“Emptiness is loneliness and loneliness is cleanliness and cleanliness is Godliness and God is empty, just like me” Monday
10 March 2008
There are some days when I can do little more than get out of bed. The mere idea of being awake is enough to overwhelm me, and I just can’t wait until the time when I can be asleep again.
I’ve been an insomniac since I was 16… In fact, I don’t remember sleeping well before that, I think that I just noticed it then, because that was the year my dad moved out and my mom went back to school and the house was so quiet.
Lately there have been things roaming around in my subconscious that are preventing even the insane medications I’ve been prescribed from letting me sleep more than four hours every few days. I sit around awake and tired all night. I sit around awake and tired all day. I have very real things I could be getting done, but most of them involve some form of human interaction, and I just don’t do well with that.
I’ve been thinking a lot about random acts of violence in the last few days. Thinking about these murders has had a great deal to do with that, I’m sure… but beyond that, I’m thinking of my own desire to commit random acts of violence. Sometimes I feel like my skin is too small for all of the anger that’s inside of me, and if I don’t slam something into the wall, or better yet, tear the entire goddamn wall down, I’ll probably explode. Sometimes my anger is directed at people, but not usually… Usually when I’m angry with people I want to kick inanimate objects until those objects TRULY understand how pissed off I am. Like the vacuum cleaner, or my bathroom door. They REALLY need to know that I am angry, goddamnit. That I am unable to control the world around me, that I’m unable to control the world inside my house, or even the world inside of my head. Evidenced by the fact that I’m not sleeping. Evidenced by the fact that I’m fake!emoting. Evidenced by every single thing that’s outwardly visible to any random person who might come into contact with me.
I have a post in response to Democrat1’s comment from yesterday that I fully intend on writing, but today… I’m just so angry. I suppose I could take it as one of the stages of grief, and it is… I just feel like my entire life is a continuous circle of grief. A carousel of grief and I can’t get off and I can’t get the fucking brass ring, either. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Skip the Acceptance. Later, rinse, repeat. My life is a Kübler-Ross model and I hate it. I hate it so much I want to kick my bathtub.
There are things that need to be done…there are things that need to be done. There are things that need to be done.
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression.
Acceptance, please? I’m ready any time You are.
University Politico 
20 January 2009 at 9:32 am
Well I don’t feel hate and anger anymore. But I do understand your words, since I’ve been through depression and still have problems sleeping. In my case, it’s more about emptiness, which is indeed possible to turn into Godliness. But what is need to be found is will.
21 January 2009 at 9:14 am
7372vrP7ltwsG
23 March 2011 at 8:17 am
i think i can really feel each word written above… as i am facing same situations..i don’t even remember the day since when i am into it but yes i spend sleepless nights…. i am not able to sleep….and don’t know why… i feel restless everytime.. so, many things are not going according to me or i am not going according to so many thing, i don’t undestand…..
29 May 2011 at 8:21 am
I came across this looking up the zero lyrics, I’ve been a fan since 1994-95 and I always, even as a 12 year old, related to Corgan’s despondant/religious (even though I’m not religious, nor was I raised religious), trapped/transcendant lyrics. I can relate to your candid, genuine expression of feeling trapped in your own head, which traps you in your house and alienates you from the only people that actually care, who can help. And everyone’s got issues, so they start wondering why you’re not talking to them, so they start to question your motives, not realizing what’s REALLY going on, which just ends up feeding back into your depression, your confined world of ever tightening isolation. I know this world better than I know what ‘regular’ people call the ‘real’ world even though neither exist. I also know that the carousel stops once and a while and lets us off for a chance to explore ourselves and the ourside world before we forget how dizzy and alone we got on that ‘ride’ and we end up leading ourselves right back to that attractive loop, that deceptive loop. I know this is an old post and I don’t know you or if you even still have this blog/journal, but I can relate so incredibly well to what you wrote (except about wanting to do violence to others; I’m the polar opposite, I internalize it and end up wanting to do violence to only myself…a desire to do violence upon others would just add to the guilt I feel), so that’s why I’m sharing this. Plus I just came out of my own carousel of self isolation. They last anywhere from just a couple days to several months. So anytime the ride stops, I take a chance to reach out, explore, make my mark in as selfless a way possible, learn what I can, because I know I always end up getting stuck in that darkness again (I call it the monoblack). I’m also a lifelong insomniac. I’ve stayed awake with zero sleep for as long as four days (never longer, though usually two or three when its bad), until the hallucinations terrified me into intentionally shutting down. I wish I could remember that trick for when I can’t sleep, but it took demons looming up and over the television set and hovering over to me, speaking in the crying voice of my mother strange and terrible contemptuous things to pull that one off. I understand is what I’m saying, and I hope the ride stops for you once and a while too. Because I felt like I was reading my own writing when I read this and we’re all the same, as different as we are. We’re all apart of the same flame, the same ice cold nothing, so I see you as me, and me as you, so in a sense I’m talking to myself. But I also know words like this can’t pull you out of a monoblack hole, but when you’re out, I find they’re appreciable. If you ever want to, email me. It just seems, psychologically, emotionally, rationally/irrationally, we’re pretty genuninely similar. I don’t see that often.
