5/22/2020

well, the date says 5/22, but it is actually (for me) the end of 5/21. it's just after midnight.

i regret writing things so personal in the previous entry. at times, i wonder who reads this stuff anyway.

it's true that for long periods of my life, i felt terribly alone and terribly depressed. i also always felt compelled to stay on this straight and narrow path, no distractions. perhaps there could have been liberation for me, had i entertained it, but something always kept me moving. in hindsight, it was ridiculous, actually.

i often often wonder where this feeling of imprisonment comes from. it is a feeling of being surrounding by whirling knives. to reach out, to step off the path, is to be cut viciously. so i never did. but the loneliness, it was also cutting in itself, but internally. a waste disposal system, churning and grinding me from within... an emptiness within, an emptiness without.

yesterday i remembered the emptiness of my undergraduate years. but there was severe emptiness in los angeles as well. in a way, it was more pronounced...

i recall sitting at seats in malls, or at cafes, so compelled to study on the one hand, and so desperate that someone would come and sit across from me and talk to me. i recall driving and walking to empty beaches in the middle of the night to do obscure forms that no one saw (a repetition of what i did in college, walking to trees in a graveyard, surrounded by silent snow, hitting the bark with my bare knuckles, secretly hoping that someone saw me, and felt for me)...

a trap. a vicious trap.

i always imagined there was some summer country. when i was trapped at williams, in the midst of all the snow that refused to melt, i dreamed of hawaii, and people in bikinis. or i dreamt of san jose, where there were anime stores. stuff like that. i dreamt of life existing elsewhere. and earlier in my life, i dreamt of japan, my figurative summer country, where things were always somehow brighter, and more real, than my pale reality... but in truth, but in truth...

*****

i'm returning to the notion of the switch. when you feel no one wants you, then it appears as though you have a choice: you could continue to humiliate yourself and be small and worthless, or you could set off on your own, "out and up," and gain momentum from the pushing off and away, feel a semblance of motion, and emotion, in your life... but again, it's always a false choice. secretly, after you pushed off, you would still want them to miss you, to regret ignoring you (even as you understand that they didn't notice)... and all of it is a play to get attention... you keep swallowing a more bitter pill, progressively more bitter and emetic, trying to make yourself really real. like you keep trying to make the other, the desired other, disappear, and yourself disappear. but it is all a hoax, a game. you can never swallow yourself... you can never make yourself disappear by eating your own pain, and concealing yourself in your gut.

you will still be you, all hurt and lonely.

but what alternative is there?

i hate hate hate being without respect. without love. that was what i knew early on. the rejection. the not-measuring-up. the feeling of complete worthlessness. and i internalized it, i think. like swallowing a razor blade... cut me up inside into smaller and smaller pieces...

*****

well, i'm starting to feel drowsy. i've got some writing and meditating to do, before i fall asleep. so i best be going...