Saturday, 13 June 2020

1


14 June 2020
1:14 AM

How are you feeling?
The question should rather be – are you feeling anything at all?
Yes and No.
There are many things at the back of my mind, nothing that I’m choosing to deal properly with right now. It is there; it is making me miserable, I don’t know what I can do, except to feel miserable. Writing it on paper would have been more therapeutic, but maybe wouldn’t have remained private for long. Haha – I always have this fear of my writings of misery being discovered and then of the writing not being understood, sympathised and empathised with, of it being seen as useless. I don’t need that kind of rejection right now, ya’know?

How are you feeling?
Miserable, as I said before. I am not alone though, the whole wide world currently might be feeling the same in some way or the other. These are horrible times and getting through it alive only should make me happy. It does not. I am done with gratitude, I can’t see anything to be grateful for right now. I have exhausted my reserves I think. Others have it much worse, I am aware. That does not take away my experience, does it? Have you heard of Relative and Absolute deprivation?  I feel bad for people experiencing the latter. I feel bad for myself for going through the former.

People are dying. The world is literally on fire. Justice and power don’t seem to co-exist. Social media exists and so do people who use it to amplify hate and spread it all around. Well done! What have you done?

What have I done? What can I do?
I think that is one of my problems. That makes me uneasy as nothing else does. I have been through the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness before, but the feelings have just come back with a force 100 times multiplied than the last time. I have excuses. I don’t have energy – sometimes not even to move around the room I’m restricted to. I haven’t stepped out in about two and a half months now. Human interaction in actual human form is limited to my interactions with my mother; the nature which I’m sure has changed. I don’t like the change and yet here we are. I can only manage to snap back half the times and then realise that she is also a human only, trying to stay sane in these testing times and then I feel guilty and the other half of times I am trying to make jokes and pretend some semblance to normality. What is normal anymore?

Did you see how I dodged the topic of “What have I done?”  Impressive, right?

(Some sort of feeling is surely returning to me as I write, not bad.)

(I did it again. I’m just fooling myself at this point.)

Action and Acceptance, the guidance and counseling professor said. Act on what you can change, accept on what you cannot. I remember it. You bet I do. Have I been able to implement it? NO.

I think the action that is left for me to do now is to accept whatever is going around the world. It is a freak show, really. Nothing surprises me anymore. It’s one horrible event followed by another and the order and balance seem to be unravelling one thread a day. One thread? Many threads a day! Or maybe the world was always in a flux and it is just the access to information – the information overload – that is causing all this misery.

Standing by and observing as all hell is breaking loose. As if there was anything else left to do.