For those who read this 'page', lately has obviously been a tremendously difficult period for black dog. I don't post online about my ups and downs to get people's sympathy, and I even if I've gotten it, I don't trust it. Sympathy easily won is just as easily withdrawn, and I refuse to pretend I haven't had many lapses in my life that would lead to the withdrawal of sympathy from people too quick to give it. However much I've written here, I doubt I've ever given the impression of a person who wants your sympathy, or even deserves it, but if in whatever way I have, my apologies.
Sincerity is a cheap emotion that exists at the surface of people's emotions and beliefs. The quicker a person gives love, the quicker a person withholds it. The real world is as ugly as it is beautiful, and neither state is possible without the other holding up a mirror in relief.
So the reason I write personal things on facebook is... well... near as I can tell there are fiveish reasons:
1. Why do they get any idea in their head? Why do people climb mountains? Why do they masturbate? Because it's there.
2. Because, whatever I write about, I have always felt far more comfortable as words on a page than in real spacetime, where there is always something irrational to worry about. I have only derived any social satisfaction when there was some self-medicating substance in my hand.
3. Many people have commented upon this: one of the great things about the internet is that there is infinite space upon it for everyone to sprawl out a self about which they feel more comfortable than they otherwise would. A month from forty, I still have no idea who I am, but I do know that on the internet, I have no trembling hands, no ticking facial features, no mental states that turn into colossal physical pain, no signs from the outside world for my brain to interpret the future with, and as every mental notion turns into the concrete definition of a page on a screen, every harrowingly obsessive rumination can suddenly be handled. All there is here is the transformation of a colossal mental slit into words, frozen in time and space, where no affliction can longer emiserate the mental state which motivated me to write them.
4. Because self-revelation is not about 'I'm feeling this way.' It's about registering, without hurting other people, the much much harder process of all the ways our mental state transitions between emotions; the 'emotions between the emotions' where happens real thought, nuance, and eventually, a moral code that is both personal, and a way of seeing the universe. If what you think about any given subject can be summed up in a couple sentences, and sadly I think that's true about billions of people, you're not living your most interesting self. If the ways you talk about morality can only be done by appropriating jargon coined by other people, you need to become more yourself. Morality very obviously exists, but none of us has a monopoly on what's right. Not even me.
5. I don't know if these various online screeds are art, and if they're art, they're not good art. But at least they're something to point to, something that says that everything you've undergone is to a purpose and left a testimonial document of what it was like. Hopefully, that makes all this more than yet another mental scar on a mind that somewhat lost control of itself thirty years ago, it's a document that perhaps, one day, could be of some use to somebody.
I would much, MUCH, MUUUUUUUUUUUCH, much rather write about anybody and anything else but me, but these online explosions of semi-narcissism are like diarrheal bowel movements done in moments when the mental wreckage is too radioactive to stay silent. In these moments, you know that writing out what you have to say is a hundred times better a palliative than talking the same few friends over and over again who have more important people to take care of than me. And if you didn't send it, you know that, for whatever reason, you would feel just as pained as if you didn't write it at all.
I don't know exactly for whom I write all this shit. I don't think it's to any one person. I think I address it to the reader(s) I wish I had. And even if I like many of the people in my life very much, perhaps I address it to the sorts of people in my life I wish I had.
The world is a tough place; maybe it isn't for you, but I can pretty much assure you it's tough for others. Most of us end up in places very, very different from the ones we envisioned, and most of those places are not better than what we wished for. Life deposits very few people to the places commensurate with their best talents, and most whom life treats with the dignity they deserve are willfully bad at relating to the difficulties of others. What is left for us but to document the ways life is tough? And document it wherever will have us?
The last place in the world I expected to end up was on facebook, a partially malevolent place that isn't even in the real world. So much of what I believe, what I think, what I encounter, what I love and hate, everything I experience, is here. Not everything of course, but by any traditional moral metric; much, much too much. And yet, where else would ever have me? In retrospect, I'm certainly too crazy and disabled to have ever gotten a normal writing job, and most people in the humanities have to spend so much time marketing and promoting themselves that they barely even work at what they should be doing. I've gotten the privilege so few people have of putting what's really going through my head to paper. I've got things going through it that nobody has ever wanted to hear, and I've never known where else to put them. In a weird way, I'm quite thankful I have no talents but the very few I have, because so many others I know had to sever essential parts of themselves to get noticed at all, whereas I get to write my meandering musings in complete obscurity, and let other people decide what to read after the work gets written.
If you read them, thank you. if you don't, I have a weird and unearned confidence that more people one day will. I'm not even sure readers is something I want, but it's all here, and even if I decided it's a net bad, it would be too hard to delete, you might as well delete eighteen years of your life.
I don't know what 'me' is, but if I'm anything at all, what you see on this page is me. It's here for whoever wants to know.
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