My partner pitter patters around the house constantly, always looking for something to do, always scheming up some new creative project of hers. Being with her is an ongoing lesson and reminder how someone else can operate on a totally different mental sphere. Without her, I may be tempted to think that most people have energy, attention and direction issues like me.
After 43 years of life, I have changed so much that my younger self wouldn’t be able to recognise my current self if she time-travelled to the future. But there are parts of me that feels like the same dark despairing pit that has existed since the beginning of my time. It is difficult for me to imagine a brighter future for myself – putting aside external conditions like the ongoing wars, pandemic and climate change – I feel like if my mind is so used to operating in a certain mode with her wiring so deep and ingrained, it just seems impossible that I can become a different person. I guess I just want a less torturing relationship with life, because trying to manage that every single moment is very exhausting.
Perhaps that is why I like exercising. To an extent the body ignores the pessimism and negative conditions of the mind and does its own thing. Put in the stimuli and the body responds. When I run regularly running becomes more and more effortless and almost pleasurable. It doesn’t care if I think if the world is going to end, or that humans suck or that I suck. My body and muscles have their own learning memory, and it bypasses all the gatekeeping my mind likes to do.
Strength training is even more rewarding. It seems difficult to believe that every week I making some new progress on the weights. When I first started, leg-pressing 20kg gave me DOMS for at least 4 days, and now I can more than twice of that almost effortlessly. It is amazing my tiny fragile weak body can still have its own growth spurt even in my 40s. I have never imagined I would ever think of myself as a strong person. Through weights I can escape the fragility of my mind and at least work on the physical strength of my body. Perhaps one day they will converge in some way.
My other super power is that I can easily go 16-20 hours without eating. Probably longer if I wanted to. Hunger is no longer as disturbing as before. I found myself wishing I could do something similar for my mind – to somewhat ignore the negative patterns my mind is making for 16-20 hours. That would be such a welcome break for me. I often joke with my partner that I wish she can periodically shut me down for days so I can take a break from myself.
Some days are terrible. Even soothing words from my partner can no longer console me. Both her and I can only watch helplessly as I hurt. Yes I am watching too. A part of me witnesses like a third-party observer: conscious that I am spiralling again and it is a state I do not want to be in, and yet there is nothing I can do about it. But these days are getting fewer as I get older. Not because I am getting better, but rather numbness has taken over. Perhaps the capacity to hurt is a good thing, to signal that I am still alive. The numbness is deadening.
Once in a while I make a concerted struggle. I post a photo of something beautiful, or I make an ugly drawing. It is not inspiration that drives me, but desperation. I am hoping to feel a spark that never comes.
I am endlessly intrigued by the concept of internal transformation. I have spent so much of my life mulling over insignificant things, only to wake up one day discovering that they do not matter anymore. What flips that switch? Is there a recipe or a playbook?
I swing between accepting myself for who I am, and rebelling against her. Alternating between self-compassion and self-hatred. Sometimes it is the acceptance that provokes change, other times trying to do something radically different works. The psyche is a mystery – I am often perplexed at myself.
I do go through periods of optimism – again I am unsure what truly triggers them. Then all of a sudden I seem to be back at square one. Am I really back at square one or is my baseline shifting ever so subtly that I can’t have an accurate gauge? This is why I journal frantically, hoping one day my future self will be rewarded with an unexpected shift in my consciousness — only detectable because I recorded it. Day to day, it doesn’t feel like much has changed. It is difficult not to feel despair when it feels like I am trapped in the same invisible prison, unaware that in objective reality my prison has gradually transformed. Sometimes it has grown wider, sometimes deeper, sometimes the shape has morphed, sometimes the density, the colours, the quality. Other times I feel like our subconscious rewards us for achieving personal breakthroughs by giving us more complex, deeper issues to work through. This is why it feels like it is never-ending. Is this optimism or pessimism? To believe that we are constantly thrown harder challenges to overcome, or that we can never be free?
The other day I read about a Korean philosopher who lives in Germany. According to him, he does nothing the entire day, but he writes like 3 sentences:
Professor Byung-Chul Han is a 64-year-old man who lives life backwards. He’s awake when people are sleeping, and goes to bed when others are starting to work. A proudly lazy thinker, he writes just three sentences a day. He spends most of his hours caring for his plants and playing pieces by Bach and Schumann on his Steinway & Sons grand piano. For him, these are the things that truly matter in life.
– source
That is enough for him to be prolific, having published over 30 books. He seems oddly at ease with himself, not entangled with the cult of productivity-associated self-worth. I wonder if such an existence is possible for me?
Maybe one can feel truly fulfilled writing just 3 sentences a day, they would be better off than ends up having blank-page syndrome because the thought of writing 1,000 words seem too daunting.
The ability to manage one’s mind to the point of ease and fulfilment seems very elusive, especially because we are a society that has been so conditioned to feel like we always have to be doing more. I ought to give myself a pat on the back for everything I have tried to do for myself so far, but what fills me up every day is a chronic saddening sense that I am wasting my existence.
The thing is, I know. I know that I cannot trust my feelings, because they are an outcome of many years of fatigue, heartbreak and disappointment. Yet some of them are valid too, because living in this world is frankly too exhausting for me. I think the only way to thrive is to deny and ignore, and I can do neither. It almost feels wrong to me to try to be happier in a world like this: a world where so many are suffering, and so many are causing others to suffer.
Maybe what I should seek then is not happiness or even fulfilment. It seems unrealistic to me to feel happiness or fulfilled in a world that is causing so much pain. All I can ask for, is a profound acceptance.
In these conditions, what is it that I can realistically expect from myself and from the world? This is the answer I must seek.