Descent: Part Two

Despair comes when I feel like my work has no purpose. Despair comes from feelings of naught, I am naught, my work is naught, the world is naught . . .

But what is despair?

Despair is the conviction of the futility of life.

Despair is all efforts signifying nothing.

Despair is the abortion of possibility.

Despair is a yoke that reads “Carry Me or Die.”

My despair feels like the abrupt end to a good movie. I wish I could return to those beginning parts and relive the experience, feel those powerful emotions. I regret having felt joy; it seems like a cruel reality, something that was given and taken away.

Despair is my grandfather’s overcoat hung on the door when he comes back from drinking and gambling. The house is silent. My grandmother is crying up in her bedroom.

My despair is a pit of solitude the town bullies throw me into so they can piss on me and shout jibes.

My despair is the convincing reality that I am stuck forever.

My despair is the inability to stay in one place, physical or otherwise.

My despair is the absence of wanting to do anything. Nothing interests me anymore.

My despair is a shopkeeper who scowls at me when I enter his store.

I used to be a drug addict. I am still seeking respite.

The Internet promises fulfillment. The type of person you are depends on what that fulfillment might be.

One moment, I feel like a king surveying his realms on a map of the world.

The next, I feel like the king’s fool, making jokes about the king’s empty possessions.

For three days, I am gliding through existence—every sensation a lubricant to positive emotion, every thought an expansive, intelligent connection.

For two more days, I am shedding my charisma and beginning to walk in a growing fog of self-delusion.

By the end of the week, lethargy and despair pour in through the levees.

Cycles are part of nature right? The seasons are cycles, the day is a cycle, life is a cycle . . .

I yearn for a place outside my constant seeking. I yearn for repose at the end of the wheel’s turning.

For the first time, I am conscious of my despair.

I am conscious of the cycle that drives me to act, or not to act. For the first time, I am interrogating my sadness.

I restrain myself from becoming too indulgent in my feelings of intoxication. This is the beginning of learning detachment.

My tendency is to grasp positive emotion. Like a cunning alchemist, I will try to make joy into a fountain of ecstasy or happiness into glowing euphoria.

Now I can see the problem with that. After euphoria, there is emptiness and only emptiness; after ecstasy there is pain.

Flights of grandeur. Flights of poetic inspiration. Flights of high emotion.

Nothing lasts. The water returns to the sea. The flight I expect to go on forever will at once make its sharp descent.

Whatever is holding me, will let go.