Sifting through the wreckage

It's been several months since I've gone and gotten rid of the last four years of my life.

I suppose I had time to think, think too much, ignore, force myself to forget what had happened, what was felt and what I'd been through. To call it a breakdown might be too much. Was it a cry for help? For attention?

Through my readings in subsequent time, I've come across a way that best described what I did, and it is Monet's destruction of his paintings. I can only ponder what drives a man to destroy the very things he has created out of vision, passion and more than part of himself. Why only ponder? It's because I still have no answers. I romanticise the pain of what he's done, the madness of it, watching the very extension of your soul and mind and wanting to tear it into pieces. I think that's what I've done, because I look back and I feel emptiness. What have I done?

I don't claim my dime-store reviews were on any level close to the art of Monet, though. But each one of them, as amateur as they may have been, was a part of me. There were times I literally felt something draining right out my body the more and more I wrote. Coming to the end, my writing was described as inaccessible and cryptic and heavy. I thought it was my best work. If anyone was alienated, maybe that's how I felt too.

My friends have been utterly supportive and wonderful people. I've gotten tender pats on the head, tough love, all sorts of lovely advice and treatment from them. But it never felt adequate, since my ultimate problem is myself. It was something I had to fight, like a sickness which you have nothing but your insides to rely upon.

My family remains distant, and if anything they seem to hate me. Or rather I should say that they do hate me. They said so themselves. I've had nobody show me love me except the dog, and she shows her affection by biting. Perhaps this is the exchange we're all meant to have: some pain for some love.

But then I know my friends love me, and maybe I'm just a selfish, greedy, dependent black hole of feeling. I need and crave people constantly. Maybe that has been my flaw all along. I've never felt lonelier than I have this year, even though I spend all my free time in the office surrounded by work, even though I've not stopped socialising.

Last year was difficult. I had my heart broken by two people I thought could never hurt me. I warmed a stranger's bed and was left feeling nothing but disappointment and guilt. I performed terribly in school and let myself go.

This year has little improvement. My work and school work have gotten worse. I'm as fat as I was when I started university. I asked someone out on a date for the first time, and was given a negative. I don't know what I'll do for a job. I don't know when I'll write again.

It's whiny and shitty. I'm aware of the world. I know that a girl just got on a bus and was vandalised and slaughtered like she was a nothing. That Earth has a truly clear image of a barren vista on Mars. That Nintendo is suffering record financial losses and that a boy from Africa has superb engineering skills. In the scheme of things, I'm nothing. In the scheme of myself, this is everything.

I remind myself how much better I have it than most people, that I'm lucky, lucky, lucky.

Then why don't I feel lucky?

I want to start writing again. My hero died this year. Ebert was the one that made me want to be a reviewer. I wanted my words to reach as many people as his did, for it to matter, for people to reach out to challenge, to agree, to exchange. I wanted to have something to give to the world even though we're living in an era where the world gets enough and maybe even too much from everyone already.

I wasn't sure what I started writing this for. I was told to let go, to stop hanging on to my past because it's unsightly and pathetic. But if my past self was the best I have ever been, should I not try to model myself after that again? People will say try to build a new you. There's only so many times a person can be reborn. And maybe I can only dig up the flawed design. The one that succeeds and then crumbles. It doesn't seem like a bad idea considering how things have been.

If all I can have is a moment's stability in exchange for months of pain, then that sure beats this despairing ambivalence that I'm living in right now.