Detached
Image taken on 1/25/14, the day before this incident.
Snow covered the ground, and once again the green lights shined upon me as I went to sit on the cold bench. I sat there for a good hour or so, just mourning the death of my positive-thinking mind. I didn't know what to do to make my life better again, when I would be motivated to do my work, pursue a dream, and wake up with something to look forward to in the day. I was lonely, and I wasn't willing to blatantly search for someone that would want to talk to me, console me, or truly be someone to look over me all the time. That would just kill the purpose of it all. I could find no one in the people I knew anyway.
I stared across at the yellow eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg to know that God was still watching me. I still remembered what someone told me at church: "You're not feeling this way because God is distant, but because God is nearer than ever, because He cares." I wept. I wept and I wept — tears inundated and flowed down my face. I cried because of the sad and pathetic life I've been living all my life. I never was really close to Him, read my Bible, or truly devoted everything. Instead I went about on my own, sinning and sinning, and now I suffer the consequences. I was sorry for all of it.
I slowly stop crying and look up at the feverishly pink and red night sky. I begin to become frustrated. I see that no one came to see how much I am suffering, how many tears I've shed, and what I've been going through. The cold begins to grow upon me, and my hands and feet start to feel the frigid clench. My entire body is freezing and shivering at this point, and the only things to warm me are the salty tears that flow from my hopeless eyes. I grow desperate and I dream that someone would come and rescue me, take care of me, and change my life forever. But it is once again only a dream, and still no one comes.
It is midnight now. I start to pace around upon the snow-covered ground. I then come upon the umbrage of a dead, leafless and lifeless tree and lean on there. I don't want to go home. I don't want to fucking go back home, to know that all this is in vain, as all I did was, where I would go back to my old, pitiful, lamentable life. But I have to. I have no where else to go.
I walk awfully slow home, still hungry, freezing, and thirsty, but I don't give a shit as the cold-darkness wind continues to blow across my face. When I make it there, I walk straight into my bedroom and close the lights. Who the fuck cares about all this anyway. It's my motherfucking fault in the end. I can't get anyone that really cares because I make myself think that no one gives a shit. Fuck me and fuck my life. Screw what people think! Screw what I think! I'm just a sentimental bastard that no one even cares about, and everything is in vain and is futile! This doesn't make sense. I don't make sense. Nothing makes sense. My life is a paradox. I don't care about those stupid midterms tomorrow, I could fail both of them for all I care now. I don't need to study. I don't need to eat. My life is pathetic. I fucking screw up everything, even the relationship with the girl I love. It always turns into this supposedly "awkward" inconsiderate bullshit that I wrought for my own agony. I didn't pursue God, Christ, read my Bible, associate myself with those at church — no — I'm lost amongst them indeed because I'm a damn complex, self-deprecating, and miserable problem for everyone, my teachers, my friends, my brother, my parents, for all the people that I've known, and for my God — my Savior. I'm not like everyone else at my church who just accepts and goes about and has miracles in their life. Not me, never. The measure of my sin and misery was only building up and measuring to a greater and greater degree of hopelessness and shame. Then what did I live for? Why should I even wake up tomorrow? For a faint sliver of hope, slowly growing grotesque upon a disheartening horizon of sunrise? No, it's only a storm of God's wrath brewing in the distance. Because I care so much about a stupid midterm that I'm expected to do, and I would make myself ten times as depressed and sad if I skipped them. I'm lost in an ocean of despair getting deeper and deeper with not one to show remorse, but only an angry God staring down at me as I grow thirstier and thirstier for truth, for change. It only gets worse when I think how insignificant I am to anyone, just alone, forlorn, and bereft of any dignity or true life. Here I am! Stranded in my own savage, brutal despondency! For no fucking reason. My life is perfectly fine in many people's eyes and it's only me —- only my true pitiful self ruining it all for me. Doesn't make sense, yet still it's all my fault. I start to laugh to myself in the dark and scoff at people. I think about all the people that will bullshit the exam tomorrow anyway including myself and I muse at their and my own misery to come. They can all go fuck themselves anyway, pretentious insensitive dumbasses. Fuck me, too.
It was at that point I realized how much of a cold, apathetic, angry, and terrible person I've become. I cried even more at this realization. This wasn't the person I've wanted to become. What about love? What about my dream to help others? What about those that care so much about me? I wept because I didn't want to become this person — for people to see that a warm, helping person could fall into such despair and distress. I cried to God, but still the disheartening thought of tomorrow brought me once again into despair, and I went to sleep depressed and once again without hope. Hopeless without Christ. Unable to sense Him near, by my side. So there I was indeed, completely detached from the world, as I wanted to be in the auroras, though in a way I never expected.
I wrote this for the autobiography I was assigned to write for my English class during my Junior year in high school. It recounts the events of the momentous evening of January 26th, 2014, a day that would encapsulate the most emotionally traumatic epoch in my life. It was the first time I was truly denuded of all pretensions, all the vanity and strife, confronting the world naked and unafraid.
