Good Times
I’ve got a new metaphor for you: being mentally ill is like trying to tame and keep at bay this terrible beast that is terrorizing you and everyone and everything you care about. The considerate thing is to keep it under control, keep it on a leash, keep it from biting the ones you love or sabotaging you at an important moment of your life. It’s difficult but it becomes a bit more bearable when you realize that you’re at least wrestling this beast for someone other than yourself, that there’s a magnanimous purpose for this Sisyphean struggle. Viktor Frankl and all that.
I keep finding very good reasons to get high. My grandmother just passed last night, God rest her soul. The evilest world figures are vigorously shaking hands and making deals. The end of the world is coming? Get high. The end of the world isn't coming after all and the world has always been in a state of chaos and will continue to be? Get high. My life consists of housework and childcare. Look man, having a wife and child and a home is a blessing but you’d want to get high too sometimes if you were the primary caretaker and stay-at-home-parent for said child for the first year of the child’s life. I’m a fucking depressed stay-at-home dad and I’m not afraid to say it. Sometimes I worry about how I’m basically high all of the time, but then my wife says something that makes me want to throw myself out of the apartment window and I’m glad that I’m baked out of my mind.
It must be me to a certain extent. Like even if we accept that the world is garbage, there’s still the matter of us being able to exercise some sort of freedom with reference to how we engage with and respond to our circumstances. Even if every environment has been unfavorable and/or hostile to me, it’s still significant how I exercise my positive and negative freedom, even if this [how I act] is also predetermined in the sensory realm. In the intelligible world I have freedom, even if I am bound by causality in this physical form. But that's just me poorly paraphrasing Kant.
I’m not sure if it’s mental illness or personality defect or just looking around right now but I find it increasingly difficult to give a shit about anything. And I don’t even mean this in a selfish way. Take care of yourself, take care of your family, take care of those you love, but apart from that fuck all of this noise.
I need substances more and more. Right now I'm off of a sugar free Red Bull, a 40 mg edible, and I just finished a calisthenics workout. So I'm at cruising altitude. But once I start to come down it's going to suck again. Because it will be back to me once more, ruminating about the same old bullshit. Just me vs. me. Is this depression? Is this addiction? Or this is just survival in the modern world, just leaping like fucking Crash Bandicoot on lily pads from one chemical rush to the next?
Whatever it is, whatever the means, I've always been in flight from myself. I've used different tools over time, alone or in conjunction with one another. Exercise, porn, cannabis, booze, soccer, what else? There must be more. So many ways of just getting away from myself. Because if I really turn the lens inward, what do I see? I'm not even sure I want to look.
I was diagnosed with OCD but I'm sure if I were to shuffle through the pages of the DSM-V I'd be able to find something else that fits as well. The thing is, I'm also a cunt, and sometimes it's difficult to differentiate the two. Like am I being an asshole because I'm mentally ill or am I just an asshole? Certainly being mentally ill makes it more difficult for one to avoid being an asshole, but that's different from being a miserable asshole by disposition. I think I've got a bit of both going on.
That's why this stay-at-home dad shit is so hard for me. I fucking hate being alone with myself. I'm also still a fucking child. Like to an astounding degree. I'm a thirty-seven-year-old baby. The way I think astonishes me in terms of its puerility, its self-absorption, it's vapidness. Something is fucking wrong with me and it's not just the drugs and it's not just the mental illness and I would like to think it's the porn and social media, but maybe it's not that either, and if not what then? What will I scapegoat then? Sit me alone in a dark room or better yet out in nature. I'm due for a factory reset. That's the only curative. How did I end up so callous and and callow and immature? Did someone or something fail me or have I failed myself? And I'm also not sure I've failed or if I'm just being too hard on myself. If I deem myself a failure, whose metrics am I using? Mine? Someone else's? What even are the metrics? Am I even giving myself a fair appraisal or am I just a de facto and de jure and by default self-hater?