27: Reintroduction
I want to start again here. To be frank, I've spent the last two or three months deeply immersed in a largely functional depression. Functional in the sense that I've been able to go to work or go outside or see people, but depressed in the sense that I have wanted to die every day. I sometimes feel like my ability to write and conceptualise is a canary in the coal mine for my mental state, and unfortunately the only things I have been able to write about through this time are the angst itself and the internal dilemmas which sparked it. In a sort of ill-advised stoic attempt to think my way out of a crisis I obsessed over this, locked into the process and convinced I could not be released until all the answers to my anguish have divinely conceived from the page.
In an obtuse paradoxical way this actually worked and the answers did indeed manifest themselves, in the sense that performing this process has led me to understand that this process is certainly not the answer: the manic writing is unfinished, but while nearing a kind of desperate conclusion it finally prompted an epiphanical reminder that living is a long process of embracing uncertainty. Being comfortable with the lived state of not-understanding is preferable to (and more attainable than) obtaining self-actualisation and total comprehension, and on reflection this is one of my core beliefs. Long have I regarded the pursuit of neat and comforting answers as a fruitless form of temporary pacification; the addictive and manipulative technique of childish and evangelical religions, and I'm distressed by how easily and effectively this concept was locked away from my consciousness for these long months of sadness.
As a result of all this, all I have to show for 2025 thus far is several thousand rambling words of personal memoir and uneducated philosophy attempting to rationalise a newfound inability to determine my values, how to express virtue, or whether I should care about being virtuous or ethical at all. I believe in certain actions being the right thing to do, but I no longer believe in doing the right thing. These feelings originated in the depression but have lingered into the present and ossified into a perverted crisis of conscience: rather than feeling shame for actions lacking in conscience, my crisis is instead an embarrassment for ever having been conscientious.
Measured against any of the benchmarks I formerly subscribed to, I am becoming a worse person. Day by day my self degrades further towards what I would have deemed feckless and detestable, weak, valueless, selfish. Yet now my past self is no longer attacking, and anyway I am unarmed and indefensible; I described the effects of the malaise as merely lingering, but in truth some persist immutably. I have been altered in some way and I feel aware of the permanence of it, lasting scars of an unnecessary and unprovoked mental turmoil substantiated in a corporeal change, into something worse and more pragmatic.
I don't know what I'll do with the words I wrote, to be honest. I'm loathe to read them at this point. Though while writing it I intended to send it to you I'm aware that at best it is wildly off-topic for this platform, and worse is full of malformed half-ideas, juvenile if not childish. I read parts of it aloud to someone recently, which felt good, so maybe it's suited to some kind of performance where its irrational angst might be justifiably woven into the text and its audience might not be able to scrutineer the finer points long enough to see through them, or to accompany something visual where viewers might be softened and distracted by the primary visual medium and the text might be alleviated by its secondary status. I suspect it holds more weight as meaningless self-expression than as rational discourse. I don't know, but we're here now so I'm ready to move on if you are?
I began writing these emails when I was a full-time student, working for pay only a day or two a week and otherwise getting to spend hours and hours reading and writing about things I care about. I think it's healthy to admit that I don't have that framework now, and even if I were succeeding in my current aim of spending a day a week studying then I'd still always feel like I've fallen behind. So where in the past I'd used this space to talk about some big ideas or events and distil some research into a digest, I'm going to focus instead on sharing the normie things I am actually working on, while hopefully along the way I can drop more brief open-ended thoughts like the notes below and we can let some immature concepts develop and provoke each other into some new ideas.
