dawn-steals-the-night:
coldalbion, you’re right of course. I just seem to have lost my flow and I’m not feeling very useful. And I know it’s alright to not be ‘useful’ sometimes. I’m just used to having things to distract me from my existential lonliness and boredom and I’m not as good at self motivating as I would like to be, as I fall into this pit of despair at times and it,s difficult for me to claw my way back out. It’s a horrible, vicious cycle
I’m glad you are cool with my existence 🙂 I literally can’t stop…
Xoxo
So, I click reply on this, and what starts playing?
“I dreamed I died, ended up at the gates of Heaven
Greeted by a man Saint Someone, said how’s the ride son?
It’s been alright, at times a little rough, why am I here?
You did alright, lived a little dark and that’s alright
‘Cause we made the darkside and the rightside is to have no fear, no fear
My whole life flashed in front of me
I saw everything that I was and what I had done
Even let me look back on some good times for a little fun
Yes, a little fun
And then I heard “Damn boy, you done good,
Did the every little thing that you could.”
And then I heard “Damn boy, you done good – Damn good!”
When you hear the call, bury them all
Destroy all or nothing
When I hear the call, I will bury them all
I will destroy all or nothing
When the sky opened up and the clouds parted clear
There wasn’t any doubt to why I was here
And I knew I’d done a good job, the best job that I could do
So now it was time to move on, to get on, to get back
To the question of why I was here and what I had learned, no fear.” – I Dreamed I Died, Devildriver
I’m going to say something potentially contraversial here, so please feel free to tell me to piss off. You see, I can completely empathise with that kind of vicious cycle, and that yawning maw of the pit of Despair you mention. I’ve been there, myself repeatedly.
And it’s interesting that you point out that you can’t stop existing, because believe it or not, that’s the precise way you can set fire to those notions of boredom and loneliness. What you said there is precisely the way you can find yourself once more dancing around a bonfire, feeling the rhythms of the tides, the pulse-beat drumming of the kosmos vibrating through your bones.
Because we’re sold on boredom as something to be escaped from, and like most states, it’s been pathologised by culture. Do the Thing, cease being bored, cease feeling disconnected and isolated.
Push the button. Do the Thing. Feel better. It’s all very mechanical in a sense. Like we’re things of whirring cogs and mathematics instead of messy things of flesh and blood, pain and pleasure, lust, hate, desire, creativity and teeth-baring, gut-aching laughter and frenzy.
Cause we made the darkside and the rightside is to have no fear, no fear…
Now, you don’t know me beyond words on a screen, so I’m going to ask you to have to take a leap of faith here. And it’s a big one, but it’s no more than you do every day when you walk outside and your front door and expect to be presented with recognisable objects and forms that you know how to interact with and manipulate – instead of the raw, ceaselessly flowing flux of the quantum soup that surrounds us.
Hell, I don’t even know your name, and yet I’m asking you to consider the fact that boredom and existential loneliness aren’t bad things at all. That’s pretty arrogant of me, wouldn’t you say? To come into a complete stranger’s mental space, and tell them their perceptions are off. What an arsehole!
Suggesting to you that these states aren’t things to be escaped at all, but rather they can serve as doorways into their own negation? Where the hell does this guy get off?
.Of course it’s natural to want to escape that ache. Of course it’s natural to want to embrace the distractions to avoid the tiny-but-endless gnawing at your soul.
And like you said, you can’t stop, can you? There’s this rebellious, heretical streak, this primordial thing that keeps you going, that would be the thing sending the ache along the nerves of your soul, if your soul had nerves, that is.
The thing that’s steadily informing you of the disconnect, the boredom. Again and again, it’s there, under all the distractions – and when they cease, it’s there immovable and inviolate, like grit in your eye.
Why in all hells won’t it let you have any peace; again and again it comes, presses into you unceasingly, draining things of colour? It’s no wonder you’re exhausted – it keeps going even on those occasions you manage to forget about it, and you only realise how draining it’s been, in the quiet moments after.
I might be wrong? Maybe I don’t get it at all? That may be the case. Or it mightn’t be like that at all.
Only you can say for certain. But if it were me? I’d study the boredom, get up and close and personal with the thing that’s telling you something is up. Learn its rhythms, its language. Every time the achje arises, notice what’s happening, right there, then.
You might find that the moments of loneliness and boredom also contain Something Else, as well.
I usually do, but then, I’m weird.
Best of luck!
