Monthly Archives: March 2005

Having resolved to withdraw from my course, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief followed by a significant epiphany – I realised I’d transmuted all of my vague, amorphous angst about what I should be Doing About My Life (but wasn’t), into concrete, specific anxiety about work I should be doing for uni (but wasn’t, or at least not rigorously enough). In eliminating the latter by deciding to withdraw, I’d also, at least temporarily, eliminated the burden of the former.

I didn’t have anything to worry about anymore. I felt free, for the first time in maybe a year. I felt happy. I felt like I was existing in the present moment, rather than trapped within a suffocatingly rigid mental structure that I couldn’t possibly escape from.

I was reminded of the ultimate, liberating truth that I’d become terribly afraid of – because I saw it as being what had gotten me into this mess in the first place: all of this shit dragging me down was (just like.. whisper it.. everything else I perceive) a creation of my own mind.

My mind, which belongs to me. Mine.

I could choose to let it all go. I could relax.

Paradigm shift. Breakthrough.

The world changed.

My god it was beautiful.

Intense mental reshuffling ensued. In a wired, sleep-deprived, half-drunken state on Thursday night, I scrawled the following notes:

Nothing I do will ever be enough for what? For WHAT? You stupid boy – you have (and it’s a bit of a habit, isn’t it?) trapped YOURSELF within a recursive mental structure, which has locked your brain up almost completely, and caused you to lose sight of what life is really about – which is to say, the active, fluid, open-ended process of actually living it.

You must accept that you have been clinging desperately to the identity of a person who is dead, staring out of the eyes of a dead person. You must accept that you’ve done this to yourself. And you must stop. All you need to do this is to know that you can. And you can.

You, the person writing these words right now, is NOT DEAD. The person writing these words is 28 years old and their life is not over. It’s recognisable as still just beginning. And although that’s kind of dysfunctional, it’s a hell of a fuckload better than being dead. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Think it fucking is.

You have a past, but it’s finished. Over and done. It’s yours and you must accept that – but it isn’t YOU. It isn’t who you are. You are a living, breathing entity. You are an open-ended system. You are an ongoing concern. You are a work in progress.

You may not have the first idea who you are, but you can start finding out, and doing that can be a fun, vital, creative endeavour. And it can begin here, now. Fucking believe it.

Okay. That’s more than enough earnest, self-indulgent, self-obsessed drivel for the moment.

Observation: there’s a personality characteristic for you right there, no-self boy: YOU ARE INSANELY SELF-OBSESSED. It’s only natural: you are recognisable as going through a second childhood, of sorts. But work on that. Persue this whole construct-a-new-identity thing, for sure. But don’t take it too goddamn seriously. And make a major plank of it a resolution to LOOK OUTWARDS MORE. For your own sake, and everyone else’s. It’s so much more interesting.

My course at Melbourne Uni started at the beginning of March, four weeks ago.

I’d been looking forward to it, but at the same time felt enormously uncertain. About whether I could find the self-discipline to make a go of it. About whether it was really what I wanted to be doing. And uncertain about how, given how much of my time and energy was already consumed with simply coping (after a fashion), I would manage the workload.

I wondered whether I was just kidding myself in imagining that it was a realistic thing to attempt at my present juncture.

I enjoyed the furniture of it all. Buying stationary, going to lectures. Being a Student. But my fears were well-founded; by the end of Week 3 was falling behind and starting to panic. By the middle of Week 4, I was becoming a nervous wreck.

I decided, after some soul-searching, to withdraw, or at least defer until next year.

It felt surprisingly good.

So – I moved to Melbourne. And the challenge and the new setting were energising. But December, my first full month, was still unremittingly awful. I felt small and alone and ripped out of context. I suspected that I was likely to go insane, in a really, really bad way.

(I’ve arguably ‘gone insane’ before, but although these periods have been enormously disruptive, and damaged some of my relationships quite badly, they’ve also been extremely powerful experiences which provided me with insights and perspectives that couldn’t have been acquired any other way. They may have contributed to my subsequent ruin, but even so I’m glad to have had them. No doubt there will be more about this at some point in the future – although it’s an area I find frustratingly difficult to talk about.)

I still felt nothing had been ‘resolved’, and that this procluded any kind of ability to live a meaningful life. The sense that what I really needed to do was bite the bullet and commit suicide followed me everywhere I went. (Jesus. It gets chirpier, I promise. Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.) But I wasn’t allowed to do that. So there wasn’t anything I could do. Nothing I could do would ever be enough. This became my new mantra. Nothing I can do now will ever be enough. It beat being a VCR funeral of dead memory waste. But it was far from ideal.

