dec 12 2023
The feeling is back.
Maybe Brian Wilson said it best in "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times." Or maybe Bo Burnham did with "That Funny Feeling." Or maybe Robin Peckinold was getting at the same thing in “Helpless Blues.”
I’ve never been original, always latching onto somebody else’s ideas. But if I could describe this feeling at all, It's that prickly feeling I get all over telling my body to Do Something. It's the bile creeping up in my throat signaling my body to vomit. When I lie down, I feel it pulse through my legs in waves. My heart is pushing into the back of my chest. I think it’s been with me since high school, but maybe it was just always there undetectable to little me who was focused on community building in Animal Crossing. The pain speaks more than the incoherent thoughts colliding into each other in my brain. All I feel is the wave from my skull to my toes.
The feeling chooses when to come. It’s like the feeling wakes up and decides it needs to keep busy. We all do. Who am I to shit on someone else’s purpose? It’s not like I have one at the top of mind. With the feeling comes dread and a sense that my time is up. When I find myself in this state, I go limp. My body is in physical pain and I don’t fight back, I give in so easily, drooping like underarms. I have told no one about this pain. Becca JH wrote, “Pain eliminates language. At its most extreme, it results in an animalistic scream, an expression of utter unintelligibility.”
I think this feeling first entered my body in high school, like a possession. But I saw The Exorcist when I was in high school and it didn’t scare me much. To combat this feeling I’ve done everything from drink, smoke cigarettes, suffocate my ears with music, go for walks, yoga, get a degree, stop eating, and flirt with guys at parties who I will never see again, amongst others. But it has no escape, it throbs every now and then to remind me, that it’s still there. Every time it shows itself, I swat at it like a mosquito, but the desire for blood is strong—it wants to kill its host.
"I don't think you know what you wanna do with your life."
In ContraPoints’ video “Incels,” Wynn coins the term masochistic epistemology: whatever hurts is true. This is to say that as a form of self-harm, people will seek out disparaging comments about themselves or people whom they identify with online to reaffirm their own ideas that they have of themselves in their head. To those who live inside my head, they’ll know I’ve been known to do this from time to time. I used to have a screenshot saved of a Reddit thread where a man posts, worried that he is stupid as he fails to complete everyday simple tasks. I didn’t care to screenshot the replies. I don’t need comfort, I wanted to reaffirm that yes, there are people who are incompetent and deserving of very little. Not of course, that I would say that about that man. To him, I would say that he is loved by his friends and family and to move towards the light in his life. I don’t go on these online adventures anymore. Because once you’re an adult with a degree people you won’t have to seek out cutting comments about yourself through a stranger, sometimes somebody will look at you square in your deer-in-the-headlights dumbass face and say your worst fear about yourself to you.
"I don't think you know what you wanna do with your life."
The other night I was at a party with people all older than me whether it be by a few months or almost a decade. Everybody seemed so eager, so willing. Our bodies were close together, I could feel the legs of another man touching mine. My heart fluttered. I forget. I drink. I forget. I remember, then say something I shouldn’t have. I forget. Then I wake up at 3 AM.
"I don't think you know what you wanna do with your life."
