11/21/2005

I've made many mistakes in life, and have (sometimes not so) happily learned from the majority of them. Or I'm still learning.

But that doesn't stop me from sometimes feeling like such a failure. Reviewing, reliving, looking back with the clear shades of retrospect...and realizing how badly you screwed up.

Hurts.

I've been rotating between a vast appreciation of life, quiet, reflective joy, and being on the verge of complete and utter breakdown, destabilizing destruction, and hopelessness.

I can't wait to get home for Thanksgiving. I need a nice bike ride. I need to just lie in my own bed at home, or whatever semblance of home remains, and stare at my ceiling. Maybe I'll find an answer in the blankness.

The numbness has gone away. Now there's just this dull ache of pain that keeps growing as the memories assault me.

Happiness is really such an illusion--it taunts me. Sometimes I feel like everything could be so easy, if only, if only, if only...But that just makes me realize how much harder it all is.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for maintaining a shred of my sanity, for continuing to live and fight and try and maintain an optimism and clarity of mind.

I'm thankful for all this. I really am.

While at the same time, I realize my immense academic, professional and personal failings.

Maybe it would have been better if I had not come back. Maybe it would have been better to have just gone somewhere else. I'm utterly exhausted in every possible way.

Tomorrow I go home. Tomorrow I get to pack up everything in my room, box it and stuff it into a garage. Tomorrow I get to visibly witness the breakdown my own father has had to live through. Tomorrow I get to walk the neighborhoods that will constantly remind me of my former best friend who cares not one damn about me, but lives one block away. Tomorrow I get to return to the center of almost all the pain and sorrow of the last seven years. Tomorrow that numbness will completely disappear.

I am thankful for the pain that lets me know I am still alive.

That reminds me of the good that once existed in my life.

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