Exhaustion is a strange creature, one I have come to tolerate far more than one should tolerate a being with the sole purpose of slowly smothering one in apathy and bleak acceptance. It is vicious in the way it gnaws at the core of oneself, tearing up every scrap of strength one musters from uneasy rest, stealing all the quiet moments one stole oneself from racing thoughts. It is a battalion that batters at ones defences day in and day out till all that is left is the longing of nothingness. Despite this, I’ve tolerated it, embraced it even. Because at least it is a feeling. Some concrete marker of my own failing as a productive member of society. A symptom to treat. Exhaustion makes visible all the things in my life that are not. It is in its own way the catalyst that made me question my sense of self or lack there of.
For a long time, probably from when I first learned about it in my early teens, I have believed in the concept of “kintsugi”. Repairing something broken with gold or silver lacquer to make it more beautiful than before.
For years I’ve thought of myself as a vase that could be endlessly repaired with a bit more lacquer. That each “new” iteration of me would be more than before. Whatever that “more” was in my mind at the time. But then there should also come a time to let go, to thank the object for its service and lay it to rest. Maybe too many repairs and reworks would make a self more akin to a taukumogami, a sentient object, than a new “me”.
Maybe instead of burning my limited resources into remaking something that was already flawed from the start, I should just take its core at its purest level to build something all together new and my own. Wouldn’t it be freeing? To decide on a path you could not conceive for you to begin with? But again, you must remember the exhaustion. When you have already spent every asset you have, how exactly are you to remake yourself?
My spirit yearns to be authentic to me, but I feel as somewhere along the countless recastings and repairs I’ve misplaced “me”. So much so that descriptors I know to be true feel disingenuous or hollow. Whatever voice this vessel carried is lost to the constant need to be “more”. The more i think about this loss of self, as if all my parts have been replaced and I am no longer nothing else but a cheap replica. I find that rather than facing whatever it is that is causing me such existential distress, I would rather hide. Again I am beset by the constant need to isolate, to hide deep in some forgotten forest or mountain range and live the life of a solitary hermit. It finds me every autumn, this feeling. Yet this time it screams to be acknowledged rather than ignored. Its call is beyond my time, my resources or my independence, I cannot heed it as much as I would want. Still it screams for this unrealistic solitude.
As if all this time, instead of a vase, I’ve been but a caterpillar. Instead of layering myself in precious metals, I should layer myself in silks and cocoon. In this sense maybe my exhaustion with all its nagging negative aspects has been pointing at a solution my mind has been too hellbent to consider. Towards the simple fact that I need to rest. That it would be okay for me to dissolve into nondescript gene soup and reform anew with fresh goals and wishes.
I don’t think, despite all these late night revelations, that I am at a point that I could proceed tp cocoon, even if I would benefit from it. After all I have no idea how. For the last seventeen years I’ve had a singular goal of becoming a commercial artist, so realizing that it’s not something I have a healty outlook with is kind of jarring. I still believe art is my dream career and I want to pursue it but maybe I should start by relearning what art means to me. And even before that reinvention, there are a lot of other physical and mental hurdles I need to overcome.
I am a sum of all of my parts but this doesn’t make me consumable or a machine. I have run out of room to grow in my old mindset and ways. In all of this I’ve recovered a shard of a person that has self worth, however how little, and I think that even if I cant be a moth yet, I want to cultivate that shard. For the time being, I am still exhausted. I am forever gold and silver veined from my experiences. Parts of my past selves will live in new forms or in peoples old memories. I am both the vase and the caterpillar and maybe just accepting that for now is enough.
Someday I will be something, but it is okay that that someday is not today and that that something is yet unknown.
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