Week 07: Lows and Highs and Lows.

Regular programming.

Monday, February 10.

I've really exhausted myself today. I feel emotionally exhausted, like I need a minute to not be myself and come back when I feel emotionally stable. To explain this, I will share some parts of my journal entries for today with you.

Journal entry: 2:13AM, February 10.

“If you could begin to see yourself the way you see others—acknowledging flaws but still appreciating the whole picture—you’d realize just howmuch you’re underselling yourself. What would it feel like to give yourself even half the compassion and recognition you so easily give others?”

i genuinely wish i don't care. it's so sad and tiring. the constant need for external validation and comparison. i wish i can just be happy and okay.

Journal entry: 2:23PM, February 10.

i've just been feeling so uncomfortable and dissatisfied with myself today. it's so weird and frustrating. why can't i just be comfortable in myself? be comfortable and unperturbed and okay without needing external validation? it's so frustrating and sad, i just feel really uncomfortable.

[redacted]

i struggle with trying to be the best at everything. today is very difficult, everything is just messing with my head and it's so annoying.

[redacted]

i feel really tired of myself today. dissatisfied and dare i say, i disgusted with myself. i don't want to be myself, i want to be an earthworm. it's so infuriating.

i'm so tired and uncomfortable.

it's almost like i think i'm above mistakes and need to be perfect everytime, and i wish i was perfect, so that i would be happy.

i'm just so tired of myself today and all these feelings. why do i care so much about what people think of me and why do i always want to be good?!

On Sunday evening, I noticed that I was feeling anxious. My chest felt heavy and I wasn't sure what the problem was. The first thing that came to mind was that I was feeling bad because I spent the entire weekend doing nothing and now that the weekend was over, I didn't know how to deal with the backlog of things I had to do.

My best response to that entire thing is to do something—what is that thing they say? “action kills anxiety”, so I decided to make a list of things I had to do, so I can figure out a plan.

I did that and it felt okay, until I saw something that triggered me which led to the myriad of feelings I started experiencing in the night and today. I just couldn't sleep and I felt like shit.

Sometime last week, I discovered that I spend a lot of time craving external validation and I compare myself to people a lot, and because of that, I can never just be happy and satisfied with what I do. No matter how satisfied I am with what I did, I will definitely find someone to compare myself to and invalidate the work I've done.

Compared to what ‘other people’ have done, my work is stupid and irrelevant, no matter how much work I've done and how much I might care about it. This is the way it is in my head.

Another thing which makes this entire thing worse is the fact that I can't give myself grace and forgive myself when I make mistakes, it's like I think I can't make mistakes.

If you go back to read what I wrote in the journal entry, there's a place where I talked about how I wanted to be perfect, just so I could be happy. It's almost like I've accepted that this is just how I am and the only thing that can help me is being perfect.

It made me sad because I'm a human being and I will definitely make mistakes and so, if this is how I will react everytime I make mistakes, I'm going to end up living an unhappy life and I don't want that.

I noticed that because I always compare myself with others, seek external validation like my life depends on it, and always want to be good at everything, sometimes, I find myself lacking focus. I might not care about something, but XYZ person has it/does it, I also need to do it and be good at it.

I wish I can just be. Of course, I don't always feel this way, but between last week and this week, the feeling has amplified so much that today was literally so much for me, I remember crying while journaling earlier.

I'm really tired of living this way. When I say I don't care about certain things, I really don't, but there's a part of me that seems to care so much. It's like a certain personality separate from the actual me. The funny thing is, I might not even care about this thing, I just want the feeling of having it/having done it. I don't know if you understand, but yeah.

I hate the constant self doubts, the constant questioning, “what if nobody cares?”, “what if it's actually stupid?”, “what if I'm doing something wrong?”, it's so annoying and I want it to stop.

Right now, I'm tired of being a person with feelings and thinking capability. My life feels like a performance that I keep messing up.

Wednesday, February 12.

It's currently 8:43 PM and I'm lying down on my bed. There's light, I don't feel hot (unlike earlier), and I'm eating Spaghetti tomorrow. I feel really excited about my life right now. You know, like anything is possible and anything can happen—and this very idea is what's so exciting. Anything. Can. Happen. It's exciting.

It's funny that I'm saying this now seeing that I felt like shit on Monday, but I feel good right now, and I'm going to hold on to that. I'm not going to bother myself with what's going well and what's not going well, I'm going to do the best I can in this moment and just continue in my state of being.

I went to school today and I came back by 12 PM or so. I slept from past 12 till past 3 PM, I remember waking up several times thinking that I had somehow slept till evening. It's so funny that I was getting worked up for nothing, because when I woke up, I didn't even read anything, I was just moving from one place to the other in my house, and doing everything but reading.

