From the department of cosmic head-thwaps

[vvvexation]

Aaaaand a few minutes after my last post, I check my friends list and find a post forcing me to delve into the reasons I haven't been journaling in considerably more detail. Someone had written: "I find myself writing less lately because I feel as though I'm not getting much of a response or that people just don't care about what I have to say. Have any of you experienced this problem?" So, of course, I was obliged to respond, in part:

I write partly for myself and partly for my friends, but the basic problem is similar; I've been feeling less motivated to write for myself but also feeling that no one will be interested in what I write, and oddly enough the two feelings seem to be so closely linked that I have trouble telling them apart. I think that's because when I write for myself I think of my future self reading what I write in the same way that I would think of my friends reading it, and right now I keep thinking both of those hypothetical audiences won't care.

I further realized, though I didn't add, that this in turn is part of the dangerous trend toward solipsism and even nihilism that my brain has been taking lately: I don't feel like I or anyone else oughta care about things because nothing really matters in the grand scheme of things anyway. This isn't stopping me from getting work done or making long-term plans (no, plenty of other things are stopping me from doing that, as always), but it does have some rather eerie feelings associated with it--like having a hard time believing any of my friends really exist whenever I'm alone, and having a hard time believing any of the things I remember ever really happened.

This is actually getting scary of late. I've always (or at least since I was a teenager) had brief flashes of this mental state from time to time, but it's never been so pervasive or long-lasting as it is now. I'm worried that it's gotten permanently etched into my brain chemistry or something. I want to change it but I have no idea how. Frankly, if I were a suicidally inclined sort of person, I think this might push me over the edge if it didn't improve in another year or two.

(Let me hasten to state now that I never have inclined that way. I think that's due to luck more than anything else, but I'm glad of it--and if that fact ever changes, I will certainly tell people. I'm not sure what there is to be scared of, psychologically, if I'm not scared of that--but somehow I'm still scared.)

Comments

[adamchristopher.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's like, since nothing really matters, may as well just enjoy each moment to the best of your ability. That's the other side of that realization. It seems gloomy, but it's really just a signal to fully participate in each instant of life. Each breath, fully and deeply experienced, leads you back to the truth. And the truth is, that breath in that moment, fully experienced, is the one thing that actually does matter, because all of life is contained in one breath. That's what I'm seeing anyway.