My Current Perceptions

I am in a state of malaise and wish to express my current feelings and perceptions of things. That is all I intend to do within this post. It has no quality, no aim, and no point aside from the communication of my self as of writing.

All is illusory. This is not a good thing nor a bad thing, as those predicates too are illusory. Indeed language too is illusory. As such this post is illusory and all that it attempts at is illusory. I attempted to write such a post as this many times, but these reductive thoughts stamped out what little desire I had to write, stepped on them and beat them until bloody and bruised. Thus, for now, I’ll bracket off these sentiments as best I can.

As is written in Ecclesiastes, all is also vanity, as all is filled with emotion which is necessarily self-affirming. Every single action is filled with emotional content, whether we realize it or not. Seeing someone, they might well be a stranger, seeing yourself, tasting food, witnessing beauty – all such things elicit a response in us that we are not aware of, as it is part of what it is to experience that thing. We, consequently, live in what I can only call an emotional simulation, a play in which our roles are in part determined by feelings and emotions. Without them, all is illusory.

Given that I’ve said all is illusory, one might assume that I at the moment lack emotion and, indeed, I do. When one considers friends and family they typically feel a dull, abstract warmth. Indeed, right now, I feel nothing. My family, in a very real and literal sense, feels alien to me. When I watch movies with aliens in them, I typically get what I’d call a feeling of uncanniness – that the aliens are doing something we as humans do, but that something is simply odd about it. It is familiar and yet distant – alien. This is how my family feels. If I look at past pictures of myself, the same feeling is evoked. It’s as if that body in that picture is not me, but someone else. Of course it isn’t actually someone else, I’d be absurdly psychotic if I believed that. No, something is just missing. I don’t know what it is or how it is, but it simply is not. I’d say “emotion” but that’s not quite right – I can still laugh and feel “happy.” And yet, something isn’t there. A piece of me isn’t here.

It’s like I’ve stepped into someone else’s life, like the person that’s talking to you right now isn’t “me.” I don’t know who I am, but I might as well be no one. And I cannot stress enough that I don’t mean this in a depressive manner; rather, I simply feel empty. Again, not in a depressive manner, but in a manner which speaks only to a thing’s being devoid of content – empty in a denotative, not a connotative, sense. I feel like a shell of a person, a husk, a set of references which have no core substance, an empty set.

Indeed, the world feels the same. Thus, all is illusory. Without a distinct feeling of self, all affirmations of self, that is, all affirmations of the denotative (“emotional”) content of the self are equally worthless and alien. We are only animals, and nothing more. How could we be more? I’ve negated the self, that on which we ground human differentiation from the rest of the animal world. We are animals practicing kin relations and power structures grounded in our vanity. All we are is our vanity, and there is nothing more than vanity. The whole of life is, thus, a sham.

Of course, all of this is crap. Vanity is what makes life meaningful and self is what makes man great. I can tell you that, but I don’t feel it. The denotative emotional content which constitutes the self and which can affirm that statement wholly is simply not there. It is all of this that I was speaking of when I mentioned the collapse of reality in my last post. Indeed, when you no longer feel like a person and everything around you seems fake, collapse is all you have. That, and eyes which struggle to see the screen through which they read, and a head which pounds as a constrictive pressure wraps around the skull. It is misery.

My Much-Awaited Release

For the past several months, as I’ve iterated in previous posts, I’ve been experiencing what many would classify as depression or anxiety. In addition to this, I’ve been experiencing issues with constant headaches, my balance, and my sight. After a string of doctor’s appointments, a CT scan was performed, and it was found that the inside of my nose is bent to the side (called a deviated septum, a rather common condition which can be surgically cured), preventing mucus from draining out of my head. The resulting condition, called chronic rhinitis, has caused a severe mucus buildup, resulting on pressure on the back of my eyes and the front of my brain.

And it was, for the first time, yesterday that I finally felt release from the prison of the pain there-caused, the prison that has held my mind captive. I don’t know what precisely brought it on, or how, or why, but again, in waves of warmth that seemed to penetrate me until my extremities, I recovered that piece of myself that’d been missing, and I felt again what it truly is to be alive. Indeed, it was as though, for a moment, my head had come up out of a pool of absurdity and I, my mind gasping for the air of reality, could breathe once more.

I was reminded of my grandmother’s pasta sauce, my driving lessons with my tutor, my mother’s lullabies, my sister’s television shows, my father’s stories, and my aunt’s chidings. Oh my god! I cry as I write, for the feelings and emotions and experiences associated with those memories for the first time in months finally felt real again! Lord! Christ almighty! I cannot wish the hell of forgetting the feelings of the world, of those you love, of all that there is, on anyone! Not even the worst among us deserve to feel as though reality had collapsed upon them.

And, in those moments, I finally felt like a man again. I felt like me. I stopped feeling like a husk of a person, a robot, a tinker-toy, a piece of material moved only as though it were in a simulation! My vision, for several hours, finally became clear again! I could see clearly again! What it is to be meant something! What it is to be me meant something. It did not matter what that something was, for it was reality, truth, de rerum natura. I didn’t need to explain it, understand it, or do anything with it in any way, as it simply was.

I remembered my interests in politics, in music, in philosophy, in semantics, in religion, in what it is to be in this world. I remembered, and indeed I felt, that all of that was meaningful and worthwhile because it, in truth, is all there is. For too long had I forgotten what it was to be, for too long had I forgotten what it was to know, to want, to desire, and for too long had the abyss of emptiness, the pressure at the forefront of my head pushed down on me, and battered my bones until all my body and soul were tender to the touch.

Of course, none of this was out of the blue. I saw an acupuncturist yesterday and I believe that it was because of his work that I managed to feel somewhat whole again (though why this precisely seemed to assist my headache is beyond me). Unfortunately, that part of me has left once more, and my vision issues and headache have returned. I’m going to be seeing this acupuncturist again within the next few days. I have an appointment scheduled with a standard Ear Nose and Throat doctor; however, it will be another 2 weeks until I’m able to see him.