I have a test tomorrow and I have to wake up later tonight to read for the test. Hopefully. I notice that these days, I wake up in the night, check my WhatsApp and hope they've cancelled the test—and when they cancel the test, I continue sleeping and tell myself that I will change tomorrow. Tomorrow never seems to come, sigh. It's not my fault.

Friday, February 14.

It's really interesting how you can be so full of life and nothing seems impossible one day, and the next day, you're wondering why you're still here. Life is just anyhow.

Right now, I feel like I'm running a temperature and I just finished crying my eyes out, I also have a splitting headache. Obviously, today hasn't been the best day, coincidentally, it's valentine's day and for some weird reasons, something always goes wrong on Valentine's day—or I’m just sensitive to everything that happen because valentine's day is supposed to be full of love and I'm experiencing the opposite? I don't know, but today's feeling is well deserved.

I saw something that made me really upset and sad in school. It didn't go the way it should have, which means I have to do it again and it's so tiring. I'm tired of being brave. It took a lot for me to do it that time and I have to do it again and quite frankly, I would rather not.

It's so sad that the “worst” thing can happen to you and you're supposed to suck it up and try to move regardless and be happy, like why? Why do I have to do this every single time?

Anyways, this is the end of this week's regular programming. I hope you had a much better week than I did.

Articles, blog posts, essays, and the rest.

🌻 ‘We’re not doing the thing we’re built to do’: Agnes Callard, the philosopher living life according to Socrates.

Before today, I had never heard of this person, but after reading this interview, I'm intrigued. Read it here.

Excerpts:

• “It is true,” she says, “that you can view life as a comedy or a tragedy, but I really think that Socrates thought there’s a third possibility. That is, you can refute things. You can investigate them, never settle on an answer. There’s an inquisitive mode of living, in which you’re living your life at the same time as not assuming you know how to live it.”

• “Look at the kind of behaviour we accept as routine in the context of love and romance, and put it in the context of, say, food,” she says. One common idea of love “would be like seeing somebody standing outside a restaurant, and banging on the door, and you’d be like, ‘Oh, that restaurant’s closed.’ And you’d point out that there are these other restaurants that are open. And he’s like, ‘No, I have to go to this one.’ You’d say, ‘Why? Is the food really good?’ And he’s like, ‘No, I hate the food here.’ That’s just what we do when we’re texting the person who broke up with us. ‘He’s a jerk, but I need to have him.’ We don’t hear how insane that sounds because we’ve gotten used to it. Socrates would say there’s a better way. You’re built to do something else.”

• “Philosophy, I think, is a leisure activity. Indeed, it’s the leisure activity, but it’s not a relaxing one, or one that you can do on your own. It’s like sometimes we might watch Netflix or whatever, but we also sometimes need to read a classic novel. In a way, a minimal claim of my book is that you should extend that same generosity to your conversational life. You want to have these hard conversations, because they are some of the best things in life.”

🌻 Sorry, Lily Collins, but when people outsource childbirth, their motives really count

This might be my most controversial opinion, but I don't see the problem with surrogacy. As long as nobody is forced into doing anything and everything is legal—no loose strings anywhere—people should absolutely do it if they want to. Read it here.

Why do you need to peer into people's souls to divine their “true reasons", what does that even mean? If they end up abusing the child or anything, the problem is them, not the fact that the child was gotten through a surrogate.

🌻 Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds: The philosopher, who lives with her husband and her ex-husband, searches for what one human can be to another human

This is the best thing I've read since this year started. I've never actually thought about marriage and relationships this way, it's an interesting perspective. Read it here.

Excerpts:

• “In “Parallel Lives,” a study of five couples in the Victorian era, the literary critic Phyllis Rose observes that we tend to disparage talk about marriage as gossip. “But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding,” she writes. “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.” Rose describes marriage as a political experience and argues that talking about it should be taken as seriously as conversations about national elections: “Cultural pressure to avoid such talk as ‘gossip’ ought to be resisted, in a spirit of good citizenship.””

• “‘Hey, I know all these couples have gotten rings and gone to the courthouse, but are they married?’ One thing you can do with that question is forget all about it and find some deadline to be anxious about. Or you can really hear the question, vividly. That’s the place where philosophy begins—with a certain anxiety about how to live the life that is yours.””

• “It was, she said, “the first moment when the world says to you, ‘That can be possible.’ Nothing can be more important than that. Every other little wrinkle and confusion—it’s, like, whatever. Forget it. Set this aside. This thing is possible. And that’s amazing—you’re right to be taken in. Even when you start to see, Oh, he doesn’t quite live up to the ideal, you owe them the very existence of the ideal in you. You owe them your projection. They pointed you in that direction.””

