I spent the first half of last year in isolation with my family, upon moving back home. It actually wasn’t that bad of a year for me, not entirely - I had an abundance of time to read, write, reflect; it was peaceful yet also somewhat dismal. I wanted to share a few fragments I wrote during that time, because it’s interesting for me to look back at these feelings now that I’m doing relatively better, and I also hope that if you’re going through the same things right now you feel a little less alone.
I can’t seem to stop writing about the loss of the life I was supposed to live. All my life, whenever I was in love, infatuated with someone, or especially when I was heartbroken, it was all I could write about. Obsessively, persistently; it’s like I had to pour whatever I was feeling out into some kind of form with words so I could understand it, analyze it, get over it. Or perhaps I just have a continuous case of tunnel vision when it comes to things that make me feel a lot. In any case, this is a lot like that - it’s all I can write about these days. The lack, the longing, the loss. It’s mostly what I think about; it’s the motif that’s been encasing the entirety of this year. I feel stuck in an extremely narrow region between my past, my teenage years, and the future, whatever it may be - except I can’t seem to see beyond this wall no matter how much I try. It’s terribly opaque. It’s gotten to the point where I’m not even sure if the future really does exist for me. As bleak and melodramatic as it sounds, I just can’t seem to visualize a situation, or a life for myself, that’s better or even different than the one I’m living. At some point you get sick of doing the same things and thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same emotions. At some point some change needs to come barreling into your life to throw you off just a little bit, but it’s ultimately for your own good.
I don’t know what it means to exist. I can’t access the parts of myself that would light up in response to living, to existing. I feel at odds with myself. And with the world. I need to go outside, meet other people, but I don’t know how to. I’ve gotten too used to this. God.
I wanted to write about this because this song that I had listened to on repeat before life had let me down so devastatingly just came on. Back when I still had hope. But I still was waiting back then, waiting for life to start.
When am I not waiting for something? When, when, when?
It feels as if everyone else’s lives - the people around me - are moving at adequate speeds, as if they’re doing and experiencing things that should be done and experienced and I’m stuck, frozen in place, unable to live life in its entirety. Even writing or talking about all this is difficult and harrowing because it forces to really acknowledge this feeling, this lack, this emptiness and this stagnancy, and all my life I have tried to run away from difficult feelings and situations - I feel that is what defines me, that is the root of all my issues and disappointments with life. I run away in the face of adversity, I retreat, I pretend it isn't there. How, I wonder, would my life have turned out if I wasn’t like this, if I had the guts to look life in the eyes, look all my feelings and all this emptiness in the eyes and really see them, know them? This is why I don't like being home, even though the love I have for my family is boundless, home is always - what is it? Perhaps a place that always reminds me of all the past selves I used to be, the past selves that held so much sadness and loneliness that it seeped out of my being into the crevices of this house, into the corners of the walls, everywhere. Can a different self emerge in the same place your old selves carried all the things that brings you pain? How do you create a different life for yourself, create a different self when this home halts you from really changing? I know that I am what stops me from really living, from experiencing life. Me and all my selves. Me and all my anxieties, all my insecurities, all my fears. They overshadow whatever desire I have to break free of this stagnancy. I’m thinking of something Jeanette Winterson once wrote, about life having no continuous narrative:
“There are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.”
I suppose that’s just how it is. Meaningful moments strewn between the banality of it all. Except I want it all to be meaningful, or if not that, I just want more human connections and friendships and love. And love and love and love. All the time, everywhere.
Maybe things will get better and brighter and less murky and more alive.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.
I have to believe that it will.
“Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
From when I was trying to give up a (mild) nicotine addiction:
An exercise in control - that’s what I’ve been trying to do. Trying to ration out my desires, decrease it gradually by increments, try to get rid of the want and longing. Am I talking about love or addiction, and aren’t they fundamentally the same thing when stripped to its base essentials? The withdrawals of both are similar - chest pains, nausea, headaches, thinking about it right after you wake up, thinking about it at all hours of the day, longing, needing, persisting, I want it back I want it back I want it back, I want to devour and consume and have it devour and consume me. Love, want, need. Destruction and self-abasement.
Exercise in control, exercise control; both allude to different things. The former conveying you want to manage or grab hold of something within said control, the latter being defined as “to hold an authoritative or dominating influence over”. There’s something of a gender dichotomy that exists in these two phrases.
