I feel emotionally very stressed and lost whenever I think of job hunting, or trying to learn something 'professionally-related'. It's like I get a sick feeling in my heart and stomach and I'm not sure why; maybe in my head I've just been building up so much disdain and vitriol that now that I must confront it like an adult, I've only shot myself in the foot by literally triggering a bad reaction every time I try to deal with it. I feel like I am being pounded by contradictory advice, values, and I have so much fear that I cannot be myself or that I will get so good at imitation as I always do that one day everything will explode once more when shit hits the fan. I feel like I have so much regret but can only move forward, and only now witnessing the proverbial Jenga tower collapse in slow motion as I am left behind by everyone in the rat race and am only not sleeping on the streets because I can draw upon immense privilege, i.e. I am making my parents suffer for my arrogance, childishness, stupidity, laziness, etc. and have no confidence in anything that I do at the same time that I judge others less clever and yet employed - again the arrogance - but then this cannot be and it must be that I am just blind, unaware, unable to build up any form of the 'street-smartness' that was my passion and example to follow. I am constantly afraid to ask for advice as it makes me look dumber and dumber, and as I told Steele I hate feeling like I am dumb, patronized and spoon-fed like a damn amateur. I feel so fucking stupid, and a failure of a Singaporean compared to my peers because I should have, could have given up my ideals earlier and thought long-term. Now I might work in Singapore and essentially lose the only real connections and relationships that I really value at this point, for all my years of self-perceived social ineptness, because I was a fool. It's good to write this in words at least. But unfortunately for new algorithms they might be read, which I why I like being honest, so nothing can be held against me ever. I feel like I've been indoctrinated, turned against society by my education and made a fool for it, because I cannot seem to hold down reading any business news without cringing, when I know that the world is grey and made up of people who are just trying to do their best, as I saw in the museum today. I have squandered what was given to me instead in some lame rejection of position, as Chris pointed out, and am now the hapless and useless son that I despised in my mind. So it's self-hate really. I don't want to hear any comfort because I'm the recipient this time, and nobody's convinced me otherwise yet. I have to focus.
How easy was it for me back when I still had mainstream hobbies and interests, and now everything seems so listless and hopeless. It's as if I've discovered myself and discovered nothing and no growth except realization of self-deception as I talk to the internet. I've thought about suicide some more but it's too selfish and too pathetic so I must ride it out. I have to try and hope for the best and meet mediocre standards and be prepared for jealousy and ridicule as I go below people's expectations. The thought of it only makes me want to work triply hard for any job I get. I must learn to discipline my mind and treat things as important and regain my confidence that things will work out, that the child in the basement will be uplifted if you participated, that this is MLK's struggle for integration and that revolution is a red herring. I must learn to remember that people opening the window, eating, walking dully along smiling while others suffer is a normalcy of reality, and that they truly mean no harm or perhaps are ignorant in self-protection. That you can help with a smile, though that still feels wrong to me, because only the people supposedly helping have that choice to carry on, smile and forget about everyday woes. I feel angry on behalf of people I do not know, that being a symptom of my own privilege still, which leads to further frustration that there can be so much unfairness but as long as it breaches no thresholds it is tolerated regardless.
Wednesday 26 June 2019
Tuesday 25 June 2019
:thinking:
I think I should start by admitting that I've had the beginnings of what people would consider suicidal thoughts. I know that suicide ideation requires planning of method, time, place, etc. so I should not kid myself in thinking I've gone that far, but I have been thinking about it much more than usual.
It's pretty pathetic though, which is why I chose to write it on my blog which I haven't posted in a while. The ironic thing is I think a lot of it is stress from job hunting but this absolutely does only harm in a job hunt by putting your mental health on the internet. I say stress from job hunting when in fact everything is my own fault and I have not really done much about it because of a mental block. I supposedly pride myself on being adaptable but can't seem to manage something that supposedly everyone does. I remember a lot of things in different orders that I wanted to include in this post. One of them was just thinking about a friend whom I visited many times in the hospital when he was checked in for mental health. That friend told me the doctors were not helping, but the sheer helplessness and hatred of the situation he was in (having his movement controlled, meds, etc.) made him absolutely want to never go back and motivated him to try and get better. That's just honestly, very tragic... I don't know, perhaps we are being selfish by being depressed, and that logic of the system only seems to confirm this. A shame that most things are a lie these days and for all days. I should read Kurt Vonnegut after Infinite Jest.
