Self-Pity Be Damned!

For 2 days I have been unable to do anything. Literally, anything. I have watched tv or stared blankly into space. Occasionally started to cry but have not been able to maintain interest in even that. When I did bother to think it was pathetic and pitiful thoughts. Often thinking of what my life "should have been" and of all of the great and exciting lives of other people. People I grew up with. People who went to better colleges, or pursued their dreams ACTIVELY, people who APPEAR to be living the life of their dreams. And me? I stay in my hermitage, wasting all of this time. Unable to get myself to leave the house, to study, to look at this amazing city I live in - I let myself feel overwhelmed because I believe that not a thing will get done because I cannot get myself to do it and thus all of the projects which loom over me - the real deadlines will not be met. When I start do something I just slip back into the void of nothing that has become me. I am sick of it.

Kyle thinks that things like facebook have been a bad influence - in part because in this state of pathetic self-pity I am not reflective on the goodness of life, the good fortunate of others or how we each carve out our own lives and destinies. How dreams change and how part of growing up is knowing that plans are never set in stone but move and grow and alter. Instead they are about my seeming failures and how behind I feel, how I let my dreams die - and not recently but many years ago. How I went to a less respectable university than I had dreamed of, how I did not pursue writing, how I go to a graduate school that provide a good education (with most all of my classes) but is nonetheless not noteworthy in and of itself. And I mean this in the bigger flashy sense. The sense that does not REALLY matter except in my green mind of random and childish jealousy. How I compare my responses to things in class and feel aware of their inadequacies when I listen to the intelligent responses of others. Even when they are things I have done professionally and others haven't - how much better theirs sound. It feels disappointing. It feels pathetic.

And so I beat myself up and briefly whine to Kyle and I mope. That and this god awful depression that I let own me. I do, I allow it ownership in my life. And I am sick of it. Sick of it all. I complain that I am so unsuccessful and have done nothing noteworthy. Which is an insult to those I love and to anything I have done. It says, "this life, you who are in my life - not good enough." Which I don't feel at all. I have put myself in the cave and can only see the shadows and I have chained myself to this view - I have mistaken appearance for reality and let myself stop living.

This is a life not worth observing - that is not the life I have been given. Not the life I have been blessed with. It is the shadows I have embraced and the untruth I have make truth. And it has to stop.