Dear reader,
I’m sitting here exhausted from the ills I managed to contract recently–a headache that won’t let me sleep, fatigue that won’t let me think, and nausea that won’t let me eat. I cannot do any of my three favorite things to do. And yet, although I find myself in an effective state of inactivity, I nonetheless find it easier to deal with my reality by attempting to distract myself with a confession. And we all know a confession is the most therapeutic act after transgression, but I am not sure if what follows amounts to a combination of the two.
I have found my thoughts wandering to despair recently, corroding the image I had of what earning a PhD would be. It’s a general despair, not one of any specific nature, but perhaps not a general one either. That would be inaccurate. It is a specific despair, but one I cannot recognize. I project things onto it. I project phantoms like hurricanes or despots onto it, but none of the projections capture my despair. Am I just going through some kind of middle-PhD crisis? I figure it can’t be that weak. But I figure it is that weak; just don’t take what follows as pure, as a representation.
I hate the idea of writing. I sat down the other day to work on an assignment due tomorrow, and on the wings of Mercury, I leapt over two hours of time and told myself that, despite no objective sign of any work done, I had nonetheless made progress in thought. Maybe I did; I don’t remember. But the idea of writing engenders in me such a ferocious repulsion of late, I have found myself compensating in so many pathetic ways, the above of which is an excellent example. It’s like every time I think I’ll sit down and write, my compulsion turns on itself because we need the future if we want anything to matter, and there is no future when the worst has already happened. And it has–we only have to watch the worst unfold.
I am unsure if I even hate anything anymore. A friend of mine and I joked recently that even the coming apocalypse is boring. You know? The coming apocalypse in which humanity ends not in flames (well it will when we launch nuclear missiles against each other), but in a Wall Street scandal of such a scale due to its algorithmic reach that production simply cannot reproduce itself in the wake of its disruption. Supply chains will sputter to a halt. Then war. But everything is boring now, so the war will probably be a series of cyber hacks from nerds. Heroes don’t exist anymore.
I just don’t know if I should laugh, cry, scream in rage, or drool. Perhaps an emoji? That just doesn’t matter.