The other thing I wanted to include was this poem, and perhaps 2, both of which I was crying to when they were spoken by Professor Natasha Trethewey during Weinberg's convocation. I took this from Emory's website:
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
It takes up a good chunk of the text, so I'm not going to write the other way here. I told a few brothers this, but the true banality of the poem manifested itself in the setting of its delivery - while I listened intently in awe at how ... correct... the poem was, my two neighbouring graduates were looking at their phones, maybe listening, maybe not, maybe texting about how someone was crying next to them, or how depressing the speaker was, and how they didn't need to hear it, because ironically, her tragic life, was not an important failure to them either. But it certainly helped me to feel, and that's how I know I can carry on, or how I know I must learn to praise the mutilated world.
Soon I will have to leave my blog as is and write other things.
The poem goes even further; it reminds me of times when I felt that the suffering of others was not my own, and I had somewhere to get to and I sailed calmly on. Right now it frightens me how little I can do for others, how little attention the homeless man sleeping on a pile of soft garbage must get, and yet he carries on because he must. And yet I am upset over my own privileged life because I am upset that he does not get that same opportunity, and I believe the system will only benefit me if I play it. But this is not true, according to everyone around me, and yet this is not what my classes have taught me, but surely this is what all the fancy-clothed people around me must believe, as they stroll past Icarus in the dumpster. How curious that it follows the opposite pattern as another story I've been thinking of lately, the Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, which if you have not read... well you should and if you've forgetten its premise, you could catch up with this well-written article.
My mind strays then to the Little Match Girl, another story about poverty... But what is this abstract poverty I'm thinking of? Am I not just romanticizing the poor and exploited? That is when I think of Brave New World, about a happy socially-stratified country which somehow still makes absolutely no sense. Because maybe the book was about how happiness is meaningless without freedom, yet today the latter is easily traded, and you would be childish to go against the meta. OK, I think I've cried enough for now.
It's pretty pathetic though, which is why I chose to write it on my blog which I haven't posted in a while. The ironic thing is I think a lot of it is stress from job hunting but this absolutely does only harm in a job hunt by putting your mental health on the internet. I say stress from job hunting when in fact everything is my own fault and I have not really done much about it because of a mental block. I supposedly pride myself on being adaptable but can't seem to manage something that supposedly everyone does. I remember a lot of things in different orders that I wanted to include in this post. One of them was just thinking about a friend whom I visited many times in the hospital when he was checked in for mental health. That friend told me the doctors were not helping, but the sheer helplessness and hatred of the situation he was in (having his movement controlled, meds, etc.) made him absolutely want to never go back and motivated him to try and get better. That's just honestly, very tragic... I don't know, perhaps we are being selfish by being depressed, and that logic of the system only seems to confirm this. A shame that most things are a lie these days and for all days. I should read Kurt Vonnegut after Infinite Jest.
The other thing I wanted to include was this poem, and perhaps 2, both of which I was crying to when they were spoken by Professor Natasha Trethewey during Weinberg's convocation. I took this from Emory's website:
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
It takes up a good chunk of the text, so I'm not going to write the other way here. I told a few brothers this, but the true banality of the poem manifested itself in the setting of its delivery - while I listened intently in awe at how ... correct... the poem was, my two neighbouring graduates were looking at their phones, maybe listening, maybe not, maybe texting about how someone was crying next to them, or how depressing the speaker was, and how they didn't need to hear it, because ironically, her tragic life, was not an important failure to them either. But it certainly helped me to feel, and that's how I know I can carry on, or how I know I must learn to praise the mutilated world.
Soon I will have to leave my blog as is and write other things.
The poem goes even further; it reminds me of times when I felt that the suffering of others was not my own, and I had somewhere to get to and I sailed calmly on. Right now it frightens me how little I can do for others, how little attention the homeless man sleeping on a pile of soft garbage must get, and yet he carries on because he must. And yet I am upset over my own privileged life because I am upset that he does not get that same opportunity, and I believe the system will only benefit me if I play it. But this is not true, according to everyone around me, and yet this is not what my classes have taught me, but surely this is what all the fancy-clothed people around me must believe, as they stroll past Icarus in the dumpster. How curious that it follows the opposite pattern as another story I've been thinking of lately, the Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, which if you have not read... well you should and if you've forgetten its premise, you could catch up with this well-written article.
My mind strays then to the Little Match Girl, another story about poverty... But what is this abstract poverty I'm thinking of? Am I not just romanticizing the poor and exploited? That is when I think of Brave New World, about a happy socially-stratified country which somehow still makes absolutely no sense. Because maybe the book was about how happiness is meaningless without freedom, yet today the latter is easily traded, and you would be childish to go against the meta. OK, I think I've cried enough for now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)