The days drift by in both agonizing slowness, and with bewildering speed. My waking life seems one long stretch of empty corridors, while the past recedes in piles of lost years. The mind is a maze without end, furious piles of stares and locked windows painted black, and jammed doors that must be forced and only open onto more stairs and frantic nests of empty rooms.
I can't escape from it. When I'm alone, I'm lonesome. Around people, I'm practically paralyzed in the fear of making social faux pas. Or else I dare to make a fool of myself, only to end up regretting it.
I'm disappointed every day I wake up. By noon I feel totally reborn and powerful, ready to take on the world in all its challenges and ring every drop from life. By 3:30 PM the crushing weight is back.
If everything is doomed to death then life itself is an absurdity. Anything can be done because we're free from consequences. This logic works in the world of fantasy, but not in the world of flesh and blood. Adventures are filled with mostly waiting. The worker is the victim of a vampire, whether he knows it or not. The difference is that the ignorant one isn't aware of his pain. The worker who can feel his blood being drained but is powerless to stop it is at a much worse place.
Unless he can find a way to rebel, and stay there. Or otherwise weaken the vampire's grasp.
I don't know how to do that. I tried living without a house, traveling the country. I tried making friends and building something. Each endeavor burns and crashes with no satisfying resolution.
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Upon writing all this out I can even devise arguments against each and every statement. I've grown and developed into a totally different person in the few years I've been on the road. I've learned social skills, I've developed a form of self-esteem, I've destroyed and replaced just about every barricade to my development. I've learned to survive on nothing, how to manage money, how to let go of painful emotions.
The insidious power of depression is that it makes you forget the times you weren't depressed. It never leaves, though. It's always waiting around the corner, to catch you alone. I need a bell and a hammer to crash away it's intrusions. Maybe that's what art & writing is for. Just clench and squeeze and fuck out all the words, all the feelings, all the terror and useless crap and wad it all up and burn it.
There's a fine balance to be struck between effort and no effort. If you push too hard or try to force it the whole thing stops up. This goes for everything. If you let your eyes kind of cross and loosen your grip a bit and steer intuitively, using your peripherals to guide you, it becomes easier.
You have to push gently.
My lungs hurt.
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The biggest predicament is that I struggle with what it means to feel. I want to be able to feel with my whole body, to know deep in my bones a resonating vibration. I want to smile uncontrollably, to laugh until it hurts, to have my skin crawl, a cool breeze on a warm evening to bristle my hair. I want fear to strike like a bolt from the blue. I want icy chills, and grumbles, and triumphs, and passion, and fervor, and humility, and idolatry. I want to be stunned senseless, struck speechless, enraptured, nurtured. I want the world to be real, to affect me as I effect it.
How do I find feeling? Inside me there is only cold dull grey static, loud as the pounding of the ocean, that drives away life. There is a bruised and swollen ache which isn't so much a feeling as a smothering voidness. I can feel the lack of feeling, a clenching in my guts, the sinking of my shoulders, an ache in my neck, the shortness of my breath. I can feel my body full of cysts and tumors, my spirit malignant and infected, my soul shriveled and fearful. I can awaken to the feeling of an exposed insect in the bright light of god's damning gaze.
The nerves are dead.
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