure that I am investing my thoughts in the development of positive thought patterns and habits that will prepare me to a proper life that I can not only enjoy, but rely on.

It feels like I had degraded and taken a lot of steps back in the development of these (and other) habits, which implies I had been working on them for a long time. Blame it on my inexperience, the circumstance, or on the people (or lack thereof) that I was surrounding myself with, or on whatever, but these setbacks created a violent contrast between who I expected myself to be, and who I actually felt I was. This violent contrast created a high degree of tension and anxiety. It felt as if I was living a lie - in terms of my professional life, in terms of my romantic, and in terms of my personal life.

The last few months have been some of the most difficult times of my life. It is important to note that, because sometimes, once we can finally grasp for air and can finally breathe, we can forget we were choking not so long ago. The mind can, at least in my case, quickly forget of the pain it has endured. Adjustability and adaptability can be a dangerous response to discomfort, as it can hide the pain that we experienced not too long ago. Let us not forget why we were choking, or that we were in fact choking, for if and when we do forget, we risk the possibility of falling in the same traps that led us to those feelings in the first place.

For me, it can truly be hard to understand how multiple thought processes work in parallel as we live our day to day life. It has long been a wish of mine to have access to the different planes of thought that are taking place in my head, but it can be truly hard, as I feel that the time envelope of certain thoughts, despite their potential predictability, is slower. Just as there are multiple time-scales for musical ideas (time-scales within a bar, within a phrase, within a larger piece, etc) there are also multiple time-scales for thoughts. Attempting to understand all levels of thought can result in an incoherent thought that can cause more trouble than good. Sometimes you can know something for a long time but can’t articulate it, because the timing isn’t right. It’s really frustrating to have to let go to time.

Although perhaps a submission to time isn’t what these thoughts need. Perhaps it is the admittance that you cant reconcile the irreconciliable. Once incoherences have been addressed, thought can progress. Perhaps, ending the living of a lie and moving onto a life of uncertainty can give air for our thoughts to breathe and for the subconscious ideas to grow. Perhaps.

This is a feeling I’ve been endlessly been trying to articulate in a period of time that simultaneously feels like a day and a year, but was in reality two and a half months. The idea of time being subjective has never been clearer to me. In that amount of time, I’ve been able to accomplish a lot of things in the past, but for the months of mid-July through early October 2018, it felt like it was a single day.

Anyway, that was a really long introduction, that on some moments it does touch upon some ideas from the quote, but it mostly does not. Let’s turn back to the quote and refresh our memory and move on:

“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death”.

Upon reading this quote, I realized that I was feeling an urge of relief. As preposterous as it might seem, my feelings felt completely misunderstood by everyone around me, so being able to read in a very articulate text that what I was experiencing was somewhat commonplace made me feel comfortable. As previously stated, I have the opportunity to reflect on my past:

“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.”

I feel that this prompts a lot of important questions about the habits that preceded my substantial life change. It prompts questions about my personal character - who was I choosing to be? Why was I choosing to be this person? Why was I choosing to show this behavior?

Was I choosing my personal attributes out of familiarity? Was I choosing my fears out of familiarity? Did I know, deep within me, that a substantial change needed to occur within me to move on with my life? Did I make my choice to leave Boston as a way of forcing that substantial change? Was I attempting to force substantial environmental change to induce substantial emotional change?

What is immaturity other than a refusal of the truth? Of admitting fear and vulnerability? It feels as if I was creating a definition of myself (a “familiar world”, to bring it back to the quote) that was being explained by “poor” reasons (ie personal behavior and attributes that aren’t constructive to a positive life according to my own personal values) because they had developed out of familiarity. They had developed out of the linear progression from one environment to the next one, everything had been a logical step. Did I need to take a radical step to actually progress in the constitution of what makes me who I am?

“But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.”

This quote is particularly relatable, especially during the darkest time of my emotional crisis. My universe had been completely divested of illusions and lights. I felt aimless in my professional path, and I felt powerless in my romantic engagements. I felt isolated socially, and I felt like I was alienating my family with my intense feelings of disillusion and chaos. I felt like my chaos was an inconvenience, but for the first time in a long time, I didn’t care I was being an inconvenience - which is a weird change of character for me. Being an inconvenience had always been a source of heavy anxiety for me. It feels like my desperation had stripped that away - or had it been my girlfriend? I don’t know yet, as it might be a combination from both.

I did feel like an alien. I didn’t feel like I fit in where I was. I didn’t feel like I belonged where I was. I didn’t feel like I knew what my identity was. I didn’t feel like I knew what my worth was. I had problems eating, showering, performing basic adult tasks such as buying groceries and washing my laundry. Tasks that had been of relative ease in the past had become obscenely challenging duties, and I couldn’t understand why.

During the darkest time of my crisis, I did feel I was in an exile without remedy. I couldn’t relate to my past. I saw pictures of myself and I couldn’t recognize myself in those pictures - I knew it was me, from memory, but it didn’t feel like that face belonged to me. It was a sad scene, looking at a picture of myself in a computer, knowing that the person on both ends was not the same, but had all the same both been confused about their identity.

But not only could I not relate to my past, I could not see how I had done what I had, and I could not see how I had lived the life I had lived. It felt, and it still does, to some degree, that I had stumbled on someone else’s life, and that I was simply an impostor that had fallen onto their path. I had stolen someone else’s identity, and I was simply feeling the shock of stealing someone else’s body. It was a very scary feeling. At the same time, it felt ridiculous to contemplate the idea of the future ever possibly becoming better. Imagine hearing heavy feedback from a microphone in a public space, or venue. When you hear the loudest sound and you’re in pain, it feels like you’re never going to shut off the sound. But you eventually do, and after a minute it feels like it was never that bad.

Which goes back - trying to go full circle - to the idea of not forgetting the pain that one had endured. Adaptability can be dangerous.