March 2012
“How are you? Fine, and you? It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we’re terrified that someone will actually break down and tell us. Everyone I know is in some kind of pain. Everyone. How do you like them apples? And so, another reason to lie, because we’ve all agreed not to tell the truth to each other, not about that.”
—Journal, Day Three: Weakness, Truth, Swearing, Precision, More Lies, and the Social Contract by Richard Siken (x)
“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
—Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.”
—Ferdinand von Schrubentaufft (via thingsiwannaknow)
“It’s a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.”
—Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street (via tikerion)
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books;which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”
—John Green (via larmoyante)
“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”
—Adrienne Rich, feminist poet and essayist. (via blankpagesandinvisibleink)
This guy is taking words out of my life and making it good advice.
Why It’s A Bad Idea To Run Away From Your Problems? Ryan O’ Connell.
“I mean unsafe in a vaguer sense. Like I would walk home alone from a bar on a Saturday night and get the overwhelming fear that I could just disappear, like I could just vanish and no one would even think to look for me. This anxiety stemmed from the fact that I felt very lonely and isolated at the time. I was experiencing detachment from most of my friends, so I would just go off the grid for a few days and become a total frosted flake. It was a vicious cycle. I would feel alienated, so then I would alienate myself and feel even more alone…
In the story of my life, I had casted New York [home] as the villain, as some sort of abusive lover who represented everything bad that was happening in my life. The thought of returning made my bones tremble. I was convinced that by staying in California, I was keeping the monster at bay. It’s not me, It’s New York [just my home and family]!
Except, of course, that wasn’t true at all. And here I was, a few months later, going back to California [To College] for a month under the guise of figuring my stuff out again. I believed that this time the sunshine and beach and being with my family would act as some magical cure and shake off these feelings I had been grappling with for quite some time. California [College alone] would be my salvation.
Do I even need to interject the cliche saying here, the one that ensures doom when one runs away from your problems? “Wherever you go, there you are!” It’s trite but true. Put a beach in front of me and I’ll just be feeling the same terrible things. Sad with a beach. Changing my locale only demonstrated that my issues were something a plane ticket couldn’t solve. I was supposed to know this already. I was supposed to know that running away wouldn’t fix anything and, in a way, I was aware that it was fruitless. I just didn’t want to make the changes that were necessary in order for me to be happy. I was enjoying my downfall, deriving some sick pleasure from the misery that I had grown accustomed to. It feels good to run sometimes. It feels good to be broken. This is something no one is supposed to tell you. We’re supposed to always want to better ourselves. It’s human nature to strive for excellence. But that’s not entirely true. You can experience true comfort in destroying yourself. It’s exciting to see how far you’re willing to go. It’s like playing a game of chicken with yourself. When is it going to stop?
I knew I didn’t have another escape in me and, as it turns out, running away from your life is expensive and exhausting. “
So here I am, I’ve thought that coming to college away from home, taking a different path from those at home and that would be the solution. But it isn’t. In a different form, I’ve just managed to create a new life that is equally suffocating that I cannot live in. I’ve blamed the city, blamed the people, blamed the circumstances. But, I guess we always knew where the blame should lie even before we open our mouths to make the excuses.
“We can’t blame something on a lack of self-awareness. We’re all aware, which makes it that much harder when we see ourselves making the same mistakes. We often wonder why we do the things we do. But we already know why. Knowing and doing are two different things though.”
—Ryan O’Connell, How to become the person you want to be.
“You’re missing something. You’re watching everything pass you by and it’s making you anxious but you’re not quite sure how to catch up. A small part of you doesn’t even want to catch up. You’ve become comfortable in your complacency, comfortable in your own mistakes. Your slip ups have become some kind of solace. They’re yours to keep. Flaws have become some sick substitute for a relationship and you take them to bed with you.”
— Ryan O’Connell, How to become the person you want to be.
?
It is true, as it has been brought to my attention, that beyond my newly diagnosed depression I didn’t know how else or in any other form did I exist anymore.
I’ve been obsessed with being a good patient, eating my meds at clockwork, reading medical papers and novels about depressions. I liked that my not regularly taking meds years ago formed a highly plausible reason for my relapse. It HAD to be because of that, that I shouldn’t have stopped medicating. And not because of anything else I did nor anything I am.
I had wanted this medical diagnosis to be the solution to my problems. The meds have to get me well, they need to get me out of this head and ever-darkness. They had to solve everything. I must be depressed not because this is who I am..
But then, what’s left? I don’t know who I am beyond this madness. Do I even exist beyond it? Or is it all of me? There has been no present for me, which I seemed to have been wasting. I barely exist in the objective world since I spend all of my time trapped in the screams of my mind.
“In the city of my mind, it’s always night and raining. The windscreen wipers are at work all the time. And this goes on forever, and I live there.”
—
“I realize there’s something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they’re experts at letting things go.”
—Jeffrey McDaniel (via fleurishes)
