Being and Doing Better
Note - This gets introspective and personal, involves discussions of/references to mental health, addiction, and self-harm
I don't know where this one ends. I hardly know where it starts, even. I know where I am right now – The basement of my parents' house, where I've stayed this past weekend, dogsitting as they vacation in South Florida. It is a Sunday, it is just past noon on a Sunday, the second day of February. I have just completed what felt in the moment like one of the worst full weeks I've experienced in years due to a combination of interpersonal heartbreak and illness. I am dissatisfied, congested, and reduced to a frustrating, but ultimately healing sort of pragmatism into which I retreat during times like these.
I haven't turned cynical, moreso maudlin. I'm glad that I undergo private crying jags listening to old albums instead of sneering and laughing at myself for ever yearning in the first place like I once did. After all, a line in one of those old albums states: “Hopefulness is tantamount to hopelessness.” I couldn't feel this low if I didn't know how it felt to be so high at some point. From this proverbial rock bottom I can see everything above me, identify each handhold and foothold for the climb back up.
When I returned home to Kansas from Canada in 2022, I shifted the question I'd ask myself in these states from “Why is it this way?” to “What do I do to change it from being this way?” The answers to the first question haven't really changed ever since I first started dealing with my mental health back in 2017, but they vary in how charitably I interpret them. Back then, it was lovesickness, abandonment, disenchantment, and purposelessness, each of which I attributed to a central, unshakeable inadequacy at my core.
I was simply an essential, soul-deep fuckup, some cursed eunuch, here only to shamble blindly, wasting resources and time from birth to death. Something was wrong with me, as if my existence was some cosmic mistake. This interpretation was intoxicating: It made me feel special, unique, like a martyr. It provided me with a simple, all-encompassing answer to the 'why' question. It also absolved me of any responsibility for making it better. If fate or god or the universe had truly doomed me, then I mattered enough to be treated specially by them and there was no point to risking more disappointment by continuing to try.
I felt the abandonment problems dissolve when I left Lawrence in 2018, complicated when it was my turn to understand what my friends from college felt when they left. When I left a place without malice, I was able to understand that they had left without it. The abandonment I'd felt during the summer prior cracked the self-significance which had convinced me that I was a powerful enough magnetic force to keep people I cared about near me in perpetuity, and making the move myself cracked the self-significance which convinced me that I was a powerful enough repellent force to push a person to uproot their lives in efforts to needle me, specifically.
I only first cracked at the sense of purposelessness once I started tutoring and teaching in San Diego. This was the first time in which I could put my efforts towards something that extended outward. I had spent so much of youth afraid of responsibility and cynical about leadership, and it left me hedonistic. Finally, though, I could see my efforts and skills bear fruit. I would see students become more adept in writing, then more adept in speaking, then more confident in the way that approached the world around them. It was a small sort of help that I could provide, a matter of planting seeds in the garden and placing bricks in the wall, but it built up over time. I find purpose through service to others through my work and in my life outside of it.
That leaves the heartsickness and dissatisfaction for today. The experience of handling, or at least re-framing the other two, helped me to shift my perspective on these two. I've yearned for romantic love the most of anything and have yet to find it. I've tried to think of it differently, to redefine love away from romantic companionship and spousal commitment into something else, something I can control through the way that I choose to interpret life, but it's all self-protection. I cannot self-will my way out of heartsickness, it requires the equal efforts of another person. This is, unfortunately, just going to hurt until we find one another, and if we never do, then I will hurt eternally. I can still live a long, valuable life fighting through the pain.
I am so thoroughly overcome with love for humanity and do as much as I can to give it indiscriminately. I've received an overwhelming amount of it in return and feel only gratitude for it. Yet, I know I will never be genuinely happy on my own like this. I try hard not to ruminate over why we haven't found one another yet and try even harder not to fret over whether we one day will. I only try to have myself ready and deserving in the event that we do.
This leaves us to the dissatisfaction. This is the hardest of these factors to define, both as a whole and by its component symptoms. It's also the most volatile, as I know that I live through moments of immense satisfaction, of joy, of euphoria, even. I cannot deny that there is also a dissatisfying undercurrent that creeps into the foreground at disparate moments each day. When I take stock of these shifting moments of joy, contentment, and dissatisfaction, I find an inverse relationship between the quality of the moment and presence of the internet in that moment.
Outside of the tutorial teleconferences that I get to hold in my work, I constantly find myself frustrated with what I interact with online. I keep returning to it with the expectation that I will find myself sated, informed, or enlightened by it, but it mostly brings me tedium and annoyance. Yet, I return to it absentmindedly throughout the day, like forcing a series of dry pumps in a futile effort to coax the last drops out of an empty lotion bottle. I know that there was something there for me online at one point, but it's thoroughly overshadowed by so much useless detritus now.
I've tried the methods for finding online intrigue that I've seen and I don't care for them. I join Discord servers, supposedly for the 2020s what the webforum was for the 2000s, only to find myself annoyed by their very nature, every entry so unmoored from history, so many commenters gleefully disinterested in striving for anything better than the surface level, and a cycle of arguments hashed and re-hashed on a daily basis with no potential or desire for closure. I've been on Bluesky for over a year now, and I've seen it turn from a platform for recovering Twitter addicts attempting to wean off of the old stuff into a platform for recovering addicts who quit the site cold turkey back in November and have done their best to relive the halcyon days of Twitter in early 2022, only without the casual users who kept the waters moving or the villains from the opposite ideological side that let the power users rack up little wins through quote-tweeting and reply-flooding. It's a miserable, cynical space, and I feel myself slipping back into the same addictive tendencies I had with my old Twitter, under the same pretense of staying informed and getting my work out that I used as justification for not abandoning it years ago. I can tell that I log on there because I know it'll make me feel unhappy, because that feels more “real” than bog-standard pleasance does, which of course reflects my perverted sense of self-worth. I've come to terms with the knowledge that this is self-harm, it continues the illogic that I used to justify physically cutting as a teenager, but I owe it to myself to stop doing it.
It's one of my greatest shames: I've spent so much time exacerbating my unhealthy social media habits under the guise of using it to 'share my work,' all the while taking time and attention away from the work itself as I try to create it, leaving me equally unhappy and unproductive.
Unlike with my heartsickness, I can fix this aspect of my life through effort. I can develop a healthier relationship with the internet, even if that means eschewing it outside of the bare minimum of what I need from it. Speaking frankly, I would love to live a life bereft of screens. That's not possible, I know, and the more that I pick at the idea, I remember that I genuinely enjoy video and photo editing on my computer, I read the work of so many phenomenal writers on the web, and I feel fulfilled by the work that I do using a computer. I need to interrogate it more than I have, ask myself if the lies that this addict tells himself are creeping back in. Because there is a life that is better than this. I have striven for it before, I have tasted it before, and I will do so again.