My writings

Hey! This is going to be a personal reflection on how I relate to my own emotions and how I express them. I'm going to at the very least be mentioning heavy topics such as suicide ideation, so do tread carefully. Anyway, I'm sharing this in part because I feel the need to write and get it out, and also because I think I'm struggling a lot with this, and if even one person relates to my experience and feels less alone, then it means I'm doing something right with these words. This might also be a cry for help. But like, just a little bit.

My therapist asked me some months ago to start tracking my emotions on the daily, because we're trying to gauge if there's any changes or significant stagnation and whatnot. I tried to do that for a little bit, but ever since June I haven't really been able to.

I'm very disconnected from my own feelings. I feel numb a lot of the time, and I have a hard time differentiating between my emotions— mostly, I just assume I'm not feeling anything at all, because there's nothing at all that indicates I might be feeling something. Several times during the day I get hit with a wave of despair, and I just have to stare at the ceiling for minutes at a time. I do not have the will or the strength to move an inch of my body. That's about it, I think.
There are also good moments, but they are often short-lived, or at least they have been for a while now. There are exceptions. There are days where I'm just absolutely ecstatic and oh so high. But that's what they are— exceptions.

My therapist tells me often that she is surprised by the way I talk about my feelings during our sessions. She points out that no matter now grim or heavy the topic is, I'm always calm and collected. I'll cheerfully speak of my thoughts of death as if of a nice day out with my friends. I know that the pain is there and real, it's sitting beside me every day and it peeks at me through the disconnect, but I know of no other way to express it. There is such a big distance between my actual feelings and the way I perceive and let them out that you probably wouldn't think they were so real even if you heard the words coming right out my mouth.

Occasionally the emotions will actually seep through the cracks and get to me. When they do, they hit me like a truck. There is no mercy in the way I'm completely overcome with the agony that I normally only know to recount with a polite smile. No warning and no breaks until it's over. That's when you will see me cry as if I'm one breath away from dropping dead.

And then it just begins again. Some days, weeks, maybe even a month I'll spend in the cold embrace of emptiness, reaching out for the tiniest amount of sensation, desperately looking to connect to my own existence. And then I'll break down again, I'll be confined to my bed for days and won't be able to look my friends in the eye.

Sure, there are good days here and there. Some are really great, even.
I have always been terrible at keeping track of time, and I don't know whether it's just always been like this or the time I spend being numb and distraught just grows more and more. Either option sounds terrifying.

But what does one even do with this information? I'll still be in next session, earnestly describing my most recent breakdown and the way I feel numb down to my bones, just the same way I would speak of a really nice walk in the park.

What are even emotions at this point? How do I live like this? What can I even do except for surviving the tide?

What to write when your head is just static?
I watch myself move as if I were inside a videogame, and I'm so painfully slow that I wonder why the player won't fucking press shift.
As I walk down the street, I look at the arrow keys moving as I go straight and then to the right; straight on again and then to the left; then I stop. I look at the unpressed keys. I'm standing still.
I'm moving again and I'm still so slow and I'm thinking God, I didn't even figure out that you can run until halfway through Omori. Why the fuck am I not running? Am I thinking this as I walk, or as I write?
The lines are blurred.
Even just turning my head to look in another direction takes so long that I forget what I was looking for. What am I looking at? What am I even doing?
Nothing feels real anymore.
I press the keys on the computer and this time they are under my fingers, not over my head. What am I writing?
My head feels like— God, this sounded so much better in Italian. Why is it called a shuttlecock in English? I'm so immature I almost ground myself back into reality.
Really though, what am I writing?
It's been days, or maybe weeks, or… I don't know how long it's been, but everything I do feels so unreal. I'm watching myself from above and I can't help thinking: "Man, I suck at videogames so bad I can't even play my own life right." Where the fuck did my shift key go?
Some lousy writing for some lousy fucking days.
I try to greet my mother coming home and the words come out of my mouth so slow and confused. I'm thinking this guy won't even fucking pick a dialogue option.
When the fuck did I become the main character in a badly written game? Not even the fucking music's good. It's literally just static. The fuck?
I think I said "fuck" here more than I normally do in two whole days.
Nothing feels real at all, but even from this hazy state I can tell this is far from good or interesting writing. I'm not even sure I'm making the choice for myself though.
Whatever. Let this be a celebration of bad writing.
Will anything feel real again at some point? I know it's supposed to.
While I wait, I'll just watch myself from up here.
Am I even wearing my glasses? Everything is so fucking blurred.

