Random breakdownage
On Tuesday, I think I wrote this as part of a longer entry I didn't finish:
"While doing the all-nighter thing again yesterday and the day before was painful in all sorts of ways, it was encouraging to feel myself really working hard again. When the tension goes out of my attachments in life, everything about me goes slack, like a dropped marionette. But as it was, I felt myself on a slow adrenaline drip right down to the last minutes before midnight deadline."
Just now, while working on building a Gibbs sampler, I was just struck by a wave of self-loathing that has been building, I realize now, for a lot of today.
Here's the gist of my anxiety: There is a part of me which I think is noble and good. It believes in a very small set of things hard enough to sacrifice (I imagine) all else for them. It has a sense of purpose that's goes beyond (I imagine) momentary whim. It is zealous. It is judgmental, but (I imagine) righteously so. And if there's anything that will make my life worthwhile, will help me pay back the debt to world I incur simply by living in this privileged state each day, it's that.
It's the religious part of me: stripped of its original content, but identical in form.
And what hit me (not for the first time, but with unusual intensity) is the fear that this part of me--the most valuable part of me, to myself--will always be terribly, actively, ruthlessly alone. I'm afraid that it will go unloved and misunderstood by everybody else and it will be unable to love and will misunderstand anybody else.
And yet, it's the only ticket to the kingdom of heaven. So to speak.
And I just don't know what to do.
"While doing the all-nighter thing again yesterday and the day before was painful in all sorts of ways, it was encouraging to feel myself really working hard again. When the tension goes out of my attachments in life, everything about me goes slack, like a dropped marionette. But as it was, I felt myself on a slow adrenaline drip right down to the last minutes before midnight deadline."
Just now, while working on building a Gibbs sampler, I was just struck by a wave of self-loathing that has been building, I realize now, for a lot of today.
Here's the gist of my anxiety: There is a part of me which I think is noble and good. It believes in a very small set of things hard enough to sacrifice (I imagine) all else for them. It has a sense of purpose that's goes beyond (I imagine) momentary whim. It is zealous. It is judgmental, but (I imagine) righteously so. And if there's anything that will make my life worthwhile, will help me pay back the debt to world I incur simply by living in this privileged state each day, it's that.
It's the religious part of me: stripped of its original content, but identical in form.
And what hit me (not for the first time, but with unusual intensity) is the fear that this part of me--the most valuable part of me, to myself--will always be terribly, actively, ruthlessly alone. I'm afraid that it will go unloved and misunderstood by everybody else and it will be unable to love and will misunderstand anybody else.
And yet, it's the only ticket to the kingdom of heaven. So to speak.
And I just don't know what to do.