Shrines (and shower gel)

Many of the earliest remnants that still stand testimony to the dawn of human culture are not fortifications, settlements or battlefields. What our ancestors decided to invest so much time, effort and energy into, that they still remain visible until today are sites of worship and memory. Even before humans settled down, they dug graves and built temples to remind themselves of things that were gone or not visible to them. For some reason this seems to be a need, that all of us still feel today, be it on a societal or on a personal level. And of course I am guilty of it too. Probably more than others. Seemingly having no perspective towards the future naturally turns ones focus to the past. And my past haunts me with every step I take.

Today I went shopping. I took an extra long trip to a place, I rarely go to. The mission objective was to procure a bottle of a special brand of shower gel. Since my skin is sensitive as all hell I am I should limit my choice of human-cleaning-supplies to a few products, that don’t make me itch all over (but since I am kind of lazy and tend to just not care I often use the stuff that’s bad for me anyway. Self destruction anyone?). So far I have discovered two affordable brands, that work perfectly for me. One of these, the one I bought today, is hard to get. An almost full bottle of the other, easy to find one is sitting on the shelf in my shower, where it has been since december of last year. I haven’t touched it ever since. And I probably wont for a long long time.

I bought it, when she visited me the last, and as I didn’t know then, final time. She always used that certain brand, since it is one of the few available without the foaming agents she reacts allergic to. It smells like her. It reminds me of her. It is so childish and ridiculous. And it hurts. Each time I step into the shower, I do my darndest not to look at that bottle, cringe, when my fingers accidentally touch it and I feel its distinct shape under my fingers. I really should just throw it out. And I am aware of how idiotic it is not to. But it’s just one of many things I surround myself with, to, I guess, deliberately cause myself pain.

Those little tokens of self destruction include a postcard in the chest-pocket of the jacket I wear every day, a picture, stuck to my fridge door, plush animals positiones on my speakers (by two different people) and, last but not least, the ring on my finger. I have been officially divorced since 2012 now. But the ring remains. It serves a distinct function. It irritates the sensitive skin underneath. It itches. The skin cracks. It sometimes hurts, occasionally a few droplets f blood are spilt. And it is a constant reminder not only of my past failure but of things to come. It is, what lets me never forget, what I am and why I need to stay away from others.

I was once told by somebody (showergelgirl), that my ring was “evil”, as she phrased it. What she didn’t see was, that that “evil” was me and the ring merely an instrument, that never allows me to deny that – like a voluntary ball and chain, making sure I never forget.

I am very aware of how insane all this sounds. But it has taken me a long time to observe, analyse and become aware of all my flaws (or at least a quite impressive number of them). It was hard, bruting and crushing work. And it did not only cost me dearly, but even more so people who meant (and mean) a lot to me. I owe it to them and to everybody I am still to meet, to not forget: I am not a good person. I have tried to change, over and over again and each and every time the results turned out more devastating than the last. No matter how hard I try, it is never a question of “if” but always of “when” the next person I try to be good for is going to torn to pieces by that hungry monster, that dwells inside of me. So I build shrines and surround myself by them – not to keep the demons away, but to keep at bay, whats clawing at me from my inside, trying to get to everybody, who gets too close.

Running from myself

I usually work until 5, lately often a bit longer. It is 3:26 right now and I just got home. I simply had to leave, even though there is still so much to do. I couldn’t sit still, could not perform the simplest task. This has been a reoccuring pattern lately. During the work-week I wish for nothing more but the weekend to come. Yet I am very aware of how awful and empty those approximately 60 hours I’ll have to spend sitting in my apartment, killing time by the minute, will be. And the closer the weekend comes, the more I dread it. Until sunday night nothing good will happen. I’ll sit here, staring at my screens switching between three or four types of “entertainment” to distract myself at a five minute pace. And yet I almost raced home today, once again.

But I didn’t run away from work. I ran away from myself.. and guess who waited for me, when I unlocked my door? Yes, there I was, that awful, awful person I can’t take to be around. With all the bullshit thoughts, the reocurring themes, the bottled up anger and the emptiness I can’t stand, just waiting for me. Soon I’ll hope for monday to come and glance at the time over and over again. And then, sunday night I’ll have to face the fact, that I wasted another two days I would have so badly needed to recover and to gain strength.

Well.. happy weekend..

No tears for the wicked

Okay, I admit it. Reading over last nights post again was a rather unsatisfying experience. It sounded overly dramatic and whiny – exactly, what I did not want this blog to be. I hate the idea of leaving a pathetic impression. That is not what I am – or at least what I tell myself I am not. I thought about deleting it, but that would have ben a childish act in itself. So I’ll just leave it there, as a testimonial to my imperfection.