• “As their youngest son grew older, and there were fewer urgent distractions, Agnes became aware that marriage is a thing that can die. She described the experience as “persistently ignoring the thought that there’s something wrong. You just turn away from something and then keep turning away from it, and eventually you can’t see it anymore.”

• “Until she met Arnold, she said, “I didn’t realize how lonely I was. You don’t see it. It’s like the air that you breathe, but when you see that you can be relieved of it there is this weird way in which the relationship exacerbates the loneliness.”

• “For Agnes, loneliness was the experience of having thoughts she wanted to communicate but felt unable to, because she knew that her words would come out wrong or be misinterpreted. Whatever she said would be a distortion of what she was feeling. “And that experience is almost a kind of madness—the experience of not being able to settle on a view about how anything is,” she said.”

• “In hindsight, my choice seemed silly, and I guessed she would agree. “Yeah, it feels like a way of reassuring yourself that some of the flaws in the relationship are actually really beautiful,” she said, adding that this is “why Socrates thought the poets didn’t know what they were talking about.” The ineffable wisdom they wrote of—inaccessible to others, because it was so mysterious and private—sounded to Socrates a lot like ignorance, she said. The idea that a marriage should hold space for each person’s incommunicable core, she believed, “comes from this pessimism where it’s, like, Look, at the end of the day we know we can’t really help one another, so the best thing we can do is not interfere too much.”

• “Arnold aspired to rid the marriage of loneliness, too, but he defined it differently from Agnes. “For me, togetherness is something like: imagine being with somebody where it would never occur to you to say anything but the truth,” he told me. “There’s no strategy, no attempt to get anything.” He continued, “Whereas Agnes’s loneliness is a barrier between two people, for me loneliness is almost like an internal problem. How can I manage to find reasons to tell the truth? Or how can I make contact with the idea of being honest?”

🌻 Maybe You're Not Anxiously Attached

There was actually a time when I used to take a lot of tests and read a lot of articles concerning anxious attachment yada yada, when, actually, the only thing I needed to do then was just leave. Block. Delete. Leave.

So, yes, I agree with the author of this article. Anxious attachment exists, yes, but sometimes what you need is to just leave the relationship and be with people who don't make you want to die every time you talk with them.

Excerpts:

• “I mean, look at the language we use now. It’s not his lack of commitment; it’s your anxious attachment. It’s not that he criticises you constantly; it’s your rejection sensitivity dysphoria. It’s not that he’s distant with you; it’s your dependent personality disorder. Oh he’s hurting you over and over? Have you considered you’re just a “Highly Sensitive Person”? There’s something tragic about seeing so many young women refracting their relationships through this kind of therapy-speak and losing the language of hurt and disappointment. Listing out terrible things their partners have done and then diagnosing themselves.”

• “Which worries me because there are a lot of young women on these forums realising after their relationships ended that their anxiety “actually made sense”, or they were using it to excuse their partner for everything. Many found new partners and never felt that way again. After all the crying and sleepless nights and panic attacks, turns out they weren’t anxiously attached. They were with the wrong person.”

• “There’s an important distinction here. If you’re overthinking every relationship you have, even if it’s healthy, and it’s disrupting your life, please find support. But if one relationship is causing you constant grief, if casual sex is making you feel confused and insecure, then maybe you’re not anxiously attached. Maybe you’re having a valid response to someone. Maybe you’re having a valid response to the world now, where we gave up our moral guardrails, where people aren’t called to something higher, where love has less to do with serving somebody and more to do with meeting our own needs, where expecting commitment or even decent conduct from someone seems demanding and almost oppressive, where it feels like you have to be some kind of soulless cyborg to get through it, and if you’re a sensitive young woman it can honestly be hell.”

• “I’m not saying be risk-averse. Be brave and love someone! But don’t compromise on your core values. Or think you’re broken for wanting something more meaningful. Instead of withdrawing inwards be rigorous with your standards. Instead of researching your attachment style and reading online forums, stand up for yourself. Less analysing; more action. Self-respect before self-diagnosis. Don’t accept something casual if you want something serious. Don’t waste time on people who have made it clear they don’t care. Don’t sit ruminating about what’s wrong with you. Sometimes you need to get out. And find someone who doesn’t make you feel unwell.”

I hope you “enjoyed” reading this week's newsletter—“enjoy” doesn't feel like the right word, given everything I said, but yeah. I hope it was worth your time, at least? Let me know if it was, and yes, I would appreciate prayers and hugs—and money, a new school, a time travel machine to go back in time and stop myself from choosing to go to this school.

I'm not one to regret things, but this school is the worst decision I've ever made in my entire life, but I digress. Have a wonderful weekend. 💕