I can't settle. Indecision seems inevitable. Whether I'm contemplating a career or the day's outfit, a name for my blog or a name for my business, I'm wracked by indecisiveness. A wavering, a buzzing, a sense of regret, or a projection of regret. Is it possible to feel regret for decisions we haven't made?
At the center is my self-consciousness. I don't want to be obvious, but I don't want to appear to be trying too hard to be oblique. I want to be authentic, above all, but how can I commit to a self that is constantly in flux?
There is a distrust of identity, in that question. Rooted in my life's quest for a solution to existential angst. A desire to fix what was broken when my brain turned against itself, if we're looking at things from a biological perspective. Which I rarely do, but it's easier than trying to explain trauma in emotional or experiential terms.
Trauma. I don't feel entitled to the word. Technically, medically, even, it applies. But it feels disrespectful to those who have suffered trauma at the hands of another, whereas I was merely the victim of bad brain chemistry, a combination of nature and nurture that will inspire no pity in those who have suffered true hardship.
I was sheltered, provided for, loved, given opportunities in education and emotional development. In other words, I was privileged. So to talk about mental illness as a handicap in any terms other than clinical - well, it's something I've done. Again and again. So what, if, in this moment, I happen to feel conflicted about my self-pity, the seriousness with which I regard my own suffering?
In another frame of mind, another mood, I would chastise myself for minimizing my own pain. Suffering is relative, after all. It is not exclusive to the economically disadvantaged. It's important to validate my experience as difficult, as traumatic, just as it is important to acknowledge that, in terms of trauma, I could have it a lot worse. At least I was privy to resources. If I had to choose between battling demons that exist in my own mind and the horrors of poverty, hunger, abuse or war, I'd choose my fucked-up mind every time.
No matter how deeply I delve into the philosophical meaning of my experience, or how hard I try to quantify, negate, or justify my suffering, I get no closer to comfort or enlightenment (the latter being a euphemism for the former). It's an exercise in futility, one I find pretentious in others. I am embarrassed about my predilections toward melodrama and grandiosity, and even moreso about the position of privilege from which I write about hardship.
This is a diary entry, not an essay. It is a way of approaching the page again, after an absence. It's been too long since I demonstrated any consistency in writing. I fear it. I dread opening my laptop or journal (one of a half dozen notebooks half-filled with intermittent to-do lists, lazy poetry and anxiety-fueled word vomit tied together with hangdog declarations of optimism). But then I read books or listen to podcasts or attend readings by artistic heroes, and I get that old familiar ache of the benched athlete. I've never been a cheerleader. I'm lousy at spectatorship. It fills me with either the sting of envy, the urgency of inspiration, the euphoria of delusional aspirations or the ego's irresistible impulses to destroy ambition. Usually, it's a combination of feelings that is uncomfortable even at its most exhilarating.
There is no cure except the doing. No way to start but by beginning. So this is another beginning, another chink in the armor of that self-sabotaging ego. Or maybe it's just a bunch of gunk that needed purging. Whatever it is, it's done now.
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