shit

Here I am, media res, the house is crumbling around me and I’m full of the boring and predictable self-loathing that only deepens each year past 30. My hands are shaking as I type this, I’m self-medicating, I smoke weed almost every night, I’m drinking pots of caffeine, I’ve started mixing nootropics just for an “edge”, I’m taking Vyvanse despite knowing its chemical effects are similar to cocaine. What is the point of all this whirlwind medication if not to blur out the sharp edges of the feelings that cut you up like ribbons inside? I find myself struck by divine regret all the time and I want to tear my hair out and shout, as if berating myself could rectify the course of my life. This offshoot stream I took my little life-canoe down has lost the plot and I have nobody to share it with now, and I’m no good with a compass.

The ego-soul is a projection on the manifold heart, but the geodesics are incalculable and the torsion heartbreak. I lit the house on fire for reasons I don’t know, and will not know, maybe ever, but maybe it had something to do with the notion of freedom, or its mirror self-hatred. My life has crumpled into something so small and familiar, I have nobody here, the people I knew have drifted as if sensing my deep leprosy, and I am left to become increasingly shrill looking for love and understanding that I will ironically repel more as time goes on and the need intensifies. So yeah, I hate myself, I’m glad you figured that out, and I’m nauseous almost all the time and want to throw up so hard I turn myself inside out so the medical students can touch this cadaver and ponder how A led to B and metastasized into C.

Where did it all go wrong? Did it actually go wrong? Is this the determinate path that was set out for me and I am but the tragic — or comic? — hero hitting the walls of his glass cage while the crowd laughs? Is this a performance? A passing curiosity as people move through the zoo and I collapse from exhaustion and pant on the ground as sweat beats on my chest? I think so, sometimes — it’s as if life is just one big safari, and people will take an interest insofar as you’re entertaining and stable. There is only a finite amount of compassion and love left, somehow, and we’ve engineered a shortage that needs to be dolled out very carefully, lest the last drops disappear from the world. I thought I was deserving of love and care, but maybe the fundamental neuroticisms are too off-putting and the sickness shines through the papier-mâché grin. There is nobody here to save you, there will be nobody to catch you, and you will hit the concrete cold floor with a dull thud. So maybe you should keep throwing yourself at the ground and see if it opens up and transports you elsewhere, the other side of the planet, Hell, the ocean inside, sojourn to your subconsiousness. The terrifying thing is a race to the bottom is a race you only run yourself, and pity is fleeting and a weak, and others are too busy anyway to reach out — they know you’re acting out and therefore have less of a reason to reach out since they’ve called your bluff.

This fundamental imbalance is real, solitude can be a disease, and there is no inner gold mine you can plunder to save yourself. It’s interesting, this feeling of uncleanliness, it feels so visceral and exquisitely tied into the fibers of your being, like a nervous system of sin and filth. It must be an ancient artifact from our ancestors, and some inherit more jagged and larger pieces than others. I wish I could excavate it and banish it, this feeling of deep filth and self-hatred, but it is too stubbornly lodged in there malignantly radiating and polluting the rest of my being. The priests of old would exploit this to their own ends, but now that we’ve secularized it all we have bureaucrat-technicians who conceive of you in biochemical terms instead. They rob you of any divinity so that you know that it’s as good as it gets here, and you actually have nothing to look forward to, or to look up to, except for the black pit inside. How do you clean your soul? That’s the question. I need a deep cleaning.

---

I watched Desert Hearts by Donna Deitch the other week, and felt like crying.