21082022

A profound sadness has once again taken hold of me. I know now it’s not simple burnout, but something much worse and unforgiving. 

The past few weeks have felt, simultaneously, interminably long and yet also unbearably short – and nearly every one of those moments in between has been quietly excruciating in retrospect. My days are filled with a constant, languishing weariness. By noon each day, without fail, I find myself completely depleted of any ability to hold compassion or grace for others, least of all myself. And all my nights are even more exhausting, dominated by thoughts of suicide and sharp, painful bouts of paranoia. I used to think that if hell were to really exist, it would be the best day of your life, and the worst day of your life re-experienced so many times that they become indistinguishable from one another in effect. I’m beginning to feel that way again.

It’s not that any one thing in particular has been distinctly bad, to be clear; but admitting that, too, further confounds and frustrates my thoughts. It feels like any progress I may have made in the first few months of this year have been utterly undone, in the sense of an unraveling. Little bits and pieces from everyone, from every direction… all manner of minor misunderstandings and misschedulings and misinterpretations and miscommunications just piling up day after day in a slow but certain metastasis of disappointment and frustration beyond resolution. In every part of my life. 

I have lost my ability to trust others: neither their intentions nor their feelings, least of all in their apparent efforts towards sincerity, which in my confused state feel like, at best, mocking pretence. I no longer trust my own feelings. My heart has betrayed me. I have felt my old inclinations rise within me late at night. In the cramped, stale silence of the afternoons. All of it makes me sick. I get the distinct feeling that, in my efforts to improve myself, I have instead somehow managed to make myself much worse.