29 May 2011 at 8:25 am
invisibleinhabitant001@gmail.com if you want
29 May 2011 at 10:04 am
Strange…just out of curiosity I read some more from your blog and it’s almost creepy how much of our experience aligns. I went through the community college system, dropped out twice due to mental illnesses and learning disabilities as well, and always felt that getting to a respectable university was beyond me, not intellectually, but socially, which actually goes against what I think I care about doing with my life.
But I also realize its a game in a large way, and you have to play it ‘their’ way some of the time to move ahead one space, which is the space relative to ‘their’ space which allows you to do things your way, in order to change ‘their’ ways.
I have I suppose philosophical reasons against the use of labels to identify a single entity composed of a metamorphosing amalgam of such varying interests, never stable or linear, a fluxion in sources, degrees and varieties of desire, intrigue, pain, community, which I suppose is where you get terms like anarcho-syndicalist-socialist-eco-friendly-straight edge-neurobiologist…a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
I suppose I relate most to ontological anarchism, but labels of any nature necessarily designate a divide, which disables trust, communication and cooperation between groups, collectives, parties, nations, states, religions, communities, families and all other kinds of isolated networks of people to some degree, which is what led me towards linguistics in a large way. Language is such an isolating medium for the transmission of pure data, pure emotion, pure meaning from one mind to another’s, yet it is one of our only mainstream models capable of untainted, quality understanding–the only better models being the metalanguages used in linguistics, which sets off an infinite regress of meta-metalanguages anyhow never arriving at the non-existent absolute nugget of truth used only by linguists, semioticians, logigians, etc., which nobody but those in scholastic circles can actually comprehend (most people don’t ever learn relational or boolean algebra or just formal logic).
It’s just strange because I was reading something from a friend and a line said “Lonliness is next to Godliness”, which made me think of Zero and I thought to myself just out of curiosity, “Doesn’t the lyric put emptiness next to loneliness, loneliness next to cleanliness and then cleanliness next to godliness?”, which made me look it up, which is what landed me here. And like I said, reading this post was like reading a mirror entry of something I’d have written a couple weeks ago, two years ago, ten or fifteen years ago, at any point in my life really. And then I read about your academic struggles and triumphs, your interest in linguistics/frustration with the university department of linguistics, and your anarcho-feminist association. I didn’t realize until then that you were a female. I assumed, probably from the suggestion of violence, that you were a male.
I was just astounded by the parallels, the differences within the parallels, and all in all it just makes me wonder about myself and other people more. It seems as if you’ve acheived a lot despite the weight you have to carry around, which is often invisible to others, especially people who aren’t particularly close, but it can be a transparent struggle for them even, which can make things all the more difficult for you, the one carrying it all. Because it is an invisible struggle, an invisible illness, the only visibile traits of it are the minds responses to it. And people may think you’re faking it, exaggerating, just too weak to cope with the same things as everyone else–none of which is true–but just the very thought that other people may be thinking these things makes someone with mental illness all the more disturbed and hurt, because one feels as if they have to shake it off, get up and go against the grain even though what you’re up against is nothing at all what people who aren’t inflicted are up against, which is largely a distortion of one’s self.
I don’t respond like this often, I’m just struck by the similarities, and maybe I find comfort in that. I don’t know anyone like me. The only people I’ve met like me were the people I’d meet when I would be hospitalized, something thankfully I haven’t had to deal with in over seven years. But in my daily life, no one I know suffers from this indescribable isolation, so no one I know struggles like I struggle. I struggle with all the same things as my friends, and then its all exponentiated by the filters my perceptions have to run through, distortive filters, hyperattentive filters which actually are responsible for my extremely high attention to detail and interest in philosophy, linguistics, pharmacology, neuroscience, genealogy, ethnobotony, embryology, and on and on, just the same as my mind focuses deeper and deeper into my own complexes which might exist, might not exist. Maybe they only exist because of the hyper-filtration I place beneath my perceptions, and maybe I really do invent all of this, and maybe there is no disease, no illness, just me. See what I mean?
I agree with something else you said, about not centering a blog’s issues around one’s self, but making them about other people, the outside world, issues which concern us all, and I entirely agree with that (even though I’ve absolutely devoted this/these entire posts to parallels between myself and yourself). Self-reverential, as I believe you put it–and to that point, reverence is deprecration; self-reverence is, or at least can be, self-deprecation depending on what is read between the lines, on what’s not being revered, or perhaps what IS being revered and therefore inflated. I’ve been incredibly interested in the nature of paradox lately–paradoxes in our personalities, in techno-media evolution, in socio-political movements, in nature itself–and I’m beginning to see the function of it in everyday reality, in history, in the evolution of mankind. And yet these imbalances–illnesses, handicaps, disorders of all kinds–are in themselves paradoxes. Fundamentally, the very nature of things which have been allowed to grow without hindrance is the same nature of other things which can’t grow at all due to some pressure weighing down on them. And that’s when paradoxes have to be dissected, deconstructed, analyzed, compared, reorganized, and in the end NEVER fully understood. But they’re not supposed to be understood. They’re relative, fleeting, in consistent flux with themselves and other paradoxes, so they’re forever out of our grasp. But we can run faster and catch our openings (get off that carousel and explore while you can) and throughout a lifetime get closer and closer to an understanding and further and further away from the isolation of chaotic confusion.
