we’re here because we’re here

i’ve been thinking a lot about self-destructive tendencies i have. there are the obvious ones, like occasionally forcing myself into inadequate sleep cycles and eating 1.5 meals a day and not drinking enough water and all that. there’s also clout-chasing and excessive idolization and the insistence on finding new things to do until i can’t anymore. all the usual college student impulses i suppose

but the worst one has to be the relentless descents into negativity. i don’t know if it’s a personal issue or a universal struggle (i suspect it’s the latter and people just don’t talk about it), but i think this has been a problem for at least a few years now. the descents only get worse, i guess because the deepest adventure you’ve ever embarked on can only increase in depth while you live. you can cushion the fall, you can surround yourself with friends and teach yourself positivity and convince yourself of something about god, but i think the simple fact that you’ve been there before means you’ll probably wind up there again sooner or later

i can keep on pushing close people out of my life and i can make up excuses afterwards, like that it was for their own good or that i didn’t really like them. i can keep telling myself it’s okay to be sad, that it’s good for me even, and therefore i don’t need to pull myself out. i can keep insisting on sky-high standards and justify them as the only standards worth having. it’s so easy to understand all these recurring patterns when you take enough steps back, but even when i list them out like this they don’t feel wrong, they just feel like things i do

the bleakest part about being “condemned to be free” is that negativity is a choice i can make, and it’s a choice as valid as any other. i can choose it now and choose to follow it for the rest of my life and nothing will stop me. i can take my mind, my friends, my life, and destroy them, detonate them into tiny fragments of consciousness too scarred to ever reassemble, and nobody will come and save me. i know that nobody will save me because i haven’t saved anyone myself yet, even when they were right beside me, and i guess it’s everyone’s job to save each other but it feels like we’re always failing, doesn’t it?

it’s funny how every time you think you finally understand what sartre meant when he said “Everything has been figured out, except how to live” you inevitably spiral downwards again and realize that all this is impossibly hard, that there was more to figuring out how to live than you previously thought. and you think maybe this will be the last time you’ll have to go through this, but by now you probably know it won’t be

i’m reminded of my favorite quote from this is water: “None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death”. i think i know where i’m headed, and promises about happy endings and the afterlife and whatever can’t save me because they’re not the Truth; the Truth is nothing more than the choices you make and the energy which sustains those choices, and i really don’t know how long i can keep this up for but i guess that’s the whole point of all this, isn’t it?

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“You know how in winter it gets so cold you think it’ll never be hot again and in summer it gets so hot you think it’ll never be cold again? I think that’s how it is with your feelings too. When you’re sad you think you’ll never be happy again and when you’re happy you think you’ll never be sad again. But you will be hot again, and you will be cold again, and you will be sad again, but most of all you will be happy again.”