| 18 mar 2002 *sigh* it's all about detachment. these past few days, i've slowly detached myself from pretty much everything (which isn't much to begin with) that i care about. e-mails have slowly been piling up, and now my inbox has 40 or so messages i need to reply to. i haven't wanted to write in my journal, either. but today is the first day that i woke up feeling normal. for the past week and a half, getting out of bed has been the single hardest thing to do. i would wake up, stare at the spackled ceiling, and count all the reasons why there was no need for me to get up... ever. after i finally sat up and put on my clothes, my head would start spinning, my heart would start pounding, and i'd wind up sitting on the toilet with my head in my hands. and thus would begin the painful desolate journey through each day. but today, i woke up from a dream about the oregon ducks and how well their athletic season has been going, from their #2 football team to their basketball team that has reached the sweet 16, and for whatever reason, that made me feel good. these good moods have been few and far between. the only other notable moment was friday afternoon, when i drove back from paul's house to pick up some mail. on the way back, the clouds suddenly parted, the sun started shining, and i was listening to saint etienne's "he's on the phone." and for a few minutes, i actually thought that life was good. but other than that, life has been pretty much a microcosm of hell. my mood usually falls into two camps. either i'm so depressed that i can't remember why life is worth living, or i'm so anxious that i feel like my heart is going to explode and tear its way out of my ribcage. the first half an hour of so after getting up has usually been spent sitting in the living room and staring at the wall in front of me. i'm sitting in jay's room, using his windows based computer to type this out. like i said before, apparently this pagebuilder applet doesn't run on OS X. sadness. right in front of me is a copy of the palo alto daily, opened to the classifieds section, with jay's highlights of possible places that he's going to move to in a few months. even though i don't see him much, it comforts me to know that he's my roommate. i guess his energy makes me feel peaceful for whatever reason. and come to think of it, i don't think i've ever seen him down or angry since i've known him. these past days have been such a blur of an anguished existence that i really don't have much to report. i swear, life has never been such a chore. even though i'm up for less than 12 hours a day, every single fucking minute of it has been such a grind; it got to the point where i would sometimes close my eyes, and ask myself if i wanted to keep going on. the worst part is that i would even do it when i was with my friends. friday afternoon, alan flew in from san diego, and we met up with jay at the nordstrom's at stanford shopping center. that was the day of the proposed iMac party, but tuesday i cancelled it because i didn't think there was any way i would be fit to host an event. but the three of us decided to go through with a small gathering anyway, and the first step was to buy almost six pounds of this black slab of meat called fred's steak. it was almost $50 pounds of meat. crazy stuff. so that night, we had a barbecue at my place. the eight of us (jeremy, jack, alan, me, jay, margaret, peter, and mallory) sat around the coffee table and had dinner together. it was probably the best night i've had in the past two weeks. i dunno. this depression is really different from the previous nervous breakdowns i've had. during the other five, the thing for me to do was to just sleep for two days and let my body reset itself. but this time around, being alone is probably the worst thing for me to do, because all i do by myself is fall deeper and deeper into a pit of obssessive thoughts; the key for me now is to get my mind off of those things and to focus on more constructive things. but it's been hard, i guess. i mean, i got to the point where nothing interested me. i mean, that's been a problem of mind for years now, but this time, not even the most basic of pleasures could pique my interest... i didn't enjoy smoking, i didn't enjoy _sportscenter_, e-mail seemed like a chore, and i swear, if jay walked in with an armload of hot, fresh porn, i probably still wouldn't give a shit. yup. you know it's a bad situation when even porn fails to be interesting. i forget what day this was, but on some random afternoon, i started having some weird mood swings. i was watching tv, and certain commercials would trigger tears. crazy! last week, i had a phone conversation with alan, and we got the this point where he asked me what i thought life was about. i said, "getting past problems." !! what? did i really think that? i don't know if it was just my crazy state of mind, but it shocks me to think that i really said that life was mainly about suffering. it seems so _joy luck club_. i'm not sure what keeps me going. it's a harsh statement to make, but it's true. after going through this, i find it oddly curious why people find reasons to stay alive. yes, life is beautiful sometimes. but then again, it can be downright ugly, too. so what makes us choose life? is it simply fear of death? or is it something else? these are really just rhetorical questions. because the answer is most likely "hope." it's probably the closest thing a non-religious person has to faith. hope is foundationless, yet ridiculously powerful. and the craziest thing of all about these past two weeks is that i've actually been to places where hope didn't exist any more. those are dark, dark lands... so andrea yates was that woman who went crazy and drowned her five kids. i read that she was sentenced to life in prison. i find it oddly amusing that i have had experience with two of the four medications she was on. last wednesday, i asked my psychiatrist what type of people visit his place. he said something like, "well, most of the people are PSYCHIATRIC, like you." hm. did he just say that i was loony? maybe i should start eating cocoa puffs. |