But while it was the first time, it was far from being the only time in my life where I would be compelled towards a sense of desperation. Truthfully, nothing improved after that point. In fact, it only got worse. As the tension of that desperation petered out over time, I once again wore those pretensions as I continued on with my life, only to fall back into disillusionment, realizing that I was consigned to the same inane cycle, the same tireless ebb and flow of my capricious emotions. As the years passed, I would only drift further and further away from God and the church, become increasingly disenchanted by the vapidity and inconsequential slog of school and my day-to-day life, and continue to falter and tear apart other existing friendships and potential relationships as I fecklessly wandered the wastelands that were the remainder of high school and college life. It was only in 2018 when I began working that I was able to begin mending the relationship with my past and recalibrating my outlook on life and what it means to be happy and fulfilled.
I will admit—reading the passage above hurts. Even though it’s been years since I’ve come to terms with that phase of my life, I am still able to viscerally empathize with the fevered angst and emotional unrest, the dread of constantly having to confront a daunting and seemingly insuperable pessimism, and the disconsolate hopelessness of my old self.
To put it curtly, it reminded me just how fucking terrible life can be. Some thoughts can drive you to the brink of insanity—
The seemingly insurmountable difficulties of life—these are tyrants that oppress the mind, that weigh down our soul, that make us question our very desire to continue on,
the seemingly irredeemable, incorrigible personalities that occupy our societies—these are vicious, barbarous predators that ravage our joy, devour our hope, and mutilate our dreams
incessantly gripped by the insipid distractions, the evanescent pleasures, and nonsensical minutiae of daily life, yet haplessly eluded by truth and purpose,
our once-trusted instincts, our once-irrefutable conceptions of the world suddenly eviscerated by the relentless, crushing grip of realization,
when you’ve spent your entire life hearing everyone touting values of fairness and equality, but the reality of life is bereft of such, instead pervaded by broken or empty promises,
we become mired in a dizzying, erratic vacillation between purported absolutes and apparent truths, tossed between capricious waves of good and of evil, of love and of hate, of happiness and of despair, of conviction and of ambivalence, of pride and of shame, of significance and of vapidity, of the revelatory and of the banal, of passion and of apathy, of faith and of doubt, of temerity and of regret, of hope and of disillusionment, of purpose and of purposelessness,
we are left stranded and alone, shivering in the cold, trembling in the darkness, begging on our knees to simply be freed, to be liberated from the psychological chains of this oppressive existence, but all we do is helplessly drag ourselves along, amidst an ever-graying, ever-decaying, anemic, featureless, indifferent yet incomprehensible world,
when our thoughts and words don’t come out the way we want them to, when we don’t feel the way we want to feel, when we just want someone to understand, but there is no one to understand,
when everything just stops making sense,
and when we have nothing and no one left to blame, but ourselves,
we realize it’d probably be better—if it all just ended.
One thing struck me—the more that I read, the more I came to realize that there is something about my past self that has persisted up until this very present moment. It is this feeling of detachment—this act of just letting go. In that moment of acute, unceasing despair that disintegrated every modicum of hope that lingered in my mind, I found freedom. I found freedom because in that moment, I came to terms with death.
That is to say, I suddenly became at peace with the thought of dying—this uncanny, strangely peaceful notion of all this suffering and agony being wrested from my life, as if it were the inexorable pull of a black hole. It’s not that I’ve ever seriously entertained thoughts of suicide; it would only be my last resort. My thought is, if I would end it all for myself, I would have to truly lose everything. It meant that I would have to lose that aforementioned freedom—the capacity to exhaust every single viable option in my life to be happy or to find meaning. Fortunately, I never truly lost that freedom, and thus I never lost my life, either. It was only years later—after becoming a linchpin at work, after making countless friends and valuable memories along the way, after proving my past self wrong by becoming a person that I was proud to be—that I learned to translate that stoicism in relation to death to a certain kind of fearlessness. It was part of a gradual, yet stark realization that I’ve simply had enough of it; if no one—myself included—was forcing me to partake in the chaos and the nonsense, then I wouldn’t.
In part, it is recognizing how so many things are not as life-or-death as we make it seem. Even if the surly lizard brain resists and balks at my decision to do something ostensibly risky—I can learn to quell my impulses, to eschew the cultural conditioning that has failed me time and time again. Because very rarely is something that we decide to do, especially in the insulated, privileged societies we live in, a life-or-death matter. It merely takes a moment of detachment—to recall the abject misery and hapless desperation with which I once lived and how it ruthlessly consumed me, how that abysmal bout of suffering dragged me down to the depths where hope ceased to exist, and yet it was the same place freedom abounded. It is to extricate myself from the obsequiousness and passivity that I once wandered around with amid this unjust, absurd world, instead deciding to find my own path upward from the abyss. In the end, it is merely an exhaustion of the apparent options to live a life I’m proud to live, and if it doesn’t pan out as expected, then so be it. If the absurdity ceases to exist, and I cease to exist, so be it. I started with nothing, and I can end with nothing.
I had originally intended to write my own profound conclusion for this reflection—one that ended up sharing thoughts and feelings incredibly close to my heart—as an exhortation for both myself and you, the reader. But while reading these two excerpts from the beginning and ending of Book 3 in Meditations last night, I was brought to tears, because Marcus Aurelius concludes the matter far better than I ever could:
“Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less of it is left, but this too: if we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If your mind starts to wander, we’ll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most out of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it’s time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for… all those are gone.
So we need to hurry.
Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there…
If others don’t acknowledge it—this life lived with simplicity, humility, cheerfulness—he doesn’t resent them for it, and isn’t deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book 3:1, Book 3:16)
