a collapse (reprise)
I often think to myself, when is the inevitable mental collapse coming?
I’m oddly detached from the thought, as if I were in middle school again and having to answer a math question in class; yes, the square root of forty-nine is seven; yes, at some point my mind will absolutely fail me and I will fall into a haze of not being able to connect reality with the world of my mind.
I laughed heartily out loud the other day when I was doing some Enneagram research, and when speaking about my specific subtype, the author wrote that we 4w5’s “push the edges of sanity.”
I can’t decide where exactly the source of that lingering dread comes from. My disillusionment with a lot of things made me feel like the rug of my psyche has been ripped out from under me, but rather than falling, I’m just curiously floating there. I can’t put my feet on the ground, I can’t grab any objects, and I can’t float upwards. I just have to sit in the perpetual unknown.
After reading through a pretty decent bio-drama of Vincent Van Gogh’s life by Irving Stone called Lust For Life, I was floored by similarities in temperance between Van Gogh and myself. Not that I’m going to go chop my ear off anytime soon, but his mental decline at the end of his life worried me in the sense that if I’m not careful, I can see myself getting caught in the same sense of hopelessness that plagued the end of his life.
The purpose of life is something that we all struggle with. We all have to imitate, deconstruct, and reconstruct the things in ourselves and in our environments that somehow communicate “purpose” to us. My problem is that I’m pretty pessimistic about finding any sort of purpose, and all of my attempts to create purpose tend to just implode based off of factors I can’t control. Maybe this is how it feels for everybody, but barring some sort of “aha!” moment in my life (that seems to be a reality made real only in the facade of television and movies) I really think a mental collapse is inevitable.
Maybe.
I’m more skeptical of this line of thought, but maybe a center of gravity is starting to form around me. Maybe it’s impossible for me to see, and maybe despite any current and future hardships, I’m actually able to find a sense of grounding and belonging in this place we call Planet Earth.
Because to be honest, even among my closest friends I sometimes feel so, so, distant. So disembodied.
It’s not just like that in my relation to others, but in relation to myself as well. I honestly feel like I can never catch a break in life, and when I project that into thinking that’s how the rest of my life will go, I really do lose any sense of purpose, of hope, of will. And if the weight of those thoughts were to compound every. single. day. for a few years straight, it’s just a pure fact that something in me would break and would never be able to recover.
I’ve done so much internal work over the past few years. I’ve grown in so many ways, and have really done a number against my depressive tendencies; the thing about this darker part of me, however, is that it sometimes sees things more accurately than I want to admit.
To be honest, what stirred me to write this was listening to mewithoutYou’s new EP “[untitled]” that just came out tonight, and hearing some of frontman Aaron Weiss’ lyrics. He pleadingly sings in the song August 6th: “and sometimes when its quiet, my heart feelings like Guernica.”
Like, fuck. So much heaviness. And when wrestling with thoughts of his own mental health he said “from what the rest of us could tell, dad tried his best but finally fell apart at just my age.” In him comparing his own fight for sanity to his dad’s mental collapse that came at the same age that he is now, I found a lot of camaraderie and solace knowing that someone out there is still fighting to exist in a way that is grounded in something.
To be honest, sometimes I feel so tired of existence.
But sometimes the heaviness is alleviated by the smallest things; laughter between siblings, the color of a photo, the taste of a sip of tea, playing some video games into the night with some friends, sharing a meal with someone new…
That isn’t to say that all of those moments make a hard and suffering-filled life worth living, but what they do instead is help you to keep moving. For me, those little moments help me put one foot in front of the other. They push me to keep walking towards a future that has the possibility of hope, and of joy, and of real love. A life that nobody could say was handed to me, but one that I persevered through.
I fear a mental collapse one day, but I’m thankful that if it does come, I’ll have made it to that point in time.
