The Path Little Traveled

Positive habits:

1. Exercise, particularly running

2. Taking a shower

3. Writing 

4. Reading

5. Making a cup of tea

6. Playing music

7. Listening to music

8. Doing anything that gives purpose and requires conscious focus

9. Listening to a podcast

10. Cleaning

11. Cooking

12. Having a conversation

Negative habits:

1. Binge/emotional eating

2. Too much netflix

OH THE HORROR.

It will be 34 days I must go without my one and only love in my habitational vicinity. What ever will I do? I have decided to journal every day he is gone to express the depths and pangs of my loneliness-- and to keep track of the passage of time, for she is a fearsome monster when reckoned as a force separating me from my beloved. Oh those 34 days, 816 hours, 48,960 minutes, 2,937,600 seconds! To think there is 2 MILLION somethings separating us! How ever can I bare it? But bare it bravely I shall, for it is my burden in life. Thus, my daily records.

Day 1 (July 30)

 Could barely get out of bed. My soul dragged my body deep into the bedsheets to hide and seek solace. Finally I managed to put my feet on the ground after hours agonizing over the weight of what seem like a thousand elephants. I spent the day wasting away. Not even a single word was communicated between me and bb. 

Day 2 (July 31)

In order to try to order hone my skills and attempt greater clarity, I’ve decided to forego, at least occasionally, my rambling posts and try to write about a specific topic rather than whatever pops into mine. I suspect I’ll still be disorganized, but maybe at least a bit less all over the place. For the first one, I’ve chosen the topic of loneliness, relevant as it is to my life. 

  For the past six or so years, I’ve felt an acute desire to not be alone, specifically regards to my romantic status, but also in regards to my social connections. I don’t really remember experiencing this before the age of sixteen or so, although I must have had many a crush.

    I think it was at sixteen that I begin to feel the need to have the experience of a boyfriend or other romantic attachment and because others were beginning to have that, I felt that something was wrong with me. Always a bit of an awkward duckling, I thought the reason I didn’t find boys flocking to know me was because I was extremely unattractive and overweight, although now I know this was entirely untrue. The real reason I think now was my lack of social skills and far too obvious lack of self esteem. I never was the type to go out to talk to people and make friends but instead just expected people to come to me. I can’t imagine that kind of attitude was the most attractive. 

    In my college years, my social skills improved somewhat and I began to take responsibility for my part in failing to form strong social connections, but my self esteem took a nose dive, particularly owing to my recovery from an eating disorder where while I ceased purging, for years I continued the harmful cycles of bingeing and over two years gained around forty pounds. It’s only in the past two or so that I’ve been able to stop gaining weight and now begin to lose it slowly. You can talk yourself silly about how self image is about what is on your insides that count, but it doesn’t change the fact that losing weight, eating properly, and getting in shape has done wonders for my self confidence.

   But back to college, where my self esteem and value of myself was at a near all time low as well as my objective attractiveness. I simply thought I should take what I could get and found my self at best with boyfriends I had no real interest in, and at worse in strangers’ beds feeling the loneliness most acutely. I slept around because I thought no one I liked back would ever date me. At the time I told myself it was because I enjoyed the act and wanted the momentary act, found it exciting, etc. But from where I am now, I’m just sad for my 19 year old self, so desperate for crumbs of intimacy. 

   It took a tole on my mind. I found it deadened and lacking true feeling. My senior semester I contemplated dating two guys just for the heck of it to see if I could get away with it. In the end I was not so far gone that I could go through with it, but the fact I’d stopped searching for a real relationship and searched for experiences instead is sad to me now. It goes hand in hand with my past fixation with depression. I used to find a certain comfort and tragic beauty in it, I didn’t want to live without it, and I felt happier partaking in mind numbing harmful activities than striving for more positive and healthy things. 

    It’s only in my very last relationship I feel that I’ve completely revived my ability to care completely and only for a single person. I’m ashamed to admit it, but at my darkest I felt little attachment or care for people. I once or perhaps twice broke up with one of my boyfriends so I could spend the night with another guy, feeling no guilt about it. At my worst, I all but in name cheated on another boyfriend. I felt no guilt or moral pricking over it although I knew it was wrong. I guess the only thing I can say for myself is that because of my commitment to honesty, I didn’t decide to keep it a secret. 

   But with (we’ll call him) Steve, who I dated for almost five months, I was all in. I fell so hard and fast in love with him, and would still be with him were it not for his own mental struggles. I know now that the only kind of relationship I want his one where I am fully invested and interested in someone, who loves and cares for me equally in return. Because of the pain of my breakup with Steve, I know there have been times where I’ve been tempted to go back, I’ve been tempted to return to my unhealthy ways, but I’m determined not to allow myself to numb up. 

   I guess this has been a roundabout way to talk about loneliness. It’s really more about the ways in which I attempted to wrong headedly combat loneliness. Before Steve, I always was on the search to instantly fill the hole of intimacy in my with whatever was easy. But now, although it is indubitably hard very often, I’m not so anxious to fill it with whatever happens to be around. Steve was and is such a special and wonderful person, I can’t imagine going back to something which is not nearly as satisfying. 

