too young for this kind of mental deterioration
5/5/05, letter to jared (exerpt)
**It's interesting the way traveling intensifies the feeling of an
ungrounded emptiness in the quiet moments but serves to be distracting
in a very fulfilling way as a whole.
As for your discussion of phases, I suppose it might be more
comfortable to see these phases as a haze surrounding some particular
function of self. It isn't really any outside entity hurling these
things at you. It's like we have said before- happiness is barely a
product of surroundings. Your subconscious deals with your over acute
sense of pain in all sorts of ways. Each new attempt is probably what
qualifies as a "phase." These phases are probably easy to repeat
because you get comfortable with your problems. My problem isn't that
I am incapable of accepting my immortality- it is that I have an
anxiety disorder.
Really, though, aren't they one in the same? Our
problems cannot be entirely chemical because we have given chemical
solvents an incredibly fair shot. I think our main problem is our
inability to dig through the symptoms and recognize the actual
disease. It is said that people never chose to lament problems they
cannot resolve. It is said that people chose to focus on problems that
make them feel powerful and grounded in understanding but provide a
constant struggle with which one can distract herself from her real
turmoil. I wonder about the merit of hypnotherapy…
Perhaps we know more of ourselves than we are willing to recognize
and we are trying so hard to avoid said recognition that we are forced
to manifest irrelevant problems in our lives. Who are these people
that we allow to degrade and hurt us? Certainly not people who know us
well enough to make any real conclusion about our worth.
Maybe what is really truly degrading is the way we have chosen so carefully what to
give them in order to make them love us and they are unmoved. What
could be more defeating? It isn't too horrifying to think that someone
should really truly understand you and have distaste for you. Or,
maybe it is, but not in the same way that it is for someone to oppose
to you when they have the wrong impression of you entirely. I am not
sure that being misunderstood isn't the most frustrating and
debilitating thing in existence...**
GRAPHOMANIA!!
I miss Milan Kundera.
**It's interesting the way traveling intensifies the feeling of an
ungrounded emptiness in the quiet moments but serves to be distracting
in a very fulfilling way as a whole.
As for your discussion of phases, I suppose it might be more
comfortable to see these phases as a haze surrounding some particular
function of self. It isn't really any outside entity hurling these
things at you. It's like we have said before- happiness is barely a
product of surroundings. Your subconscious deals with your over acute
sense of pain in all sorts of ways. Each new attempt is probably what
qualifies as a "phase." These phases are probably easy to repeat
because you get comfortable with your problems. My problem isn't that
I am incapable of accepting my immortality- it is that I have an
anxiety disorder.
Really, though, aren't they one in the same? Our
problems cannot be entirely chemical because we have given chemical
solvents an incredibly fair shot. I think our main problem is our
inability to dig through the symptoms and recognize the actual
disease. It is said that people never chose to lament problems they
cannot resolve. It is said that people chose to focus on problems that
make them feel powerful and grounded in understanding but provide a
constant struggle with which one can distract herself from her real
turmoil. I wonder about the merit of hypnotherapy…
Perhaps we know more of ourselves than we are willing to recognize
and we are trying so hard to avoid said recognition that we are forced
to manifest irrelevant problems in our lives. Who are these people
that we allow to degrade and hurt us? Certainly not people who know us
well enough to make any real conclusion about our worth.
Maybe what is really truly degrading is the way we have chosen so carefully what to
give them in order to make them love us and they are unmoved. What
could be more defeating? It isn't too horrifying to think that someone
should really truly understand you and have distaste for you. Or,
maybe it is, but not in the same way that it is for someone to oppose
to you when they have the wrong impression of you entirely. I am not
sure that being misunderstood isn't the most frustrating and
debilitating thing in existence...**
GRAPHOMANIA!!
I miss Milan Kundera.