What did I do in December? It’s a big grey blur. I took up a paid volunteer administrative position at beyondblue – partly because I’d previously been involved with them via a contract to develop their communications strategy scored by my old employer, a PR company also contracted by the byzantine beauracratic nightmare that men (and women too, naturally) call the Federal Department of Health. Partly because their CEO is a friend of my mother’s. Partly because I have, at times in the past, identified as a person ‘suffering from Depression’. Partly because they were willing to pay me $15 an hour without the responsibility of being a proper Employee.

It was crap, for all sorts of reasons. I felt dirty being there because the ‘blue is basically a cheersquad for psychiatry, an institution which I’ve come to regard with almost total skepticism and no little contempt. Being constantly surrounded by chirpy, brightly coloured promo material wittering about the eminent ‘treatability’ of depression (and just having to see the word everywhere, all the time) whilst trapped in a seemingly inescapable private hell was not much fun. Nothing was.

I did read Dave Eggers’ “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” – lent to me with enthusiastic recommendations by a friend several months earlier – and liked it enormously. I found its theme of confessional-autobiography-as-skin-shedding-exercise inspiring, in an abstract sort of way. It seemed like a successful attempt to do what I’d tried, and failed, to convince myself I should do in the latter part of last year.

I spent most of my spare time aimlessly surfing the web. Mostly, I read blogs. I was fascinated by the opportunity they provided to peek through the window of a computer screen into other people’s lives. Feeling that I didn’t have a life of my own – didn’t know how to live – they were recognisable as a form of research. And feeling pretty much totally cut off from other people in any interactive sense, they provided me some voyeuristic relief from loneliness.

Ideas about starting one of my own were scuppered by a sense that I had nothing to say which I’d want anyone else to hear. I felt inadmissable to the world. If I’d started a blog, it would have either been a horrible, endless, angstridden whingefest, or be indistinguishable from the sort of material produced by the Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator.

No good at all.

Here’s a starting point. It may seem a bit melodramatic. Bear with me; I really don’t know what I’m doing here. But I’m trying to be sincere.

About eight months ago, after a strange and difficult few years – the details of which may be revealed here over time, I guess – I reached a uniquely comprehensive personal nadir. I felt psychologically disemboweled; like my entire identity had finally dissolved down to nothing. I’d seen through everything, and recognised it as illusory. I’d lost the ability to believe in anything at all. I had a sense that I’d been completely excommunicated from the world, from any tangible sense of myself, and consequently from any ability to act, form opinions, or relate meaningfully to other people.

To the extent that I was able identify with a self, it was one which horrified and disgusted me, and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

I was a VCR funeral of dead memory waste.

I spend the next few months drifting like a ghost, drowning in a sea of memories retained from former selves, none of whom were me anymore. My life was over; my body and my cognitive processes just hadn’t caught up with it yet. I’ve felt lost before – indeed, historically I have felt that way to some degree more often than not, especially over the last five years – but this time it really seemed terminal.

Since I’d decided that I was not allowed to kill myself, I obsessed over what I could DO about this. I tore myself to pieces thinking about it. I considered undertaking some kind of grand autobiographical project, to help me reconstruct an integrated self-narrative, and consequently a viable sense of identity. But the prospect seemed hopelessly overwhelming. And I couldn’t convince myself that any honest account of my own history wouldn’t ultimately conclude with the protagonist being reduced to a broken, burnt-out shell.

In hindsight, I can now see that I did have a sense of self during that period, but it was an intolerable one. It consisted almost entirely of an indefinable, all-encompassing Problem trying desperately to resolve itself, coupled with an underlying awareness that this was impossible.

I ostensibly gave up on the idea that there was anything I could do about the situation. In late November, heavily coached and assisted by my family, I moved cities, from my native Canberra to Melbourne, took up digs in St. Kilda, and enrolled in a BA at the University of Melbourne.

I liked the idea of being a Student, and liked that it would enable me to give a convincing answer when queried as to what the hell I was doing with my life.

The challenge of relocating and functioning more independently, and the novelty of a new setting were good for me. But I hadn’t really moved on. My sense of being in an existential crisis devolved into a more mundane, but still hugely debilitating, depression. I was still almost totally paralysed psychologically. I was still turned almost totally inward, unable to connect with other people except on the most superficial levels. Almost all of my time and energy were still consumed by a constant, nagging, all-pervasive sense that time had stopped, and would continue to be on pause until I could figure out What The Hell To Do About Everything, along with a crushing awareness that there wasn’t, actually, Anything I Could Do.

Although I was conscious, able to sustain myself as a person in a technical sense, and had resolved at least on the surface to try and move forward and make the best of things, the subtext that My Life Was Over continued to underpin everything which I did and experienced.

It was no good at all.