 Writing is such a fearful process for me. On one hand, it helps me order my thoughts, forcing myself to put into explicit unbending words the swirls and graffiti in my brain. I must force myself to produce actual thought instead of merely absorbing the madhouse of information, stimulation, sounds, sights, smells vying for attention. All too easily I’ve become a sponge sans any real meritous output coming from myself. I don’t know if I could call it my worst fear, but I think it would be so awful to live a life like that, never giving agency to yourself but simply being blown about on the trail of anything which allows you to shut your brain off and simply experience without producing.

  To go even further, it may even be possible that to outsiders, I could possess the hallmarks of living a fruitful and productive life. Perhaps I am marginally successful in my career, coasting on the efforts and tedious work I put in and my parents instilled in me as a kid, but with insides just rotting away, until only a shell remains. 

   As has happened before, I had the stark realization that I was unconsciously avoiding writing summaries of my experience in Europe in favor checking social media, reading posts on reddit about the latest podcast, listening to the latest podcast, anything that would prevent me from any actual doing. 

   I once knew a guy. He was from Barbados, attended college in the US on an athletic scholarship and very nice, friendly, well adjusted. He graduated college and began his career as a journalist. He worked the requisite forty hours a week I suppose, participated in an ultimate frisbee club, and occasionally went out on the weekends. But when he wasn’t doing these things, he was always at home, watching Netflix. On his weekends, the whole day. That was his life. 

  I work two jobs, I’m very good at what I do, and I look very successful to people, partly because I am, particularly for my age and place in life. But I could be doing so much more. How many of my hours are spent frittering away the time doing nothing of productive value on the internet, contemplating naps, watching mindless tv shows. How little time I spend exercising any brain power.

  I’ve started exercising regularly. This has positively affected my life tremendously, but it is an output of the physical, not the mental. While my body has hardened and is turning into an efficient machine, my mind has grown flabby over the years and lacks the same tone. I know I can turn this around because years ago, I almost exclusively used my mind, I never knew what it was to let it lie fallow. 

 What are the steps I took to allow it to degenerate to this state?

It most certainly coincides with my depression, which began in earnest the summer before my senior year of high school. My self esteem had sunk to such a low level, and I chose to rebel by locking myself in my bathroom, cutting my thighs, bingeing thousands of calories of junk food, listening to whatever alternative emo band I could find on grooveshark at the moment.

  Or perhaps the depression followed on the hills of me allowing my brain to degenerate. As I think of it now, it was perhaps a few years sooner I had taken to devouring the internet into the late hours of the morning or again, even locking myself into my bathroom to watch all the dvds in our family’s collection, especially the ones I had not been allowed to watch as a kid, or in the ones I had been allowed to watch, combing for the scenes in which my mom had covered my eyes over for or my dad had fast forwarded. Consuming media had become a lifestyle for me, it enabled me to shut off my mind to the much deeper and darker fears and anxieties which had begun to take root in me and when pondered on, tended to cause extreme distress.

   This post has become something entirely different from what I intended when I first began it. Actually, I wanted to contemplate the nature of art as a career and the extent of its ability to make a positive difference in the world. Is it merely an egotistical and decadent pursuit for the marginal pleasure of those too fat and materialistic to fix their energy on matters of substance? And particularly, is the pursuit as a career of higher art particularly egregious? Afterall, it has been designed TO be the purview exclusively of those wealthy enough to pay for. Undoubtedly, various efforts to bring art to struggling communities has affected positive change, but it’s highly unlikely for these communities that they will achieve a high level of skill at their respective arts, or at least the work of an artist immutably geared towards excellence in their craft would be interminably boring almost all the time. Even as I wrote those words, I realize a certain level of arrogance inherent in them. Obviously I have not expressed myself perfectly and am not inclined to further elaborate right now.    In any case, it is sobering to see the horrors that go on in the world and then wonder if your life’s work is doing anything to stop these horrors, or at least to provide solace. Of course, all artists I know will be quick to parry with the stock answers of how art encourages empathy, how it makes life livable, how it makes it beautiful, etc etc. But does it really do anything substantive for the very most oppressed members of the world, those who therefore have most need of it? They are the ones to which it is least accessible.

  Secondly, and somewhat differently, to come back to my fears of writing, it’s always an interesting relationship for me. While I enjoy the idea of expressing my thoughts in word form, I feel that somehow, unless I am working toward eventually publishing my thoughts for the world, to great acclaim of course, it is somehow unfruitful or useless. Why should I spend hours committing word to page if no one will ever read it? I must work to achieve adequate acceptance with the fact that I likely will never be a published author.

Yellow is the color of dandelions and daffodils

The color of sun splashed over a meadow

Golden wheat stalks rippling as one

A bee humming at work

My lover’s world

Green is the color of grass and trees

The color of spring and new life

Leaves that clothe a tree in lavish array

An emerald mined from the earth’s depths

My lover’s strong limbs and mind

Brown is the color of tree bark and wood

The color of tree trunks bringing water to the leaves

The dirt which nourishes nature

Coffee beans crushed to fine dust

My love’s skin