attempting the reset

This is where I’m at: still taking the pills, back in desolate but familiar territory, and mustering the courage to get out there and risk a little heart and ego bruising. Chicago was a nice break but it’s time to lose the training wheels and do the big boy thing. Yet, contemplating this, I’m already retreating into my shell, and don’t know how to start. I’ve sent a few texts, I have a coffee date planned for tomorrow, and I’m trying to constructively engage. I took the Vyvanse after detoxing yesterday, so this might just be the dopamine-amphetamine-fueled confidence and could prove illusory. I cleaned out the house yesterday and tidied up her old room, which was therapeutic in its own way; plus, it’s nice to lounge around fully and have a separate room that’s doesn’t contain my bed to establish some separation between waking and sleeping. That being said, I still feel like a ginormous and pathetic loser, and I’m not sure what to do about that. The worst part of this, of course, is that my self-image oozes out and is probably poisoning my interactions with others, so the estrangement and loneliness turns into a recurrent state, hence the need for some irruptive delusional role-playing until I fool myself into believing this is the new reality.

I don’t really know how to take stock of the situation, but I already feel a weary depression setting in. It feels so tiresome, are we just “doing things” for the sake of doing them? The monotone circular routines, scrabbling plans, is this rhythm of existence everything we have? Would it be fuller and more enriching if I had people to share it with? Undoubtedly, but still, I wonder. I’ll be taking classes beginning in the fall, so maybe there’s a silver lining and something to look forward to. Intellectual kinship, or at least shared interest, if I don’t completely blow it up again. And even then, I wonder, is this what I’m about or into? I think so, at some level, but the psychic flux outpaces the speed of my materiality and the ever-present dissonance is ever-present heartache. So, I have two months until that starts, and still need to pay the bills. I’ll be back home for a week or two for a friend’s wedding, and then back here in the belly of the beast for the hottest part of the year, probably friendless and plan-less for 4th of July. That’s emphatically _not_the spirit, so I should say: I’ll have hopefully found something by then, or at least made progress towards that goal. I just read a Vice article that was published 2 weeks ago that said casual friendships take approximately 50 hours of casual contact to cultivate and friends about 300 hours. If that’s true, then it’s hard to see the math working out in my favor. But maybe that’s precisely the point: I need to be brave, against the odds, and suck it up. Life is full of pain, and this type of pain is so banal and mundane and uninteresting but ubiquitous in the grand scheme of things that it is almost a constitutive fact of existence. This shared commonality, you’d think, would provide easy bridges to cross and abundant empathy, and yet, we are more alone and estranged and walled up every day. This is projection, surely, but there is a guarded shame to it all. Nobody wants to be the sick leper pariah, to be a marked man is a terrible punishment. I was reading some social science journals about how those who feel depressed and lonely are pushed to the fringes of social networks, in effect quarantining them until they die or magically cure themselves; the dynamics of the group are to sustain itself, not necessarily care for its weak and dysfunctional. Perhaps there is some Marxian or culturally relative read on this, and this is just where we are today, but it is my current eternity, and I have to resolve this contradiction on my own without asking too many neighbors for some sugar.

So I’m committing to the fucking bit, whole hog! Here’s me, smiling with gusto, laughing along with the joke, feigning interest and glowing with empathy and faux-joy, because I am really actually fantastic and wonderful to be around, and absolutely not a pit of chronic discontent and negative energy. I’m a wonderful, charismatic, intelligent, attractive, lovable, social, popular guy who graces and blesses those around him with his effervescent presence. That’s me! Ha ha, wow, the sunshine is just covering everything so syrupy sweet, the brightness and warmth enveloping everything in down kisses, the law of attraction was my creation: watch me direct its awesome power. Maybe I can do this with enough mind-altering substances after all — one psych trip after another.

It all takes time though, and I feel like a snail or slug oozing their life essence on this cold grey rock and losing my own substantiality as the wake of my existence is grated and slowly shaved to a nub like so many little bits of roadkill on the path behind. Each day robs me of a little something I cannot get back, each day ahead seems to promise to do the same, awaiting for some manna from heaven to jolt me into a new steady-state altogether, a quixotic Poisson jump process out of the pits of mental damnation. Alright, that’s enough that, kid, time to suck it up.

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I’ve been reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Allegories abound, surprisingly humorous, generous with the comma and semi-colon placements, just like yours truly.