epiphanies

My answer:
I don’t get the why-to-keep-on-thing, but I currently live in the ‘gods, I do nothing in the world’ phase… I am not sure I consider myself in the world enough to ponder why I stay in the world…

 

Point blank: My worlds have always been more: more colorful, more creative, more inviting… than the outer world…

That makes it hard to ever get to the daily things I need to do in my life, like doctor’s appointments and contacting help organizations….

The worlds in my head have always been more captivating than most of the outer world. That is part of why I latch on so strongly to people that pique my curiosity and draw me out of my head. It is a rare moment for me. In this space, I get to thinking that I must be autistic.

I know what it means to suggest it. I am not making light of the condition or labelling it as a trend-of-the-day.

When I withdraw in the middle of exchanges, it is more subtle. I will end the conversation enough to move on, or I will turn sour and argumentative.

I feel so much inside of me, all these labels and conditions and disorders. And yet, I don’t think I am extreme enough to be diagnosed. I feel them all. At work last week, I offered that my ADD doesn’t interfere so much with my job, because my OCD cancels out most of it. Funny, yes, but also accurate in a sense.

Most of the distraction I normally fight is resolved at work because I am so focused on learning new skills, namely my machine and book-binding. When coworkers gather around me too much, I still lose focus… I have to fight it or tell them to shove off and chat somewhere else…

Back to my response to the question:
I am not sure I consider myself in the world enough to ponder why I stay in the world…

I think I mean this. I live more in my own world than the one that surrounds me. This makes contemplation of the ‘why-am-I-here’ ilk more difficult. I don’t think i really am here most days. I have sporadic moments of the it’s-a-wonderful-life phenomenon: i ponder what if the world would be different if I had never been. The last major one was shortly after chemotherapy…

But I think that is more a curiosity exercise than anything prompted by depression.

I haven’t had any suicidal thoughts since nineteen years of age. It was an ugly year for me, what with fighting my parents for what I wanted to study in college and coming out and all. A big year. Once I got the point that offing myself did little but pile my shit onto the shoulders of the folks for whom I care deeply, I was pretty good in that department.

This statement opens things for me. That one philosophy class back in college pushes all those theories of existence up to the surface in it. Descartes never really left my brain, even though I never fully got the class. I wonder how much I doubt my own existence… the outer world, too. That one is more from my stubborn nature. I want to believe such a wicked place is a nightmare from which I can awake.

I understand the danger in that. To see the world as imagined is to dismiss its evil instead of fighting to dissolve it. It makes me delusional instead of an agent of healing and growth. All that said, my mind is more real than anything else.

Lately, I have been fighting the sense of accomplishing nothing in my life. I don’t believe it so much as occasionally define accomplishments based on others instead of my own terms. Not good, I know.

I am exactly where my life as led me, which is the only place I can ever be.