But let’s stick with that topic: Whining and crying. When have you cried the last time? I have been pondering since I got up this morning and I honestly can’t remember. Of course, there were occasional moments, brief seconds of sobbing. Maybe a handful over the last decade. They never lasted longer than a few heartbeats though. Several years ago my great uncle died. It was the first family funeral I ever attended. Everybody cried – but me (why the fuck was my brain incapable of imitating that emotion?). When my wife told me, she’d be moving out, I did not shed a tear. Neither, when I received the divorce papers. When the one person, who beared with me through my insanity asked, if she was the only one who thought, that I should be alone for a while (what a lousy excuse, not having the guts for an “I’m sick of you”) I did not even flinch. Last winter the suicidal thoughts became so overwhelming, that I forced myself to see a psychologist. I wanted drugs. Something, anything, to make it stop. As he laughed at the idea he gave me tips on books I should read. At that point he had seemed to be my last chance. It had taken all the tiny bit of energy left in me to force myself to go there. When I was turned down I knew nothing to do but to nod and to go home. Not even then, in the face of asolute failure and defeat, was I able to cry.

This sounds proud, vain and ridiculously “macho”. But it is not. I wish I could cry. I wish I could curl up in a ball and feel the hot streams of tears running down my face while I can barely breathe through my sobbing. But I only have faint childhood memories of how that feels. Crying seems to be an emergency valve, able to release pressure, tension, frustration and pain. Somewhen down the road this mechanism must have broken. And so the pressure mounts, with no way to vent.

I am equally afraid that I’ll never cry again or that one day, that rusty old switch will flip and I wont be able to turn it off again. But oh would it be a relief to finally burst out in tears.

Next to my bed

In absence of a nightstand I put a small, metal table next to my bed several years ago.. well, then it was still “our bed”.. but that’s a different story. Of course all kind of crap has piled up on this little piece of furniture ever since – most of it things I haven’t even looked at in months. But there is something sitting on it, I reach out for almost every day. I guess each and every one of us owns an object like that. Something that grounds us and that, by simply touching it, provides us with comfort. But I doubt for too many of us a hand grenade is, what has become their security blanket.

Don’t worry. While it is an original soviet F-1 grenade it is demilitarized: both harmless and, while admittedly weird, perfectly legal to own. All that’s left is the hollow, cast iron shell, covered in sloppily applied green paint, covering up spots of rust I tell myself every time I touch it I’ll polish away one day. The empty, useless striker and the safety lever, held down by a pin. The mechanism still works. You rip out the pin, let go of the lever and you hear the striker hitting the inside of the body, where the load should be – something I only rarely do.

It still feels weird holding it in my palm, even though I know every bump, every irregularity on its surface. Each time I take it in my hand I am slightly surprised by how heavy it is – and how cold. But it only takes a few minutes to warm up. It has become somewhat of a symbol, like a prisoner would cherrish a key, even if he knows it won’t open the door to his cell. But it is still, what he needs: A key. A way out. Something convinving him, that not all hope is lost.

So tonight, when I lay there in the dark, once again so tired and yet unable to sleep, I’ll almost certainly reach out again. And for a brief second, before I allow myself to think, I will be holding the one key in my hand, that’ll end my imprisonment once and for all.

So tired

The german language has a bunch of rather beautiful, poetic expressions. While they might lack the short, technical, descriptive power, that many english terms possess, they still manage to exactly hit the spot. One of my favourite ones is “Lebensmüde”. Directly translated this means as much as “tired of life”, which, in my eyes, is an absolutely perfect description.

Should anybody have ever come back to this blog for more, you might have noticed, that in my first entry I wrote, that I was “suffering” from depresion. Those quotation marks are there for a reason. I do not consider myself suffering. Things are just, how they are. I do not have a lot of emotions about my state of existence. I am just tired of it – oh so tired.

You see, the only reason I am still alive is the fact, that me shuffling off this mortal coil would have consequences. Not for me of course, for me it all would finally, mercifully be over. But there are other people. Few and far, and they have become fewer wihin the last years and months, but there still are. And I very much feel like I owe them. So I carry on, dragging myself from hour to hour, from day to day.

Anybody who has binge-watched series or movies, anyone who has obsessively played a computergame probably knows the feeling I am trying to describe: This moment, after five straight hours of counterstrike, the end credits of the third three hour movie in a six movie series, when you realize, you’ve just had enough. The only difference is, that you can turn off the computer, switch off the TV and go outside, go read a book, call a friend or do whatever. All that’s left to me is going to sleep in the absolute knowledge, that eventually I will wake up and all of it is going to start over again.

On the 26th August of 2002 a 19-year-old student in the city of Erfurt in germany shot and killed 16 people. After he had murdered his victims he encountered one of his teachers in the schools hallways. Recognizing his student and being very well aware of what as going on the teacher approached him and said:”You can shoot me too now.”. Instead of shooting the gunman lowered his weapon and responded with his final words: “It’s enough for today.”. Then he entered a room in which his teacher locked him in. There he took his own life.