I also like to sketch and paint–I love all sorts of mediums–basically I just love creating, which some people associate with being an ‘artist’ which is a term I destest because its not really the same as, say, musician. I play guitar and piano, and while living in San Diego I pursued that path to the best of my ability before returning to chicago, and whether I’m creating music or not, I have the ability to play an instrument, or several. But artist, I don’t get it; THAT seems like a self-reverential term to associate with identity. But I’ve been called an artist since before I can remember, which I think is just what people call someone who can draw really well at a young age, or an old age for that matter. I’ve been writing a novel about all of this–paradoxes of identity, sentiment, language, romanticism, spirituality, psychology, politics, basically paradoxes wherever I find them, which is typically…everywhere–and I found at first it was a sort of, corny description, but a light at the end of the tunnel. I started writing the novel and the more I got into it, the more I understood things that had baffled me for years. I was in the clear for a whole month, writing everyday, and at the end of it I had 100+ pages of analysis and dissection of paradoxes in a multitude of academic domains, which unveiled a link between them all, leading me ultimately to this idea of the hierarchical model being the ultimate problem with our world. Everything is based on a hierarchical model, from the global economy down to national militaries, state economics, cultural classes/castes, familial roles, modes of learning and even our hindsight regard for our own individual life paths (newborn-youth-adolescence-[strange zone]-adulthood-middle age or mid life-later life-death). So the novel actually sent me back into a monoblack type carousel again, which I actually thought I’d escaped for good by writing this novel (so naive). But ultimately it led me to integrating into deconstruction-reconstruction of paradox the aspect of the potentiality of heterarchical models replacing hierarchical models. It just seems to me that mental illness and basically the whole spectrum of problems facing society are actually, in some ways, linked to systemic causes, starting way up top and trickling down in ways we find difficult to comprehend because from a causal point of view, we find no causal relationship between corporatocracies (MNC/TNC’s, monopolies and mega-conglomorations intertwined with government and society) and bi-polar disorder. But the more I dig, the more I realize nothing in existence follows hierarchical systems, no matter how much trees resemble fractals and no matter how much fractals seem hierarchical. Things are far more heterarchical, interlinking, like webs, not trees, so the causal relationships between these systemic problems are impossible to find because the mind is plugged into hierarchy.
I’m hyper-ranting, I should just delete this. But I’m going to post it whether its read or not, whether someone finds something in it or not, because I know there’s a thread in there, but more importantly, I have no one to relate a lot of this stuff to. And maybe you’ll read all this and think, “What similarities? Psycho…” to which I say, “Fair enough”, but I’ve always been a non-linear, heterarchical thinker thinking against a society full of linear, hierarchical category obsessed lunatics who think I’M the psychopath. And I’m starting to think that’s simply not true. What you experience as a mental illness is surely true and happening and valid and legitimate, but what you call it, its meaning I think is distorted. I think to a large extent society at large is mentally ill, and the truly creative, adamently opposed forces which pop up into this world from the muck are the ones with their heads on straight. I mean people like you, me, and a ton of others who society deems problematic (‘artists’, musicians, left-wing intellectuals–anarchists, socialists, libertarians [not the American Libertarian party, I mean true libertarians]) and even dangerous, because out of the tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of these types of people, a handful become the next Martin Luther King Jr., the next Gandhi, the next Cesar Chavez, the next Nelson Mandela, the next Timothy Leary, the next Noam Chomsky, the next Howard Zinn. And a whole lot of others become the influential sources, the catalysts of these emergent “dangerous” types, people like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Federico Garcia Lorca, Umberto Eco, Yuri Lotman, Terrence McKenna, Alan Watts, T.S. Elliot, Sylvia Plath, and a million others I couldn’t name. It’s almost as if they WANT such disorders to exist, and they want the negative stigmas attached so you can’t get help, but they also want to get their hands on the pharmaceutical industry and mass produce ‘cures’, which for the most part numb people and kill creativity, which allows them to keep on trying for the cure, producing a new medication every time their profits start to drop. There’s a strange connection between it all.
This is so long. I should probably start my own blog. Out of everything said, I hope you’re getting closer to whatever it is you feel you need to be near.
18 August 2011 at 1:58 am
hmmmmmmm
9 September 2012 at 12:50 pm
Hope lies in the future, may God meet y’all where it counts the most.