2023 reflections.

I spoke last year of people coming to my rescue, old friends and new friends alike, causing me to disown my obsessive tendencies. That desiring this exclusive crazy love was an inherently broken idea. I also cast away this ambition to drown but often found apathy in its wake. It’s bizarre, it feels bizarre to march into the fog of the future with any amount of certainty. I read books this year, not to feed into my misery, but rather to question whether it’s appropriate for my misery to exist. I feel as though I stare at the absurd and desire nothing from it, and some of my friends feel shocked at my lack of ambition. I want something from this life, it isn’t power, it isn’t money, it isn’t the desire to bring change, but rather just a simple desire to live. I see death in my future, whether near or far, and I choose to accept it but not to desire it.

I don’t feel the existential crises of my past, but rather two simpler problems, what am I capable of and what do I desire to do? The answer is everything and nothing. I don’t believe in the limits of the human mind, someone conditioned to dislike a field and underperform in it could as easily be convinced otherwise, this is within the nature of the human condition. Hence answering the first question, I am capable, like every other human on this earth of everything, each human possesses their own share of the divine, as Marcus Aurelius would’ve insisted. Thus the more imperative question lies in front of me, what to make of this life? If I am capable of everything, that means that endless paths lie in front of me and to make any choice feels daunting. It’s difficult to state what I want to be known for, whether it’s blatant honesty, harsh introspection, or even just having a wide array of information. There are n number of interpretations of me, and I do not know which I intend to adhere to. I think at a certain level my life has had a consistent level of documentation that I intend to continue, but other than that I see a lack of desire to do much else. I have my bursts of creativity, where I can write a song, or I can write an essay, an outline for an app, or even just simply sit and reflect on ideas that I have flowing through my head, and these are things that I can admire about myself, but none of them are the things that I feel this insatiable desire to do.

Maybe the only things I do desire are cravings of the physical, from good sleep, to good food to good sex, at a simple level these things can make me extremely satisfied. I don’t desire a meaning from this life anymore, and likely because of my madness (mental illness), it seems like the right choice to have made. 

Although, one thing that I have lately been desiring is one of the lives that Camus outlines in The Myth of Sisyphus. 

“The actor has three hours to be Iago or Alceste, Phedre or Gloucester. In that short space of time he makes them come to life and die on fifty square yards of boards. Never has the absurd been so well illustrated or at such length. What more revelatory epitome can be imagined than those marvelous lives, those exceptional and total destinies unfolding for a few hours within a stage set? Off the stage, Sigismundo ceases to count. Two hours later he is seen dining out. Then it is, perhaps, that life is a dream. But after Sigismundo comes another. The hero suffering from uncertainty takes the place of the man roaring for his revenge. By thus sweeping over centuries and minds, by miming man as he can be and as he is, the actor has much in common with that other absurd individual, the traveler. Like him, he drains something and is constantly on the move. He is a traveler in time and, for the best, the hunted traveler, pursued by souls.”

There is a beauty to this notion, no matter how ephemeral. A certain part within me feels an inexplicable attraction to this. The desire to be transported to another’s life and embrace their mannerisms, intentions, emotions, it seems like an escape from life but at the same time grounding you further in it. 

“It requires but a little imagination to feel what an actor’s fate means. It is in time that he makes up and enumerates his characters. It is in time likewise that he learns to dominate them. The greater number of different lives he has lived, the more aloof he can be from them. The time comes when he must die to the stage and for the world. What he has lived faces him. He sees clearly. He feels the harrowing and irreplaceable quality of that adventure. He knows and can now die.“

There aren’t many things lately that strike a chord within me the same way Camus’ The myth of Sisyphus did. Truthfully, I may just also be in a state of pure awe and admiration for the text where something voices an inner thought of yours so intricately you can’t help but feel like it was written for you. 

My aim for 2024 is simple, let it be better than the last and I am satisfied. No need for a movie per day or an article per week, a song every month, a book every year, my 2024 being good is contingent on me doing something better than the year before, if it happens that’s great, if it doesn’t, there’s still 2025 to look forward to.

i know i ramble a lot, but sometimes it’s good to put the craziness out there so someone else can also relate.