Dear Diary: The Dark Night of the Soul
I’ve been under the weather lately. In our current circumstance, it could have meant any number of things from momentary to permanent. Yesterday, I spent the day watching a cooking show and eating a simple bowl of beans and rice. I stayed away from the business of multiple screens and a phone. I let the anxieties of the past and future flow through me, for I am not in control of any of them. Today, I am feeling considerably better and caught up on housework. I had some bean chips and salsa, more simple food, and took some time to smell the spring rain from my porch.
Perhaps it is just fatigue from being sick and in pain, but I find days like today deeply refreshing. Days like today, I don’t strive to adjust myself to my surroundings or the relationships I try to maintain. Days like today, I am grateful I am not one to chase objects and status. Days like today, I am still keenly aware my heart reaches out, and I have yet to find the limits to my capacity to love, but I don’t feel I need to try to exhaust myself trying to do so.
I look at where I am and where I’m going; I understand I have a tenuous grasp of one and little idea of the other. With my limitations looking back is not much of an option either. I lose faith in who I thought I was regularly. In the process of being unhappy with myself, I feel I have become increasingly simple. Having spent so long moving from one avoidance method to the next, and each one stripping layers off like water over rock, I find myself feeling like I’ve exhausted all options and not knowing where to go next. With no path to follow, it is a dark night of the soul.
I find myself struggling to understand my identity. I don’t feel I strongly Identify with or as much of anything. I don’t feel particularly skilled or talented at anything, and I don’t know where my passions lie anymore. Perhaps, spending so much time trying not to be angry or distraught has led me to detach too hard and have become afraid of something deep down. I excel at self-sacrifice but fail fantastically at self-promotion. While on the one hand, I don’t want to just drift from one source of pleasure to the next, I also don’t want just to waste away either.
For years, I have accepted suffering as something I deserve due to acts I committed in the past. Suffering has been a form of atonement, while I seek out a purpose in life. While I continuously fail, every day, at most of the goals I set for myself, I have gained some inexplicable innate understanding. I’ve acquired something valuable, some broader perspective that allows me to stay more hopeful in the face of constant disappointment and negative feedback. However, it is something I can’t grab or explain. I can’t wield it, I just feel it, a quiet insight I wish I could share with those around me.
I try to keep this quiet optimism I have about people and the future with me as I try to find my purpose, my path, in life. I feel helpless, powerless, in area after area of my life. I am sincerely connected to the world, and the state of the world is often crushing and alienating, but I can’t find it in me to simply give up. I so often think there’s something wrong with me, why do I care so much? Perhaps being able to cry and smile at the same time is precisely what’s right about me. Maybe instead of just being another voice of cynicism in a sea of similar voices, being one who is willing to be patient and hopeful is worth it all on its own.
No one accomplishes everything in a vacuum. We all have people we look up to, people we lean on, people who have helped us in curious and surprising ways. Perhaps I am more of a transient figure for most people, giving a little push when they need it. In time these questions will find answers. For now, I need to find where my interests lie, where I should go tomorrow. I have a sense of clarity for things I should not do, but opaqueness for things I should do. For now, in the battle against darkness, stagnation seems to be a victory.
I stare out my window again and wonder if I am stagnating, or if I’m progressing in ways subtle and unexpected. What was once a mind overpopulated with raging arguments is now a mind, so still, I can often no longer hear my inner voice at all. Words escape my lips, and I listen to them for the first time as soon as the person with whom I’m speaking. Words are typed onto the screen, and I read my sentence with curiosity, wondering where the thought originated. I’ve often been an instinctual, emotionally-driven, person, but now I feel I flow through interactions without thought. I am uncertain how good this is, as I was always the thoughtful one. Perhaps I am learning to trust myself and stop overthinking? Unfortunately, I could be in such a dire state, my loneliness and isolation have removed me from my abilities to function that much further, and this is just another avoidance mechanism.
Journeys are not things traversed swiftly, nor are they often things we volunteer for and understand their depth when we begin. Our paths change multiple times, sometimes abruptly, and ultimately we walk much of the journey alone. I am not sure what journey I’m on, where I’m going, and struggle to grasp where I’ve been. I would like to believe it involves delicious but simple foods, giving lots of love and having it given back, and being appreciated for having patience and perspective.
The more I’ve learned, the harder it is not to be alone. I hold out hope that superficiality is not the be-all to end-all, and human relationships aren’t disposable commodities. Above all, I want to shake this feeling of being a failure and be content with being me whatever that may be as opposed to trying to be what I think other people believe I should be. I have a long way to go before this dark night becomes welcome dawn.
Monk Anchorwind – Early to Mid May 2020.