And on

The emotional and mental fatigue I have been waiting for has finally settled in. It feels strangely unfamiliar, heavy, as if the lifting of stress has left in its wake a stream of leaden, gross, misshapen weights littered across my psyche for me to lift up, too, and throw into the misty confusion that surrounds me. I have begun a spring cleaning of the soul, and am desperately unaware of how to rid myself of the dirty insidious suspicion that I will never finish cleaning. What taints me is distrust, anger, an unsparing cynicism about the future, as if optimism, hope, and calm will never quite exist in the same way again.

At the same time, I am distinctly aware that my usual optimism has vaporized and left me to wallow in whatever nihilistic sludge and swamps I have inhabited before. Not entirely nihilistic, no—that is quite impossible—but a stark departure from the cadre of beliefs I have so carefully cultivated over the course of my short intellectual life. Perhaps it is not so much a departure as the sudden vaporized disappearance of a few of those core beliefs.

One of those was the (ultimately baseless and arbitrarily chosen) belief that humans are innately good. Humans are complex, confusing creatures for whom ethical lines are blurry and sometimes difficult to see. This allows us to harm one another without overt evil intention, and to justify actions that were originally intended with overt evil. It is annoying to navigate a grey world where actions are not classifiable into black and white sections, to be generous to the complexity of humankind and the diversity of human feeling, human thought, and human condition. How exhausting to assimilate all the beliefs and experiences of others that might impact their behavior—and yet I feel no other stronger moral obligation but to grant my fellow brother or sister at least this.

[This is where you, dear reader, can infer which humans I am talking about who are evil, and how I feel compelled to empathize where I have not been empathized with. See previous entry.]

Sometimes I feel as if I am an almost-criminal, a delinquent that is merely repressed into the disguise of a proper person. I have been mistreated so often and hurtfully that I understand—I really do, I think I do—part of what drives harmful behavior. I have felt the intense and overwhelming desire to hurt another person, and in an attempt to ignore my own self-revulsion at this thought, the desire to simply cut off the vein of my emotions from flowing at all, a depressive apathy so deep it runs into psychopathy. (A feeling, if you can call psychopathy that, I experienced most deeply on a badly designed antidepressant in high school.)

How can I rid myself of this self-hatred? I can hardly reconcile myself with these feelings before being so overwhelmed by shame and guilt. No one can judge me for thinking these things—until I act upon them—except myself, the harshest judge (historically) of them all. If I cannot believe in my own capacity to be good and to act with good intentions, how can I believe in anyone else’s? (And here you see the twistedness of holding yourself to the highest standards, because it implies that most others are failing your standards, too. See every entry I’ve ever written about eating and body image.) I suppose the answer, derived from years-long knowledge of how psychotherapy works, is probably to accept the honest truth for what it is, without self-criticism and with total understanding of why it is okay to feel the way I do.

Is it? Is it really okay to feel so much anger and loathing? Having been on the receiving end of so much built up anger, anger that is self-generated, or societally pressured, or circumstantially borne, I find this an astonishing conclusion. That is, having spent most of my life convinced that harming others out of one’s own pain is the vilest way to deal with pain at all—this is hard to accept. I know that accepting my feelings does not tacitly accept harmful action, but it feels so dangerously close that I am afraid to feel at all.

I guess what I am doing is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) all on my lonesome, oddy-knocky self. It is easier to do with someone holding your hand. Writing can sometimes bring a crushing loneliness that makes it difficult to see clearly.

Please don’t leave me alone. I have never experienced such a gripping fear of loneliness as I have in the past few months.