Apathy

I'd forgotten why I need to keep myself relentlessly busy, why I need to push myself to achieve and create. Lurking underneath my resolute motivation is all-consuming apathy. Sometimes I fancy myself a kind of of crusader against apathy, fighting to keep my life fresh and active and purposeful. I fight because the apathy constantly threatens to take over. When it wins, it paralyzes me to a point where I can no longer function. I become far too weak to grasp out for a purpose or mission, too tired to see meaning in things that I usually value. I just get really depressed and awful to be around.

Frank Herbert's Dune is not necessarily my favorite book, but I have taken from it a litany that guides my thoughts and actions. Supposedly. I'm not religious and I don't associate myself with strongly established political schools of thought--perhaps another symptom of searing apathy. But I strongly identify with a personal philosophy, and I stole it from a science fiction book. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear; I will permit it to pass over and through me. And when it is gone I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I remain.

I am on a brazen and naive quest to eliminate my own fear, but the apathy and depression I've experienced in the last two days for no particular reason betray the truth. For me, apathy has always been a defense mechanism for burying fear. In high school I was often beset by anxiety, and I learned to push it out with emptiness. There's nothing to lose if you aren't emotionally invested in anything.

These days I invest my emotions plenty. I urge myself to be passionate. I started a blog so I could let out speeches like this one that stew in my brain when no one's around to listen to them. I let myself love people who are far away. I stand up for things loudly. Not any particular religion or political ideology, but an odd smattering of things like open-source software and sexual equality and creative freedom. I think that sometimes I am overcompensating.

But isn't that better? Isn't it better to push yourself and expend all of the energy you could possibly spend on passion than to walk listlessly through the prescribed lifestyle everyone else leads, not caring about anything in particular? I am a child of relative privilege and I haven't had to fight for much in my life. My parents and grandparents fought the wars, they fought to have a place in this country, they fought to give their children lives where they wouldn't have to fight. But I have warrior's blood and I can't not fight. I am going to kick and scream about something and I feel goddamn stupid if I'm going to kick and scream about nothing. Because I will not go down like the sheep I live among. No matter how much I resemble them sometimes. No matter how hard I fall from the fight sometimes, drenched in the flooding rainstorm of fear, caught up in the prison of my apathy.

Run

Maybe these streets meant something to me once but right now they exist to disappear underneath my feet. Trying to cushion the contact with concrete as my ankles buckle and roll but never twist. I was someone once, someone whose thoughts stewed in static pools, someone with opinions and observations to share with the world in one excited breath. But now I'm sedated on endorphins and amped up on adrenaline, bombs going off in succession in my dumb and happy brain. Can't stop my arms and legs from the back and forth and now I am going, going on one thought: breathe. Feels better a lot better than thinking about the pain.

Hello Internet. My name is Jackie.

I think we've met before, in different manifestations of our true selves. I was a green teenager who thought the world was a shining pearl cradled in her little hands. You were a spectacularly evil black hole of time that enabled me to poke my friends from long distance. Or maybe, when I was a confused child, you were a cesspool of spambots and trolls with the power to irritate normal users in real time (it was novel in those days). Merely to amuse myself, to satisfy my pursuit of information (no matter the quality), I would explore your dankest caverns and peaks of enlightened beauty.

Now, we meet in forms forged anew. An adult has moved into my head and attempted to take over, but the child lives on. And you seem more inviting than you were in the past; less like a labyrinth of the unknown or a chatty schizophrenic and more like an old friend who wants to hear what I have to say.

And, although I doubted it for some time, I suppose I do have a thing or two to say. The hard part is making myself sit down to write it all out.

Speaking of which, those stories won't write themselves. Except when they do.

are you

Are you drifting through fields of wheat,
dreaming past parking lots and skyscrapers
into night-forests of blooming stars?
Are you pondering the king who became a farmboy,

or the princess who slept at true love's kiss?

Are you wondering about the clouds,
the mind that moves the mouth that breathes them?
Are you wandering into lightning storms and gentle rain,
weathering the desert of lost hope?
And do you pause amidst it all
with my name soft upon your lips?