Living with myself 

To be human

I urge myself to embrace my human nature, no matter how much I dislike it or find it illogical or painful.  

In a cubicle

My claustrophobia is not of elevators or toilets, it is of the cubicle, controlled and observed, fueled by anxiety and fear.

Cliché

Here comes the cliché I won't apologize for - in pain, a greater beauty emerges. Not because after the rain comes the rainbow, no. There are some places where the rain doesn't stop and rainbows, after all, are quite rare. And not because the rain itself is the beauty, no. The rain is chilling and you get unpleasantly wet. But because rain turns everything into a mirror and the world around flashes back at you, stronger and clearer than ever. And that world is beautiful. 

On pain and hurting

Sometimes pain gets so strong that it feels like it's not you who is hurting. Those short moments, those little escape routes are, sadly, very short. I wish I knew how to sustain them. Maybe then I wouldn't hurt so much. Honestly, this is a short version of "on pain and hurting," but there is a reason for my briefness. Pain is hard to put on words. It is crippling and bending and breaking. Pain is alienating, distracting, and short-sighted. Pain is wordless and loud. It is repetitive and each time unique. It's mixed with hope, strangely. Hope that someday the pain will end and the long-promised rainbow will appear. Then, that hope is ripped out of your chest by a fear that it will never get better. But, ultimately, pain is as fleeting and as intangible as happiness. It will dissolve in time. What replaces pain, however, is times and times worse. It is emptiness. And in this emptiness, a coin is tossed - meaning or depression. The result of the coin toss, is, of course, not final, but it takes guts and effort to change. I have once managed to changed. Too bad that as soon as a new rule was about to prosper the empire crashed. With stakes so high, it is weird to have chance decide. This is another gambling round. Are the odds in my favor?     

The only moral

I don't like morals. I don't want to follow many of them. I do have one moral. Do not harm or hurt. But as a human, I do. Hurting someone is a strange feeling - it is a ghost of pain. You feel no pain, but you are haunted by the pain of the other. It hurts and, like any ghost, it is scary.  

Existentialism as a privilege

In the modern world, we are told to pursue our dreams. In existentialism, we are told that we, as humans, are free to be whatever we want to be - existence precedes essence. We make our essence. With the exhilarating freedom on our hands we are, however now, faced with anxiety. But this is the topic for another time. Here we ask if this mindset of freedom to choose a privilege rather than morality to follow.

In contrast to religion, not everyone has a social status enough to be an existentialist. Believing in God and praying is essentially available for most people - poor and rich. Making choices that lead to the ultimate life that we want is not always an option. Setting aside extreme cases such as homelessness, being kept as a hostage and lack of escape from social norms caused by the law, we can look into a more common case - lack of money. Choices, even when believed not to be inherently "right" and "wrong", have consequences - mixes of randomness, probability, sheer dumb luck. However, the odds can often be influenced by the social and financial status of a person. Money is a part of the equation unless a persons' ultimate goals have a complete detachment of the materialistic world (even then this physical needs like food and shelter play a role). Thus, for some, losing money is more debilitating than for others. Not everyone can afford to start a new job, not everyone can afford to pursue the education of their dreams, not everyone can build a family they want. With this in mind, I take the responsibility to call bs on the modern ideas of freedom. But does this have anything to do with existentialism? 

And here, in my opinion, is the difference between the modern idea of "pursue yourself and follow your heart" and existentialism. Existentialism exists as long as there is a choice (again, excluding the extreme cases). Modern self-realization idea, however, exists only in the scope of those that can afford it.    

Another consideration for existentialism would be luck. Is it the privilege of the lucky? But that is for another post.         

Morals

Once upon a time, there was a boy. He felt many feelings, mostly quick and intangible, but there was one feeling that followed him around - confliction. He was like many others stuck between his culture, his religion, his household's believes, his friends' decisions, books he read, TV shows he watched and many other wells where he could possibly find teachings on the right and wrong. Strangely, wherever he went, he was told that he was wrong in one way or another - never quite as good to be considered worthy of heaven and never quite as sinful to be discarded to hell. So he traveled this disquiet seas hoping to one day find peace and sail in the calm waters. Time went by and the storm didn't die. He sat on the deck every day polishing his thinking to be once the "good". He dreamt to be a protagonist of his own story but it was as if he was the even witch who ruined everything instead. As he sat on the deck, the waves flushed him and soaked him until he shivered. He was never going to be quite right. One day he drowned. It was just a day before he would have realized that there was no "right" and "wrong". Poor boy. Lost his life to fitting into tight morals of the others fabricated like low-quality socks. But one can only wear so many socks at once. Even better, one can wear his own socks.     
Lenses

I don't drink much. But quite often I feel drunk on life. I feel like throwing my head back and engulfing the universe like a black hole. I want the world to transcend me, I want the world to exist through me, which, frankly, is true for each of us. For me, the world exists through my lenses, whether I like them or not, I need to carry around my lenses in my arms like a baby wrapped in a blanket for them not to fall. And when they fall, I need to build new ones - there is no sand or UV in the surrealistic world of my own, I cannot just buy the lenses (actually, I can but they would ultimately be fake) so I need to build them from scratch, I need to invest them. I need to breathe life into them before I can look at life through them. It's tough building new lenses but necessary every once in a while, cause, ultimately, no lenses are invincible and the strong wind of change can shatter any glass. I am awed by those who manage to carry single lenses all through life, but I also pity them if the price is to conceal them from the harsh winds just to preserve some glass.

On fear

I often think of fear. Like in a pseudo-intellectual conversation, I ask myself "What is it that I fear the most?" I finally got an idea of it recently. I fear of depression. Thinking back on Harry Potter, the boggart meant to show fear and dementor - depression, I think my boggart might be dementor after all (coincidentally or not just like Harry Potter). I am scared, I admit, of this debilitating, soul-sucking state that a depressive episode brings. It is loss of control, hope and, eventually, choice that terrifies me, along with the numb nauseous pain and darkness. There is no light switch, no door, only windows outside, where I see a grinning face of mine from before, that I eventually consider embarrassing foolishness. Trapped in myself, I diminish piece by piece, every single happiness fleeing out if reach. This, this is what scared me the most - to lose myself to the grim illusions that my mind creates or pinpoints from the sea of beauty and love. I hope I can hold on to my patronus.

No questions asked

When the depressive episode slowly begins crawling in, it is as if a million questions suddenly receive different answers from yesterday.   

Deteriorating

It isn't instant, the change in the mood. You feel it gradually deteriorate until you are too far to change it back. 


My story of bipolar

I have felt my gut turning over and over. The computer screen seemed brighter than usual. The words became blurry. "I can relate," was the only thing I could think. I was reading an article on mood disorder trying, for the hundredth time, to balance between self-diagnosis and figuring out what was wrong. I closed the page. "No, it can't be true. I must be overreacting."

Was that the end of it? Definitely no. 

 

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