The Mid-Year Funk
Anon
I am so disillusioned. God, how trite. I offend myself by my own lack of originality. Still, I may have a legitimate problem. I’m in a mid-year funk, a big one. A funk of Holden Caulfield and Esther Greenwood proportions. Actually no, my chemical imbalance is not quite so dramatic. Depression comes in degrees, of course, and I’ll concede that my current mental state is probably on the middle to lower end of the scale, similar to Holden and Ester in substance (adolescent angst and confusion, an inability to see where I’m going, who I am and what I want to do) but not degree. Really, the most difficult part of the whole thing is not so much the depression and apathy in themselves but my inability to see a way out of them, because they are terribly inconvenient. I have so much work to do. Mountains and mountains. Not just uni, either, but extra-curricular activities and friends and exercise and self-improvement. I feel like, actually I know, I’m not reading enough or writing enough or getting out there enough. The dichotomy of it is, I care so much about all this and yet simultaneously I don’t care at all. I just want to sleep for a thousand years, lie in bed with the shutters closed and three big blankets on top of me, curled up, warm, protected, oblivion.
Other people seem to be on their game, seem to know what they’re doing. I guess that’s a lie, we always compare our insides with other peoples outsides. But logic aside, I feel like an utter fucking mess. I don’t know how to eat properly, or work properly, I don’t know how to sustain relationships or how to deal with love and sex. I don’t have a fucking clue, I’m just kind of guessing most of the time and feeling completely out of place. I know that wallowing in this pool of self-pity I must sound incredibly whiney, that Sartre would be distinctly unimpressed, but for some reason I just can’t be bothered caring.
So how to get out of this mid-year funk and get my mojo back. Maybe when you feel like this - you’re depressed but not clinically so - you just have to go through the motions until you eventually start to care and feel passionate again. Recognizing that it’s all chemical can be helpful too, apparently. Expose yourself to as much sunshine as possible, try to sleep enough, exercise and eat well. Try to laugh, don’t watch too much TV. Fuck, I don’t know. It is so hard figuring out how to live sometimes. I think I know what I want to be, I have an idea of it and yet also an awareness that life is happening right now. That’s the paradox I guess, life always feels like it’s going to happen, like you will make it happen, sometime in the future. How can this ‘present’ be me fulfilling my life when it is “gone in the instant of becoming” and often just feels so banal and pathetic? I feel so often that the life I’m living is to be, rather than in the process of being. But then I think the word ‘being’ implies the static and this is obviously not the case as life is constantly in flux. Even in terms of other people – we think their personalities are static and easily categorized but what defines a person is really so much more complex - we are all constantly changing, we are not set actors in a pre-scripted drama:
“He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in [people] as a thing simple, permanent, reliable and of one essence. To him, [a human] was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion...”
Maybe it is more accurate to say we are not being but constantly becoming. It’s good to look at it that way, it seems somehow more accurate in that it suggests progress, development - that all these things are a part of living and that the more active you are in becoming the more you are really living. It is also suggestive of the reality that life is constant interaction – you are never going to reach that ultimate goal, that pinnacle of being. Rather you will always be interacting, changing, growing, developing. Every day and every moment is a process.
Oh man, that all sounded so good in my head. So why does this thick blanket of ennui continue to smother me?
C’est la vie say the old folks, I guess.
N.B:
1. J.D.Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
2. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.
3. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890). Vol. 1. Chapter XV: The Perception of Time
4. Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) pp137