I've never been a big fan of thinking.
It's not that I don't see the importance of it, of course— it's just that it is often painful and inconclusive. One question that has plagued me for as long as I can remember is: what makes a good person?
What is it that makes someone "good"? And I wonder even more: am I a good person? Short answer is, I don't know. Slightly longer answer is I don't know and it hurts my head to even ask the question.
I most recently found myself wondering about this while trying to figure out what my supposed d&d alignment would be. Then, soon after, I thought about it while trying to help out a friend living in a dire situation.

On one hand, I tell myself that I probably am a good person, because I have strong ideals when it comes to the welfare and general happiness of other human beings. Compared to many other people, I guess I at least have the decency to believe in equity and the inherent worth of all living things. But really, is the bare minimum enough? Is wanting everyone to be well and happy enough to be a good person? I'm not sure that's the case.
When a friend shares with me that they feel like an awful person for having "bad" thoughts, I generally reply with "awfully catholic of you to believe in mind crime" (nothing against the catholics, that's just the very specific type of faith I witnessed while growing up). I firmly believe that just because we sometimes have mean or insensitive thoughts, that doesn't necessarily make us bad people so long as we don't act on them. So, doesn't this also apply to "good" thoughts?
Do I not need to act on my good thoughts, to be, by all means, a good person?

That is not to say that I do not ever act on my good thoughts, but at this point I have to ask myself: how much is enough? There is no doubt in my mind that my intentions are good, but am I actually making a positive impact in the real life world I'm in?
I know that I spend time and energy trying to be there for my loved ones, I try to build environments that are safe and comfortable for anyone who might join them, I try to voice my beliefs and live by them as coherently as I can. Is trying enough though?
It is not by intention, but I often do not pull my weight in the house. The same goes for speaking up in class when I know I'd have something valuable to share. I often do not speak up on social issues, I let my fear stop me from meaningfully contributing to confrontations, I sit by when I know I should be participating. At what point does fear stop constituting a good reason to be paralyzed? At what point do I become complicit in the horrors I claim to want to eradicate? Isn't the fact that I'm trying to justify my stillness, my silence, bad enough in itself?

I do think that big social media platforms have created an ideal of goodness that is impossible to perform. If we were to consult Instagram reels with the big questions we're pondering, we'd probably sink in despair as we realize that we cannot meet the standard that is asked of us. We cannot know everything, we cannot speak up on everything, and we probably don't even have the mental and emotional capacity to process each and every one of the things that are happening in the world. But at what point does the pretense that executing goodness perfectly is impossible become a mere excuse to just not do any of the work?

To call myself "good" feels insincere because I can never know what it actually means to do the work, and it feels naive and unfair to be the one deciding for myself that I am doing enough.

At this point in my reflection, I feel I should twist my original question a bit and start to ask myself: why am I so fixated on achieving an abstract absolute of goodness? Why do I need the validation so bad? Wouldn't it be better, seeing the way things are, to just try and do what I think is right, without worrying so much about labelling my own morality?

I guess it's hard not to put myself under constant scrutiny. It's also hard not to try and hide away behind trite and overused excuses.

I usually dislike thinking, and that is in part because I rarely find an answer that can help me navigate life. So here's a new question, and hopefully this one finally leads to some action: what can I do to be a better person, and what are the steps I need to take to get there?

Frank was eating a pineapple on the sofa while talking to his friend Mikey about how much he loved pinecones and apples. He decided that he would have gone into the woods to eat some pinecones and find some apples to put on his shelf. However, his boyfriend Gerard was jealous of the pinecones: he believed that Frank should only eat him — he was jealous of the pineapple as well.
His brother very much disagreed with him, so he brought Frank into the woods.
While walking and chewing on a pinecone, he looked at the sky and all the very pretty butterflies. He didn’t notice that he was starting to climb on a volcano.
Gerard had seen him, though, so he was fighting the volcano. The butterflies were pretty, but the volcano was mad at Gerard, so it decided to burn them down and turn Frank into a purple pinecone.
So Gerard was very sad and he kicked the volcano and a fairy made the volcano blue, and the volcano covered everything in blue lava. Everything became blue pinecones.
Frank was still a purple pinecone, and when Mikey came to pick him up and go home, he didn’t find him, so he stopped to eat some pinecones. He ate both pinecone Frank and pinecone Gerard. The fairy turned him into lava. The pinecone universe burned down. Everything was lava. The fairy sighed and took off its mask.
It was really just Ray, who was sick of them eating pinecones and leaving crumbs on the sofa.