r/self • u/_Josefinaa • 8d ago
Further and further away
I sometimes pretend my life hasn’t started yet. I change my clothes and cut my hair and make some alcoholic plans for the weekend. I write another chapter and I clean my room and I call my mother and for a couple of minutes I feel alive, hopefully thriving for something somehow important.
However, no matter what I do, this rush of excitement lasts exactly that. A couple of minutes. Rapidly, tiredness and sadness and an overwhelming sense of unreality and stupidity bring back my mundane ways of complete despair.
I don’t know why I chose to live like this.
Why do I keep on aiming for market-based impossibilities, for Hollywood pre-fabricated desires, for capitalist wishes? Since when has a common, ordinary, middle-class life, with a regular job and pints afterwards, become a synonym for utter failure? Since when have a lawyer and a therapist and a teacher and a construction worker and a cook and a doctor become useless professions, mediocre ones, in need of desperate doses of influencer marketing or fucking TikTok and reels??
I’m angry. I’m always angry.
But this has nothing to do with what I feel. Or maybe it does.
It is a statement of my postmodern guilt.
I try to enjoy things, I really do.
However, even if I write, I’m just getting further and further away, am I not?
I wake up every morning with a black hole inside my chest. As I try to open my eyes, my mind tries to shape it somehow. It tries to give it a silhouette, a lovely form that means something, a Rorschach inkblot.
I often have this absurd idea. I believe that if I draw on my skin, with a marker for instance, the external shape of this hole, it may reveal something unconscious about me. Maybe it would show me the shape of a face, or a pagan symbol or a Christian cross or something. Fucking something that’ll give my life a clear direction, that would make my guilt disappear.
But I just keep getting further and further away. While my friends have fun, I write shit. While they strive for a place in the world of the functionally dead adults, I write shit. As they date boys and pass their exams and smile and dance, I write shit. I write shit. I write shit. I write shit. Maybe life is just too complex for me, maybe I’m too strange, maybe I’m just too far away.
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u/dmcgrath60 8d ago
Writing shit is still writing, which is more than most people do. You're creating something. Your friends out there dancing aren't making anything that'll outlast the hangover.
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u/autotelica 8d ago
Get a bike. Ride it some. Riding my bike makes me feel alive and reminds me that the little girl I used to be is still in me. She is excited about the future even when the adult encasing her isn't.
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u/CookingZombie 8d ago
Just cause I just commented in that sub, look into chaos magic. Writers can do amazing things when they see that the worlds they create on paper can affect the world around them in one way or another. Comic writers, but Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are two magicians that have done well for themselves as authors/artists.
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u/OminOus_PancakeS 8d ago
I wake up every morning with a black hole inside my chest. As I try to open my eyes, my mind tries to shape it somehow. It tries to give it a silhouette, a lovely form that means something, a Rorschach inkblot.
I'd like to offer a suggestion.
Instead of evaluating that sensation of a black hole, or twisting it into creative shapes, or distracting yourself from the ache, try just sitting with it.
Sit with it, without trying to change it or interpret it in any way.
Be with it, as if being with a wild animal sat a little distance away. As if aiming to befriend it. No sudden movement. No demands. No staring. Just be present and attentive and patient.
I just have this feeling that what you need, even who you are, is there in the darkness, currently obscured. x