November 7th

What form do I write this in?

An exploration of what a good life is, meandering on truth vs perception? A lyrical account of the body's collapse against spirit and mind? A polemic against injust systems?

I'm too exhausted to choose. So whatever follows will follow, and it will be authentic.

Exhaustion is typical of my very low moments. In these states, everything I write is tinted with themes of absence, abandonment, the individual vs systems, anger with abstractions. This is a conceited and intellectualized way to admit that I am, at the current moment, suffering.

But now I have tools I learned from previous bad episodes. A small list:

  1. An abstracted life is not worth living
  2. I can't be abandoned by a God who can only "be absent under the form of creation"
  3. The greatest power is to "admit I am suffering"

Abstractions

At this moment, all I experience are abstractions.

I work a job that is, at its fundamental core, managing the complexity of awful abstractions. I work from home, so all I see are images of people through Microsoft Teams.

Outside of work, I only interact with others, at a meaningful level, a few times a week. I read books and write random things that spring into my brain. I spend time with friends across the country by playing games on voice calls.

I hardly go hiking or walking, yet, when I do, it feels like the greatest thing in this world.

Despair

For much of the last 6 months (isn't it crazy how much living I've done in such a short time?), I often find myself in moments of crushing existential despair writing letters to the void. To a God which I do not know exists, and I can never know.

I am reminded of feeling like this, a quote from Jesus on the cross:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?

Except the "He has done it!" moment never reaches me.

But the reality is that this image of God I hold, which everyone interprets God differently, loves through absence. This is to say that I shouldn't ask Him "why have you forsaken me?" because He is incapable of saving me.

The only one that can save me is me, and I must find within myself that person who is willing to be saved.

Embodiment

I see hints of that person when I read this quote from Simone Weil:

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly."

The core obstacle: self-perception. Weil did not imagine herself to be suffering because she perceived her anorexia as morally congruent with her beliefs.

The struggle: I believe my ideas and thoughts to be at times, though to a lesser extent, as dangerous to myself as Weil's ideas were to herself.

At the very least, I can monitor my body's health, and I should place that as a critical priority. If the body dies then everything else does too.

I am soon taking medical leave, which I will use to recalibrate my body as the highest goal. The imagination of mine is that my body is fine, the fact is that it is straining under too much weight.

I will likely leave my job for something embodied, even if just one that labors my body after a long hiatus. Maybe eventually I will figure out if there exists a path that is both embodied and existentially meaningful (the writing on the wall appears bleak).

It is an exciting and exhausting time.

The final act of closing the moral distance imposed upon myself by outsiders.

But "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."