“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
-Sylvia Plath
Around 1.5 years ago, I texted a friend that I wish there was a next evolution, similar to a heaven, I could ascend to. Not necessarily a heaven, but a place past this. I’d felt I’d done everything I wanted to in a place like this. I was content, I was happy, and I was ready to move on. I wasn’t restless or listless or complacent. I was tranquil. Not depressed.
By no means did I actually want to move on in the physical sense – the metaphysical, certainly, but without certainty of the future after physicality, not the physical sense. But I was ready personally, evolutionary, if such an opportunity presented itself.
Fast forward through a seemingly good – interesting? – 2025. I continued to fight hard, to work, to work out, to read, to be social, to do things we think or I think or some of us think we need to do to feel whole, to feed the soul, to become what we’re supposed to be, our best selves. To fend and fight for tomorrow, for what comes next. This continuous better until we reach best.
But it’s not there, I guess. I feel like I’ve always known it. Hell, maybe it’s a lie.
What happens when you’re taught and thought to be smart in elementary school, to still be smart and to work hard in middle school, be pressured to do well in high school so you can get into a good college, so you can get good grades to get a good job, so you can get a good job to have a good life, and then there’s nothing after that next 3-5 year stage? You’ve gotten a few promotions, upgraded cars, upgraded from renting to owning, etcetera etcetera if you’re lucky. But it still doesn’t feel the same, each time, over and over again. You don’t feel the same. It just doesn’t hit like it used to. You’re restless. You’re listless. You don’t know what comes next. And it’s not that you’re not content – you are; but it’s also not that you’re complacent – you aren’t. Truth be told, you don’t know what you are. You kind of just are. All you know is you’re not regular, normal, standard, or feeling good. You’re sort of just there: existing, drifting, a passenger, without motivation to try to recapture what you once had. What you once had didn’t bring you to where you are now. Your dedication is gone. How you once had dedication, you can only chalk up to how you once were young.
Mid-30s now. You have everything that supposedly makes a good life, minus maybe the family? Maybe that is the answer. Maybe that’d be too simple to be the answer.
You don’t know. You can’t know. You can’t ever know.
What good is all this knowledge (that you don’t know) if you’re simply treading, with no desire to start swimming and almost no commitment left to continue treading?
You’re sinking now. Slowly, slowly, and slowly you go. Gradually. Running out of hope, or more accurately floating out of hope. Losing it like losing air. But the weird thing, the weirdest thing of all isn’t how you got here: it’s how you feel nearly the same tranquility as before – just a polarized, negative tranquility this time around. There is peace. Almost too much of it. You are drowning in oxygen. You do not care.
I don’t know how to escape… because I cannot find the motivation to. Motivation requires desire, and I am too tired to find the desire to escape. It has subsumed me – this darkness, this whatever it is. But darkness implies something sinister; this it is not. It is something worse. If I could blame this apathetic apathy on a dark entity, that would be all too easy. Instead my inability to move or rejuvenate all stands and falls and gets back up again with me. Persisting, ever constantly persisting. When I get back up and stand again, I wonder if I’m ready to take a step and walk and run like I did years ago or even last year. And I fall. Down, and down, and down again. Until the pain of the fall no longer hurts. I long for the hurt. But I don’t even really long at all.
I’ve run out of energy. I don’t know where to go from here. I feel like I’ve done it all from job to hobby to passion to city to love. I know there is more to see, but I don’t have the energy. To say I feel stuck would imply I believe I can ever move again. But I don’t know how. I don’t know exactly how I got here, although it becomes more apparent in introspective retrospect. And I sure as whatever don’t know how to get out.
How, that is the question. And that question is preceded by why.
Why?
Why should I?
What more is there left to do or look forward to when I feel I’ve done it all while knowing I haven’t done it all but what does it matter anyway, what does it matter at all.
What?
And who?
That’s me.
And when?
That’s now.
And unfortunately, seemingly, currently is forever.
To add the adverb “hopefully” would suggest my mind doesn’t see this as forever and ever and never getting better.
And my mind, well, it’s written these words that are written by these letters.
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