[Transcribed from a
journal, originally written in ink]
Ask me what it means to live. I couldn’t tell you. I have
seen little, and done even less. But we all have a story. Insofar as the point
in time we speak from is a destination, there is a place from whence we came.
To boil that down to, well, a place, is understandably impossible, in anyone’s
case, but some want to share their story. Their motivations differ. Some are
trying to bridge the gap in a failing union of love, attempting to bare their
souls in order to overcome obstacles which they, in their heart of hearts, know
are insurmountable. Others have simply lived it up, spun a good old tale of
events they feel is worth relating. But what is my reason? What reason could
there be to tell a tale even more boring than it is sad, to burden an audience
with the internal conflict and teenage angst of nineteen years of life? I
suppose my reason is the same as that of the desperate lover, attempting to
impassion his companion with a deeper, more intimate knowledge yet untasted, to
reinvigorate a dying love with a new level of sincerity. Yes, we are one and
the same. We are looking to bridge the gap. But for him it is easier, for it is
not as difficult to dredge up something that was as to create new magic, a new
connection. Hear me, people. I want you to know my mind, and in having you know
it, maybe I will discover a desire to know yours. To bridge the gap, to make a
connection, to reach out from a place of loneliness. These are my reasons for
telling my story. These, and also that I firmly believe we lose a lot of
perspective as we move through our experience. When I was ten years old, I
distinctly remember thinking: “I’m going to lose this. Things will not always
be the same as they are now. I wish I could capture this, share it later, maybe
remind my future self.” And as I have moved through life, I have marked stages
in my inner development that were revolutionary to those before them. By
nineteen, the transformations my self has undergone are remarkable both in
their number and their profundity. The fear of losing the memory of those
transformations, the fear of forgetting they ever took place, makes me want to
tell my story. One can look at so many grown people with no perspective on
their lives; rats in a cage with an awareness of being trapped and no way out.
Those people suffer from a continuous string of unfortunate circumstances
brought about by their lack of knowledge about themselves. They have forgotten
their story. Oh, how many problems and conflicts of self would be resolved if
people could only speak to their five, to their ten, to their twenty year old
selves. To look into the eyes of those ghosts and reflect on how they have
changed, what they have lost and gained, what they need. When we act
upon the world, the world acts upon us. Knowledge of our personal story, the
record of our transformations and what they have made us, in the end and taken
together, is what allows us to act upon the world in ways that will elicit
positive reactions, favorable responses. We cannot know how we should act upon
the world before we learn what we want from the world, and forecasting those
desired results correctly depends entirely on possession of self-knowledge. In
my life, I have learned that I possess a drive to suffer. For whatever reason,
in the comfort of a sheltered, middle-class life, I took on burdens of the mind
and soul which were equivalent to psychological suicide. For many, many years,
I have operated from a place of loneliness, and the misery that oft strikes me
is a force which I cannot control. In my adolescence, I took on the burdens of the
world’s callous indifference, its evil, and its barely contained suffering. I
took into myself all the bad, and it blinded me, casting a veil of darkness
over my eyes and preventing me from seeing the good, the most profoundly beautiful occurrences of daily life. I
lost sight of beauty as a whole. And that was stupid, but I was driven to do it
by internal forces as yet beyond my understanding. I crushed my hope. Among the
things I murdered in my adolescent ruminations was my hope. But even as I read that
last sentence, I know it is a lie. My grandmother always told me: “Hope is
always the last to die.” As I sit here now, I still find it easier to talk
about the ember of hope in my soul as though it has long turned to ash, as
though it does not still have a heart of flame within. Which points to
something within me, I guess. See, isn’t this enlightening, this process? Hope
hurts. The possibility of pain that hope, and trust, and vulnerability bring
make me shirk away from them, make me want to crush them like subversive
parasites of the spirit. But hope is life. If you refuse to feel anything in
order to avoid feeling pain, you will fail, and experience the anguish, the
truly unbearable pain, of bitterness and repression. The feeling that you are
your own worst enemy. I hope that by writing an account of what I’ve
experienced as my transformations, I will impose some organization on my
headspace- figure out how to live again, maybe love myself. A tall order for
these scribbles in a creased and worn composition book, I know, but I have high
hopes for the written word. So, my repression of hope. I guess if you think
that things are horribly, fundamentally wrong in the world socially,
economically, and politically, and believe that little can be changed, that
perspective tends to taint your view of your own life. I’ve imposed my overall
hopelessness on the specifics of my existence, and that is terribly unhealthy
because now, I simply don’t act. This writing has been my first and only
attempt to climb out of my hole. I must find purpose. I have lived in a prison
of despair that I constructed brick by brick for far too long to derive much
personal joy from anything. Happiness seems…fleeting. So I speak to you. At the
root of it all, given that there is no plan for humans, my experience leads me
to believe that there is little more we can do than work to uplift others, to
enlighten those that come our way if we have something to share. Even if this
ranting bored most readers, even if it provokes unprecedented mockery, someone
will connect to my experience. As much as I do this for myself, to try and
recall the pieces of my story I fear I’ve already forgotten, I do this for that
someone. That someone who can’t quite understand why they view life in
grayscale, and who doesn’t feel the same depth of emotion others around them
seem to experience. This is my attempt to explain me, and if you read it, I
hope that you will read it for the form, the process of my introspection,
rather than the insignificant details of my plodding along. Read my take on my
story, and remember that you have your own, but most importantly, recognize
that knowing it is the key to your dreams.
-Artem Potemkin
No comments:
Post a Comment