As described in my last post I do not have any tendencies to wish or cause harm upon others. So I also, of course, do not condone any actions like the ones mentioned above. But these last words stuck with me ever since. “It’s enough for today.” Damn, how well I know that feeling…

Where has all my anger gone?

I screwed up at work today. Something tiny. Something minute. A simple mistake, that did not cause any issues but a few seconds of laughter in the room. I was in a new situation and unprepared. A simple mixup. Nothing bad. And yet…

The incident once again made me realize a change I have unergone. I used to be angry. Very angry. As a teenager I was permanently boiling with burning hot hatred. The aggression I felt targeted everything. School. Teachers. My Peers. Society. Mankind and the world itself. But unlike other teenagers (I assume, judging by my own observations) I never acted upon those agressions. I kind of always must have known, how pointless they were and that the way things are was as much everybodies fault as it was nobodies.

There was an incident, that somehow got stuck in my mind. When I was young, maybe twelve (plus minus three years, I really have no clue), my mom sat me down at our kitchen table to learn with me for school. That’s something my parents did not make a regular occurence with me, since they deemed me self-responsible and smart enough to do my learning by myself (which was the honorable thing to assume… and which I simply wasn’t). As I sat there and wrote, I became angry. Very angry. I wanted to yell and scream in frustration and tear down all, what forced me to perform this useless, senseless task. When I was done writing (it might have been a dictation, which would mean I was probably even younger than I thought) I told my mother, how fed up I was. She responded: “So, what would you like to do about it? And why don’t you?”.

So I got up. I yelled. I cursed. I tore the piece of paper to shreds, flinging it at her, while she just sat there and watched. And I started to feel stupid. And then I had to laugh. And she had to laugh too. The rage had gone up in smoke.

“How inspirational”, one might say. “How good to see the error of your ways at such a young age”, one might think. But there is a bit more to this story: What the rage left behind was a vast void. An overwhelming sensation of emptiness and helplesness. No amount of screaming and raging would ever fix this world, and, even worse: could ever fix me. The people I had perceived targets, the ones I had blamed, were not trying to do me harm. They did what they thought was good or, even worse, what they had to do. They were as helpless as me. And it slowly dawned upon me: Whatever felt like it was driving me insane, it wasn’t them. It was something else. Something i could not fight and could not harm.

And as I silently sat at the meeting table as the laughter died away, I could’ve gotten mad. At the people laughing. At my boss, for not preparing me for a meeting I was thrown into like into icy water. I could’ve gotten mad at plenty of things. But I simply bowed my head, bowed towards my own failure and stupidity. Which, undeniably, was the right thing to do. I had reacted without thinking, spoken without being aware. And I paid the price.

Everyone else would’ve shrugged away that awkward moment. And I kind of managed to do the same (which would not have been possible a mere years ago). But it still left this empty sensation. The same I had as a child, realizing how it was not me against them, but each and every one of us against ourselves: A fight I have been losing each and every minute, day and year. I sometimes wish I could get revive that anger, that gave me passion and purpose. But now, when I do get angry it’s cold and calculated. It it never even remotely manages to cover up the emptiness because I know: The only thing I could change is me. And that’s, what I am incapable of.

My greyscale life

Another day at the office. Another day of staring at lists, shoving tasks from A to B to C and back, without really accomplishing anything, while the deadlines creep closer and gain momentum. Isn’t that just the perfect time to delve deeper into what I intend to write about?

I am depressed. There is no doubt about that. I have watched and observed my condition growing, changing, mutating over the past two decades or so. And I am not even sure, since when I am aware of what I’m actually dealing with. But it has come apparent to me somewhen, that I must somehow differ from “normal people” (whatever that might mean). Fact is: I seem to be lacking something. I have observed that many people around me seem to have a wide variety of colors at their disposal, through which they experience their lifes. They appear full of emotion, of drive, of motivation, of hopes and dreams. They have a sense of purpose. Many of these feelings seem complicated, abstract, unfathomable and purely theoretical to me. While many people make use of all the colors of the rainbow to paint and enrich their existence, all thats on my palette is black and white. Of course I am able to mix and blend them (or, more precisely, they mostly do that by themselves, without my bidding). But in the end I never manage to go beyond different, dull shades of grey.

My emotional world is simple. I know greed, rage, hurt, envy, jealousy (oh so well), sorrow and grief. It has taken me a while to realize, that others seemingly experience happiness as more than the temporary absence of the grey, that shapes my life. The strange thing is: It is infective. I rarely laugh, I actually barely show any emotion, as long as I am alone. As soon as I am around somebody it almost happens by itself. I joke. I am witty (or at least I perceive myself as such). I talk. All of this comes as a reflex. Almost as if i need the other person as a mirror, as a moel, that shows me how to act and react. This effect only works though, while my attention is directed at another person and, even more importantly, theirs is directed at me. As soon as I lose this link it all goes away – sometimes even if my attachment figure simply turns their back on me: My face freezes, the laughter stops, the illusion of joy is drained away within seconds.

