Today is the first time in many years that I’ve gone out of my way to pick up my laptop and type. It’s funny to think that some of the more eloquent things I’ve said over the years have been with my thumbs but the interface on which you record has little to do with content. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s better. And I find that the variety of focus typing on my phone provides is more suited to committing these sorts of things to written record. While it is much easier to get distracted it’s also easier to look things up and reinspire myself to continue. I can’t count the number of times I’ve set with a half finished page and impatient, almost mockingly blinking cursor. I feel resigned, defeated in a way I have a hard time expressing when I find myself left wanting while sitting at my laptop. But I don’t really sit at my phone do I? It feels less like a task and therefore something that I can fail at when work, play, and everything in between bleed into each other.
I’m ever the optimistic nihilist.
Because at the end of the day, none of this truly matters. Though I’m not sure if that’s cope talking or a genuine reconciliation with my purpose or lack thereof. I do spend a lot of time checking in and tend to think it’s the latter but delusion looks a lot like reality to the deluded. I guess if this is my natural state it doesn't matter either way. I just very much enjoy not having a backlog of things I need to process. Life has a penchant for getting away from you in rather uncomfortable ways that make “me time” hard to justify when you’ve ignored the need to make space for it. For me, all time is “me time” making no time truly mine. I’m almost unilaterally absent, though in past years I’ve tried very goddamn hard to be present and I think I’ve succeeded in some ways, perhaps the ways that matter. I feel things more often than I don’t or at least I think I do. Emotions happen within a comfortable enough time frame or at least close enough to the epicenter for them to make sense. My back is fucking killing me and has for upwards of a week. I’m fairly certain that wouldn’t be something I’d be terribly cognizant of in the past.
So I am here. I just can’t shake the sneaking feeling that I don’t exist.
Time has become… concerningly nebulous. Things that happened a year ago feel like 10 while others that happened forever ago feel like yesterday. I have no concept of time once it’s passed. My memories are like collecting water in an ice tray, thinking all of them have their own compartment only to realize the compartments were made of paper. Like maybe for a little while memories remain intact but eventually they all become part of the soup. There is no timeline only time. I realize that time has passed, that I have grown older but I’m also rather certain I haven’t lived beyond 27 yo. That’s nearly a decade. What happened that year that I can’t remember who I am beyond it?
And of course while being present seems to be the goal it is quite uncomfortable simply by virtue of life being vastly uncomfortable. Loneliness has to be the most uncomfortable of the experiences I can identify. Not the loneliness of purposelessness though that one is distressing. It’s the loneliness of being both present and unaccounted for. I have become a person I do not recognize or perhaps I never recognized myself and am just now realizing I don’t. It’s like being invited to a party and really wanting to flake out but you finally muster up the inclination and mental bandwidth to withstand other peoples’ presence only to get there after everyone’s already left.
A memory that encapsulates the experience perfectly is the last time I went to con. I’m not fond of people or con so I wasn’t thrilled to be there despite what I hoped. The experience was entirely draining and activated a sense of misanthropy for me that I genuinely forgot I was capable of. I don’t enjoy being hateful, I really don’t enjoy most emotions so to feel so strongly about something that should on most accounts be fun is both disarming and horrible. But that night upon getting in bed I had the most uncanny thought that I wasn’t me. It was utterly resolute, I knew with unshakable certainty that my consciousness was the only part of me that made me me. That I was this disembodied consciousness imprisoned in someone else's head. Everything about me; my face, my body, my personality, even my thoughts did not truly belong to me. And it made me feel sick. Not physically, though I have had thoughts of being something else, subhuman, while delirious with pain or fever. This wasn’t one of those times. I actually understand what’s going on in those instances, it’s a form of dissociation that helps me to divorce myself from the discomfort of being sick and while it’s odd I never once thought of my body as not mine.
It is scary to look in the mirror and not recognize a single part of yourself as self. Because I rationally understand that I couldn’t be anyone else other than myself but delulu’s one hell of a drug. I honestly wish I hallucinated more than this. Hallucinations can be dispelled, it’s a lot harder to dismiss a belief that the world cannot refute for you. Hell even the delusion of body dysmorphia is easy enough to understand that your mind has hijacked your self image. I know I am not hideous because despite the ugliness that I see, the world has confirmed for me that that I’m full of shit. Which is fucking odd because can both not be true? Is it simply the fact that more people believe I’m not disgusting than who do that makes me not disgusting? Does my self assessment not matter because it based on parameters not fabricated in reality?
Idk. I just rather not feel anymore.
And even still the loneliness of not being able to share these experiences in a way that feels constructive while not as bad as depersonalization certainly is a symptom of it and is just as corrosive over time. Like in writing this. Why am I even bothering? Why does this even matter if the person I’d like to see it never does? I know my experience isn’t unique but I fear that’s what makes this even harder to reconcile with. I know that I am not the main character even of my own story and that everything I’ve said and will ever say couldn’t possibly matter. And yet I keep typing.
But I forget it was never about connecting to the world at large or even small. I write to relieve myself of my own thoughts. The ones with sharp corners and low rates of decay. The person who needs to see this is me. And they probably will. And when they do they’ll see that there is someone who understands. Someone who knows intimately the experience of being both present and positively fucking gone. I hope that whatever it is that makes this life worth slogging through you’ve found it or at least the switch to turn everything off again cuz this shit really ain’t it.
