I’ve always had this weird idea that by finding out the truth behind something, it will somehow make me feel better. Veritas vos liberabit, or, the truth will set you free. It’s from the bible, not a book I often quote, and it’s a phrase used by universities around the world as well as the CIA. If all these folks are saying it then it must be…true? This isn’t a post about objective truth though. That is a rabbit hole of philosophy I don’t have the energy to dive into right now.
What this post is about, is that not everything has an answer, or more accurately, not everything has a satisfactory answer, and ultimately the truth will hardly ever set me free (it may in fact do the opposite). There are rarely definitive meanings for me to find, and if there is something that resembles ‘meaning’ then it won’t make me feel better and it won’t change anything. This of course only applies to life’s bigger questions and challenges, like why someone we love moves away, or why you suddenly stop talking to each other. Even though I sort of know why, vaguely, and understand the wider reasons too, there’s still a compulsion within me to dig into every single tiny aspect, any morsel of a clue as to why. Again, it serves no purpose. Every answer will hurt me, and there’s nothing actionable that I can uncover. I don’t actually want to know, I want to prevent it from happening.
It’s listening to Elliot Smith that sets me off. In one of his songs, a boy asks him about his girlfriend and he says they aren’t together so the boy tells him “Not to worry, [she was] just a shooting star” and in another song he mentions this shooting star again and says “When it was me, I was momentarily proud, drunk on dreams”. I found a shooting star, started to see the world differently, then the star continued on.
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All the words I write are for other people. Who’s writing for me? Is someone out there devoting pages upon pages of words to express how they feel for me? Nope. Well, that’s not quite true. I’ve had at least one song written for me, and some poems, lots of drawings, and some awesome artwork including a small sculpture of my dog and a drawing of a musical hero of mine. I’ve got a collection of thoughtful cards with beautiful words inside. So yes, not quite true, but it still feels like I burn a bit out of sync from other people. I can’t extinguish these flames either, and man have I tried.
I don’t like to say it but I often think I’d rather be an emotionless machine. Life would be so easy if I didn’t have to care. Imagine if I could breakup with someone and just live the next day as though nothing happened. How cool would it be to not care if a client doesn’t agree with the colour I’ve chosen for the secondary part of their palette. If I didn’t care what people thought about me then I could truly be myself, because those are the limitations I put on myself. That’s what the cabin in the woods fantasy is; the isolated log cabin in the forest surrounded by nature. It’s not the cabin itself nor the nature surrounding it, it’s the freedom from other people. Solitude keeps calling to me in the distance, it keeps trying to pull me away from a life filled with other people, other people who have the ability to hurt me. I can exist briefly in moments with them, but moments are fleeting. They come and go. I can’t live in moments. This is what I have to live in, the times outside those moments.
I get scared because I don’t know if I will ever find my freedom. I don’t have financial worries and I likely never will. I have the life I want, it’s the life I wanted as a kid and I actually have it. I know I’m sad about a girl but I’m always sad about a girl. I go on dates and I have a good time. This is something beyond that. This is a cancer and it’s not the sort of illness that just goes away. When I look in the mirror and a voice tells me I don’t deserve to be happy I literally stare back at myself and correct that thinking but it doesn’t make the voice go away. I bash away at these stupid keys on this loud mechanical keyboard until it hurts and then I only stop to feel the relief of not having to type anymore, not for having emptied myself of the things that trouble me. My journal is a complete mess because I write so quickly as I try to get everything out as it comes to me, and you know what? It’s exhausting.
It is so tiring to feel this way all the time. The constant depression and anxiety sap every ounce of energy I have out of my soul. I did a lot of hiking back when I was at school, and towards the final hours of the last day, you feel completely drained and the bag on your back weighs you down as you can hardly lift your feet to reach the end – that’s how it feels daily to live with this shit. Getting out of bed is a colossal effort, and that’s literally the beginning of my day. I try to find things to hold on to but it’s like trying to grab a cloud of gas, always slipping through my fingers.
This unhappiness takes a toll on my body. The hormones released in my anxiety, particularly cortisol and adrenaline, are physically draining me. They are designed to help me get through short term dangers like running from a predator or fighting someone, and they mute my other bodily functions (digestion) whilst heightening others (heart rate). The result is that the days blend into each other, time ceases to exist, and I become merely an apparition floating through space with a mask of who I think Josh is supposed to be, because if I drop the façade for even a second then someone might notice what’s going on underneath and even though I keep a public blog about my feelings, my worst nightmare would be someone thinking I’m anything other than totally fine. I’m far from fine and don’t know which direction to go.