![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stillflightIt feels like I have been burnt out since March of 2020. In constant crisis mode. Every infographic about emotional health puts me in the red "I am in immediate danger" zone. It wasn't a decline, it was a collapse. An implosion. For three years: I haven't felt fulfilled in my relationships with other people. I haven't been functioning. I have been numb, aimless, and unfocused. My mind has not been one cohesive unit since. My synapses and neurons don't want to work together. They're throwing pens and balls of paper at each other from across my brain. I have been Internet addicted, unable to engage in my hobbies, unable to enjoy art, or create it, unable to read books or play games or watch movies, unable to connect with nature. I feel like something fractured in 03/2020 and I lost some core piece of who I am that I just can't remember. I can't recall what it was or what it looked like or what it did. Was there a point in which I could? In which I held it in my hand, tangible and solid?
But. Then I think back, and remember my life as it really was, not as I'm nostalgic for. From my first year of college all the way to childhood. I wasn't happy even before, was I? I just wasn't tapped into the same spring as everyone else. I was always disconnected. I was always wanting.
My god, I have never been happy. When I realized that it just hurt. I've never experienced true comfort. I've never been truly at ease. Not in any ontological sense. I've never been happy -- I've experienced joy, but I have never had an existence I could call a happy one, even for short lengths of time. I've never been at peace. Even as a very young child I had some kind of gaping emptiness inside me that I could feel but not verbalize. Even as a child I was restless, aching for something I couldn't put into words, but even then knew I could never have... have, or find, or get to, or be. Even on a purely conceptual I never knew what it was, and I never will. When I was 7 or 8 I called it "lonely feeling." It was the only way I could describe this cavernous hollowness inside me. I think I was born with a piece of me missing. Some fundamental piece that everyone else seems to have that makes them a real being.
How do you deal with this knowledge? How do you pursue the future without the certainty you will ever be a whole person? How do you continue on without the drive in you to pursue the future? How do I go on, knowing that no matter what they say, no, not everyone finds it, not everyone settles, not everyone coheres into a being before their body's time is up... that some people really do die regretful and craving, hungry, after an unsatisfying life of wasted labor? And that you aren't special... that you're probably more likely than not to be one of those people if you've managed to go 22 years so far without a single place you've ever felt comfortable calling home, a single person you've ever felt comfortable calling love, or a single being you've ever felt comfortable calling you?
Was I born with a curse?
But. Then I think back, and remember my life as it really was, not as I'm nostalgic for. From my first year of college all the way to childhood. I wasn't happy even before, was I? I just wasn't tapped into the same spring as everyone else. I was always disconnected. I was always wanting.
My god, I have never been happy. When I realized that it just hurt. I've never experienced true comfort. I've never been truly at ease. Not in any ontological sense. I've never been happy -- I've experienced joy, but I have never had an existence I could call a happy one, even for short lengths of time. I've never been at peace. Even as a very young child I had some kind of gaping emptiness inside me that I could feel but not verbalize. Even as a child I was restless, aching for something I couldn't put into words, but even then knew I could never have... have, or find, or get to, or be. Even on a purely conceptual I never knew what it was, and I never will. When I was 7 or 8 I called it "lonely feeling." It was the only way I could describe this cavernous hollowness inside me. I think I was born with a piece of me missing. Some fundamental piece that everyone else seems to have that makes them a real being.
How do you deal with this knowledge? How do you pursue the future without the certainty you will ever be a whole person? How do you continue on without the drive in you to pursue the future? How do I go on, knowing that no matter what they say, no, not everyone finds it, not everyone settles, not everyone coheres into a being before their body's time is up... that some people really do die regretful and craving, hungry, after an unsatisfying life of wasted labor? And that you aren't special... that you're probably more likely than not to be one of those people if you've managed to go 22 years so far without a single place you've ever felt comfortable calling home, a single person you've ever felt comfortable calling love, or a single being you've ever felt comfortable calling you?
Was I born with a curse?