Surrounding myself with people seems to be the obvious solution. But that doesn’t work. It is the grossest feeling in the world, when the smile on my face disappears from one second to another. Then I am left feeling dirty, as if i did something disgusting, someting, that violates my deeply rooted nature. Each time the illusion of normality pops like a bubble and I am left to my own devices, to my own thoughts again, I hate myself even more. And then there is the effort, to make people interact with me, let alone my inability to keep the interaction up. Each time somebody turns away from me, it leaves emptiness and a sense of falure. The inability to kep somebodies attentnion. The obvious uselessnes, that I am. It’s childish. It’s idiotic. I am very well aware of that. But how is somebody, whos emotional range is not much further developed than that of a helpless little child, supposed to conduct themselves, when what they so desperately need is ripped out of their hands once again?

Words without a purpose

So, here I am. A 32 year old male, sitting in a neon-light-lit office on the messiest desk of them all. Stacks of papers, cables, magazines surrounding me. Postits reminding me of things that urgently need to be done stuck to my screen. And I should get started, should work, produce, earn my pay. I just returned from my lunchbreak, where I stuffed myself with gross food I didn’t care to eat. That’s where I once again decided: Hey, why not write a blog?

It’s not, that my life is interesting. Far from it, to be precise. It’s not that I am tring to reach out, to provoke reactions or a debate, instill sympathy or understanding or to get any kind of support from „the community“. That’s something I don’t care for. Something I even dread. The purpose of this exercise is much simpler: Words. English words, to be precise. I am a native german speaker. My english is rather good, I reckon. But since a few months my opportunities to utilize it have faded more and more. And with that a weird, irrational fear has awoken. English. One of the few tings, that kind of makes me stand out from my peers (very slightly only though). What if even that minor ability of mine turns rusty? What if I manage to even let slip of that one thing? Ridiculous, I know. But still…

So, what is there to tell about me? What makes me „special“? As already mentioned im 32. Male. Taller than average. Not exactly fat, yet definitely heavier set (an issue I am trying to work on. Somewhat. Somewhen. Maybe.). Oh. Yes. And there is that: Crippling, anxiety attack inducing, paralizing, mind numbing depression. I am very well aware of the fact, that this is nothing anyhow special at all. Who is not depressed these days? And even those who weren’t: Since Robin Williams decided to check out, depression seems to be the new cause du jour (yes, I had to google that. For the second time this week.) and everybody is discovering, how depressed they are (or dumping buckets of ice-water over themselves for that matter.. but that’s a different kind of retardation.)

For me it hasn’t taken some actor to off himself to realize, that there is something wrong with me. Looking back I have probably been „suffering“ from depression for a god 20 years. Maybe more. I have not officially been diagnosed, mind you. I had a few run ins with psychologists during my school years, but I never desiered to talk about, whats going on. I am not one to seek help. Not because I consider myself oh so brave. Not because I am such a fighter. But simply, because I have grown up being depressed, surrounded by this vast all-engulfing nothingness. This is the world I know. People around me seem to enjoy life. And sometimes this makes me desperate and jealous and rather angry. But deeply entrenched within me, there is the sense, that I am right. THIS is reality. This is how things are and always will be. And it is by far hard enough to stay afloat from one day to another. Why would I waste my precious energy on attempting to change something, that is factual and true and immutable? It would be idiocy to do so. And in the end I’d only sink even deeper, even further from salvation.

So, here I am, trying to draw a basic outline of what is wrong with me. And as you can see, this’ll be an exhausting exercise – both for me, the writer, and for anyone who actually decides to read my ramblings. When I made the decision to start this little project, I already had a bunch of ideas for short entries, topics to tackle, things I’d like to say. They seemed neat and orderly and precise. All to the point, clear storytelling, concise explanations and descriptionsof abstract ideas. sharp, like the point of a pencil. And just like my desk, once things are in motion, the mess is unstoppable. Things pile up, avanlanches of uselessnes carry me away with them, drag me into the depths of meaninglesness and I drone on and on and on. I guess I should apologize in advance. It is very likely, I’ll lose interest in all of this very soon. Until then however, I’ll try to share. Shout and yell at these virtual walls rather than at the ones I bunker myself in behind each and every evening after coming home from work. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to stick with all of this long enough, to actually finish drawing a picture of myself, before I just stop caring once again. (And maybe even long enough to get rid of those abominable little squiggely design thingies, separating posts..) We’ll see. I’m as curious as you are.

So long…