Pattern Spiders

[rin-daemoko.livejournal.com]

I'm very grateful for my job. For seven months it's kept me occupied, distracted and free from the crippling depression I was enduring last year. A depression which landed me in therapy, with the government declaring me unemployable, with me experimenting with self-harm, and I'm sure I was annoying as fuck to more than a few people. For seven months I've been able to feel sane, whole and even happy at times. I knew it would never last, though, and over the last couple of weeks I've been sliding back into depression again. Tiny things here and there have been setting off my anger, and my anger rapidly transmutes into melancholy. Today I got angry because someone asked me to do the thing I'm paid to be doing. This is why I noticed my old psychological problems creeping up again.

Rationally, it makes no sense to be bitchy because someone asks me to fax a purchase order. Yes, I was on my lunch break, but it takes how many seconds to fax a single sheet of paper?

And over the last few months there have been cracks developing in my psychological filters. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not, but the sexual energy that I usually only see in my dreams has begun to trickle into my waking life in ways I don't feel prepared to deal with. I don't know how to deal with this. It's awkward and yet liberating all at once, and yet I'm impeded by a poor body-image and low self-esteem. Maybe that's part of the new person I'm becoming. Last year was like wiping the slate clean with the person I thought I was - I abandoned so much of myself that there was almost no one left. Then, gradually, I've been developing new tastes in music, fashion, discovering a desire to be more open about sexuality, disbelieving things in Buddhism that I once agreed with wholly.

Change is inevitable, and change can be healthy. I'm not sure if this transition I'm going through is healthy or not, though. I'm not harming anyone, and aside from the depression sneaking back in, I'm not harming myself. But ... I'm gradually failing to recognize the person I am. When I look in the mirror, I don't know who is looking back anymore, but I used to know him. His interests, his beliefs, his goals and fears. Where did he go? Well, I know ... he died. We all die several times in our lives, it's just that it doesn't seem like the sort of thing people talk about. It's not at all like puberty - it's a major change that you expect to happen. But this death and rebirth of the self ... it's a major change, and I never saw it coming, and now it's incredibly strange and kind of uncomfortable. At the same time, though, it's refreshing and exciting.

Does this happen to most people? Do their old selves just die after a long period of suffering, only to be gradually reborn over time to potentially become someone almost unrecognizable? I don't understand, and I feel like I should, so intellectually and emotionally and spiritually I feel completely lost and naked. I feel like I need a guide but I know that no one can point the way for me, because they can't see what I see.

I want to look for something stable, some thing I can be sure of, but in a world where everything is constantly changing and reality itself is groundless, I can't let myself cling to the illusion of permanence, of stability. I have to learn to become comfortable with groundlessness, but it's still so very strange.