Into the void...
“That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.”
-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
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2002-11-06
4:29 p.m.
Since returning from lunch, I have tried about a dozen times to sit quietly at my desk and read some short stories that I have to write a fifteen-page paper on for my class, while everyone else in the office has been chatting away loudly about ten feet behind me. It appears that no one in the office has any work to do today. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it sucks today because no one will leave me alone long enough or shut up long enough for me to get further than a paragraph into a short story before having to stop and reread it again and again and again because I can’t stop myself from being absolutely infuriated by the fact that everybody is TALKING.
Don’t they have better things to do with their lives? Of course they don’t. Nobody really tries to do anything worthwhile with their time on this earth -- nobody but me.
I know what my problem is.
Every morning when the alarm goes off, Rob has to literally knock me out of bed before I’ll give in and get up. If it weren’t for him, I probably would never make it past the initial sound of the alarm; I’d just sleep forever and ever. Once I am awake, though, I generally get in a few good hours of playing with the bunny, drinking my coffee, and even working out. Then I come into work and can tolerate the world full of people for about three hours before things start to go abruptly downhill. By the time mid-afternoon arrives, I’m desperately searching for someone to kill. All of this deterioration, this daily stint of madness continually toggling with fury, gets worse day by day, and I’ve finally determined that it actually is the world that makes me crazy.
I can’t deal.
One of Rob’s favorite authors is giving a special lecture here tonight, and I told him several days ago that I’d be more than happy to go. I don’t want to go. I told him I’d be happy to go because I’m the kind of person who likes to make people happy, and I figured he’d probably like some company. Besides, if I tried hard enough, I really thought I could convince myself that it’s the sort of thing I’d like to do, seeing as how I consider myself to be all literary and whatnot. In a perfect universe, I’d love to go. But in reality, I can barely make it through a few hours of work before I feel like I’m going to implode.
And when five o’clock rolls around, I need to go home.
What makes me think I can continue living like a normal person? Why the hell am I taking a class and thinking that I’m going to work my way towards a Masters in Literature and Creative Writing, when I can’t even fucking spell my name sometimes? What makes me think I’m worth wasting all the time and frustration on?
I’m not worth it.
I sit here in this stupid office for forty hours a week, and, realizing that’s not an unusual thing for someone to do, I don’t really think it’s my place to say that I shouldn’t be doing it. But goddammit, I can’t manage. Sitting here is killing me. It is literally, physically, mentally, and emotionally KILLING me. Something about the nature of my constitution makes it such that I hate work with an intensity so far beyond intense that there doesn’t even exist a word for how much I hate it.
And I hate everything.
Nothing is getting any better. When I first went on medication, it was a lifesaver. I was kept alive and relatively sane for several years more than I would have been without, but the medication stopped working, the doctors stopped helping, the problem kept worsening, and the illness took complete control.
I am no longer living my life; I’m living the life of my disease.
Nothing about what I do in life has any meaning whatsoever to me anymore. I love Rob more than life, death, god, and the future prospect of never having to feel again, but I have become completely dissociated from everything that makes me a living, breathing human being. That means I’m alive and feeling, but I can’t feel what I’m feeling. Whatever I’m feeling is really the result of something else: some drug, some chemical imbalance, some imperfection in the alignment of the planets or something....
I don’t know.
My new coworker is sitting in the cube next to me typing madly away at some internet novel she’s writing, and, despite the fact that I have novels on the internet and I consider myself to be a novelist, for some reason, I hate her for that. The guy who sits at the front desk spends half his time making giant balls out of rubber bands, and the rubber bands that don’t make it to the ball get made into “musical instruments” that are really just rubber bands around aluminum cans. He then proceeds to torture me by “playing” the “musical instruments” while I sit here trying to do something worthwhile to justify the fact that I’m struggling to suck in each painful breath so I can maintain the appearance of one who is still alive and breathing.
None of this is humorous anymore.
I can no longer do the things that I once halfheartedly wanted to do. When that’s the state of depression in which you’ve finally discovered yourself residing, it is a sad state of affairs indeed.
