"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" begins it's work on me
These two entries are important, though, and if you want to go back and read them, you'll see what I mean.
In an email last weekend I tried to describe how I was feeling, and it's the same feeling that I experienced during the coldest part of this past winter.
This is a frequent problem: where my mind and body become dissociated. Like I look in a mirror and mind just doesn't recognize the reflection, and I look down while I walk to make sure these strange feet moving me from point to point don't put me in the way of danger. I don't trust these appendages to know how to mobilize me safely. It's as though the brain controlling my motor skills and the brain running my thoughts are two different brains. Oh, I just remembered that I almost got hit by a bus today. As I crossed the street with my headphones on I just didn't notice the large vehicle turning towards me at an unstoppable speed. Through the music I heard a woman screaming "look out!" and then I realized she was looking at me. I realized I was the one she was looking at. These feet didn't move any quicker, though, but I cleared the sidewalk in time. My thinking brain had to signal to my action brain that I should smile, so I did. Then I thought about what it would have been like to have been hit. My thinking brain scolded my action brain for being so careless: for though my thoughts wouldn't mind losing this body, they know they can't exist without it. So typing is strange for me now. It would be nice to be kissed right now: something to happen in the physical that would cross over to the mental/emotional and make the two feel connected.
The next day after writing this email, while at Matthew's after a good night's rest, I felt much better: more whole and normal.
In the early entries I describe this feeling and then excuse it as a response to the snow; on Saturday it was excused as a response to a hangover. Then on Monday I found a kindred: I'm not alone.
It began as I flipped through this book called List Yourself: a blank book for making designated lists of things in my life (recurring dreams, favorite foods, and the like). My eyes lingered on one that said, "List all the things about your body that make it unlike any other."
I didn't know what to list, aside from my tattoo, and I felt a little uncomfortable, uncomforted, something.
Then I read through my new Kundera, and found where he actually discussed the "irreconcilable duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience," as though I was supposed to know that these two parts of me work in tandem, and I suddenly felt like a freak for feeling them separate.
Then came my consolation, Kundera writes: But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away."
As I read further I continued to feel more and more of a kindredness.
I am not in love, but by replacing that word with "depressed" it makes sense. Depression and love are similar. Both earmarked by self-loathing. I'm also not depressed, but so often I can't see myself through my body, or feel myself. Even if I'm being kissed sometimes I have to tell myself, "pay attention! you're having fun, now! start feeling good!"
This isn't coming out right.
Too many distractions.
This one's for me, then, and not you.
Gilmore Girls are wonderful: They Might Be Giants and Tom Waits both got references.
Field Day Fest is painfull: they took away my dream.
Nothing on this Wednesday is turning out correctly. I'm going to make a potroast now and run some errands and just...
I'm sorry.
