Travel enriches me in many ways. Apart from novelty and discovery, new surroundings help me to temporarily forget things that usually weigh me down. Certain familiar things back home trigger uncomfortable feelings in me. I guess that is why I had a multi-year respite when I moved to SF for a while. For that few years, I could forget who I was and what made me, and I experienced a never-before lightness in my being.
I am not sure why but I don’t tend to forget traumatic memories. This morning I woke up from a semi-nightmare — semi because it was not that scary, just dreadful — that I was going for an exam and I was feeling a lot of anxiety about being unable to remember what I was about to be tested for. It has been more than 20 years since I last had an exam, and I am still having dreadful exam dreams. When I woke up I was so relieved I was not actually having an exam, and that I don’t have to experience another exam for the rest of my life involuntarily.
When I was younger I had thought most people had similar anxieties like me. But no, somehow the typical response is to deny and forget. My triggered memories and sensations are disabling for me. I don’t believe words can adequately describe what it is like to be haunted permanently until to a point of perpetual depression and paralysis. I cannot escape or disengage from my mind, so I have to seek out distractions. And when distractions no longer work, I try not to let these sensations destroy me. I have realised with age that they will probably follow me for the rest of my life, and it would be better for me to learn how to tolerate living with them than to hope hopelessly that they will disappear.
But I am not there yet. I feel like I am constantly drowning, struggling to breathe. Travelling makes me feel better because my brain is too busy to bother me, yet it concurrently makes me feel worse because I know I am escaping from something. That something could be plenty of things, and one of them is definitely my self. I don’t like being an escapist. Like most people I would like to be someone whom I am not: I would like to think of myself as a person who readily embraces truth and reality. But the more I age the more weight I bear and become aware of, so I am slowly realising that being a hypocrite and learning to be good at compartmentalising is key to my own survival. This makes me understand other people more: why they would prefer for things to be swept under the carpet. This world is simply not easy to survive in, the human psyche can be too inhospitable to inhabit.
I am trying to learn to be more compassionate to myself — the fact that I am writing something like this is proof that I am not harbouring a normal existence but a tortured one. Why would anyone write and think like this if they could help it? To think and then write convolutedly is a compulsion that overcomes me. I wish I am someone who can write about my bright and sunny day but here I am writing about my dark and dreadful mind. The only thing I can offer to you and my self is the attempt to honestly articulate who I really am, because there is nothing else I seem to be good at. Words are not enough, but at the very least they let me attempt to build a bridge between the abstract darkness within me, my conscious self, and the world that surrounds me. Who knows what will happen if I just let it build up within myself?
I wish to forget my self, even if it is temporary. The weight of my mind is difficult to bear. If I am lucky I get to indulge in temporary passions and hobbies, to just bring in a tiny bit of freshness to my existence instead of feeling claustrophobic in my chronically heavy self. I used to be a purist, thinking distractions are cop-outs. I must learn to live with myself, with the discomfort, with the pain. But now perhaps the more important thing is to survive, even if it means I have to play tricks with my own mind and cut off some parts of my self.
Will this bite me in the ass some day? I don’t know. All I know is that I live with plenty of regrets, but yet I know I can only make choices I am capable of in that moment. If I can be a better person and have a wider emotional capacity things would be radically different. But now that I am older I am less deluded about the person I am and who I can be. I am someone who simply has very little capacity to live and to love. There is just so little life force in me, so much unwillingness, fear and sadness.
I don’t even know why I am built like this, as though my existence has been an evolutionary mistake. Instead of striving towards life, I dread it.