From when I got COVID back in May:
I feel untethered from reality, from my body, from my personhood. My sense of smell is completely gone, so null and void that it disturbs me if I think too deeply about it. My sense of taste is skewed as well - it’s there, but it seems to have flipped over itself in that everything I eat tastes a little off, a little wrong. I have realized that when two of your core senses are depleted and disrupted, it’s hard to feel grounded. It’s hard to feel human, and you have a hard time accessing and connecting to your corporeality in a way that makes you attuned to yourself and to the world.
What’s bothering me most about this is the complete inability to smell anything. I’ve experienced mild loss of smell when I’ve had colds before, but never anything like this. This sort of absence feels like there was nothing there to begin with, by which I mean it’s hard to imagine that my nose ever had the power to smell anything at all before this. I don’t know. I think it feels this way because my nose isn’t even blocked anymore, there is no mucus build-up or the usual runny nose, yet I still cannot smell a thing. Something about it feels permanent even though I know it isn’t.
It feels like I’m sat inside an insulated bubble while the rest of the world gets to smell and taste and enjoy life’s extravagances as they please. I feel claustrophobic, somehow, like the overwhelming strangeness and the concerning factors of it all is going to send me into overdrive or propagate some kind of breakdown caused by sensory nullity.
Ultimately, predictably, the amalgamation of all this, paired with the fact that I basically just sleep all day and any chance I get, is making me kind of dissociate and disconnect from myself and from everything around me, physically and conceptually. There is not enough light in my life right now, not enough life in my life right now. There’s also the added misery of lockdown - not that I would’ve left the house anyway, but it was a comfort knowing I could have, even if it was a brief trip to the grocery store. Everything is distorted and dull, like my surroundings had the color seeped out of them, like the saturation has been turned down. I feel like at this point ‘living’ for me consists of merely existing inside my body, giving in to its demands and trying to keep it healthy and working. I am cog in the wheel of my body and of my physiological needs. Beyond that, there is very little, at least right now. I wish my body and my organs were more seamless and less obtrusive to the way I would like to live. Ultimately I just wish my body was stronger, more capable, less prone to collapsing and giving in at the slightest brush with a virus. I wish I could trust my body fully and I wish it did not have so many exigencies, I wish I didn’t have to be so sensitive to literally everything in this world that I can see, touch, smell, feel, hear. I wish things were easier.
Actually, there's a better way to sum up everything I’m feeling: I feel like I don’t have control. Like I’m not in control of anything.
moments of beauty
i wish i could say that every day feels the same for me, that the routine of things is so rigid that it feels mind-numbing. but that’s not it. every day is not the same; in fact, it’s nothing. my days are nothing. i don’t have routines i stick to, i don’t have intricate rituals for each hour of the day, i don’t have any work to do, my health deteriorates every month, my hobbies feel like too much work these days, grueling and unfulfilling. so i just rot. in bed. all hours of the day. i feel non-human, almost, living this way: stripped of any utilitarian purpose or even artistic, creative, abstract purpose of any kind. i guess being stuck in your parents’ house for an indefinite amount of time can do that for you. but i don’t want to reiterate things i’ve incessantly ranted and complained about in my journal. what i want, simply, truthfully, are moments of beauty.
superstore, the show, is undeniably funny and quirky and wacky, but what struck me the most watching its pilot is when amy talks about how every day is the same for her, working long hours in a superstore like she had been for the past fifteen years, and so jonah’s “moments of beauty” shtick does not apply to her life. she feels it is devoid of any light, as do so many of us, as do i, incredibly often. at the end of the episode, as the lights in the store turn off, the ceiling is aglow with hundreds of glow-in-the-dark stars: it is beautiful and breathtaking and luminescent. jonah looks at amy as she looks up to the ceiling, smiling and teary-eyed, and says: “moment of beauty?”. his gift to her was reprieve and light, literally, re: the countless stars. it’s not an escape from her mundane reality, it’s a moment of beauty found inside the very thing she claims to be tired of. so, the moment of beauty: not only the shimmering stars, but also the fact that this guy has done all this for you, that he made such an effort to bring joy and hope into your life, even though you’ve literally just met. the beauty of hope, of possibility, of kindness.
this scene makes my heart ache. above all, it’s just so goddamn sweet.
i don’t know if there’s a point to me writing any of this, but i guess what i’m trying to say is that i want at least one moment of beauty in a week to get me through these hazy, murky, purgatory-like months. i try to seek it out, in my morning coffees and in my balcony and in plants and flowers and rays of sunlight and books and the rain and art, but… i don’t know, really. even the most beautiful things seem commonplace and ordinary when you encounter them often enough. beauty is good in small doses. or is it good only in small doses? i suppose it is, much like a lot else in life.