As some of you may know, Linda and I picked up covid about 2 weeks ago. Linda got a negative test yesterday, I’m still positive (though I tend to be iffy in most other areas).
I was reading a longish piece about despair in a recent issue of Science News. Seems psychologists are deciding that “despair” is different from plain old user-friendly depression, and that’s it’s hitting a lot more people today, especially the young. Why?
Why not? Between the pandemic, the threat of the collapse of life on earth and the general rottenness of existence for far too many of our far too exploded population, remaining positive feels more and more like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
As a kid, I was afraid nearly every minute of most days. It wasn’t even a matter of being “afraid of.” It was a raw, generalized fear – I guess it must have been of existence, if I had any clear idea what existence was. Just the sense of never knowing how things worked, what most of them were, barely what I was.
Over the years that fear tended to move off. Lots of high points, even in the worst times, and if course the positive revelation of my kids and of Linda. But now…
It’s like I really am having a second childhood, the one thing I most completely never would have wanted. Too many mornings I wake in panic, with this sense of I don’t want this, any of it. Most of all, I don’t want myself. Too many afternoons, in the middle of trying to make the internal vacancy of my life work, I find myself on the verge of tears.
But this isn’t quite the same as that old childhood fear. It’s closer to horror, the result of learning more clearly what existence is or seems to be. Look at the viciousness, the bitterness that’s spread around the world, the vile absurdity of our country’s government, the sense by those with any power that they have the right, even the duty, to destroy anyone who does not support their every breath.
An extreme outlook on my part? For sure, but one I think that has a pretty rational basis.
It’s not like I think there was ever a halcyon time. Mankind has always had a huge vicious streak, as have all mammals, as has all life, as has all evolution, as has the vast turmoil of space.
But this is one of those woebegone eras when the viciousness is blatant and adopted by nearly all sides, arming themselves with guns and vitriol. There have been times, there have been places, where this negativity took hold and strangled a civilization. But now, the whole world is one extended civilization, and it has every aspect of going down the tubes. Permanently.
Should I care? I don’t think so. But something down inside me must.
And here’s the latest weirdness, the other night, trying, between pills and self bludgeoning, to force my mind to shut off its rants and go to sleep. I suddenly felt a shift in outlook. In some inexplicable way I no longer saw myself as a complete individual, but a shattered something with parts broken off or lost in the haze: that I was not a “person” so much as a character in a story, one with missing dimensions. Not a character created by another, rather a half-formed amalgam that did not add up to “me.”
What then? What do I have left if I’m not me? Maybe that’s part of what makes me write, even in times like this when it’s most painful even to think. Maybe I’m trying to create a complete me that makes sense. If I succeeded, would I come up with something I would like more or less than the trashed, fragmented me that I’m coming to truly despise?
Tune in next year.
lickhaven 