Where do I start? What do I do? I feel like I have idled away the most productive years of my life, chasing after unimportant things, fleeting emotional releases, and unfulfilling relationships. I am done holding circumstances outside of my sphere of influence responsible. I am done putting the onus of my present on missed opportunities of the past. Even as the threads of reality and hopelessness form a knot to pull me further into the despair of my own design, I realize I cannot feasibly, in my right mind, attempt to go Dutch on the reverberations of my imminent purgatory.
This eventual realization puts me in a predictable perplexity, that I have nothing left to blame but myself. The realization came riding upon the back of an agonizing internal tussle between rationality and an easy cop-out. That was uncharted territory, that was extremely uncomfortable, that felt like a part of an excavation site that proved promising, but certain challenges delayed any direct action and now it stands tall, formidable, beguiling, daring to be messed with, prod, dissected. Am I ready for it though? Surely, I could think of a detour to spend a few days on, delay this exercise on self-reflection. It’s not that hard to redirect focus and energy; we have, after all, boundless resources that simply floats in to fill the void, a cesspit of daily purges to replace some previous rigamarole, multiple online forums that are solely cultivated as an outlet for secondary rage. It’s all too complex, yet very simple. There is no scope for personal headspace even if you are alone. Everything is a matter of choice, only the range of choices has far exceeded our attention span and it is so easy to keep sprinting into the abyss, without interruption, without active awareness. In a way that is vastly systemic, we lose touch with ourselves a little each day. And while I might want to consider myself miles away from rock bottom, my dwindling willpower, my apparent fickleness, and uneven temperament stand directly against that argument.
So how does rock bottom feel? Is there some sort of signal that alerts ahead of the eventful touchdown at this dreaded place? My imagination is very colorful, albeit in a dark twisted way; the imagery it conjures is quite remarkable, sometimes undeviating from the literal. I “see” rock bottom as a suffocating room with exposed mossy brick walls that turns out to be a maze on closer inspection. Or a rocky seabed that radiates a calm inviting atmosphere but has hidden tentacles ready to grab onto an unsuspecting victim. Basically, it’s a gambit. You know how they say “When you hit rock bottom, the only way to go is up”, that’s a well-constructed lie masquerading as a pick-me-up since time immemorial. Turns out rock bottom has way too many tricks up its sleeves purposely calculated to keep you there, or at least till you forget you were swimming up for air. In a move that screams Freudian, there seems to be little desire on my part to overcome that maze. Whoever made up that quote failed to envision a lateral move, the movie where an eternal cynic could possibly make rock bottom their comfort zone. I have been at rock bottom for as far as I could remember. It’s not always dark until the dark descends, almost always at the wrong time at the wrong place, not that there is a right time or the right place. I would be in the middle of a rather delightful conversation with a group of friends and suddenly be jolted into what seems like an alternate dimension. It is difficult to verbalize, but a sepia tone slowly envelopes the room, swallowing its walls, the lights, chairs, people and my real self would be floating inches away, watching the entire tinted scene as some voyeur. Figuratively speaking. Physically, it would begin with a minor twitch behind my ears, followed by heat and redness creeping over my skin. There would be a demeanor shift that largely goes unnoticed- a respite. It has been a while since I have managed to mask the subtle change in mannerisms within my distorted environment, but there are times when the overwhelm spills out.
A lot of it, to an uninitiated eye, feels like making excuses. It’s true, these are excuses when it is not the norm to be anything other than perfectly pleasant when you are among other humans. Your baggage is yours to manage, privately. Making excuses also looks like neglect, in the most deconstructed, emblematic sense. The sun hasn’t risen in days, the rain is relentless, the sky is closing in, the dull hasn’t cleared up, the blanket feels heavy, so how can I move a muscle? How do I lift these heavy eyelids when my plants are slumping and the dust is settling? I worry for these dreary, grey watery days, and what it would mean for me trying to hold on to the frayed ends of dwindling optimism. Gasp!
Perhaps I’ll have to learn to love myself. But where do I start?
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