Dark Night of The Soul

[Sage]

This was a journal entry that I wrote tonight, I guess I'm posting it here because I don't really know of anywhere else I would find someone involved in this work and having my current experience. To anyone feeling alone and desperate, I hope this can at least alleviate your loneliness.

 

I can't shake the feeling that I'm letting my life pass me by, that I'm not taking full advantage of the opportunities that are available to me. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, wasting my time and wasting my potential. I am so idealistic in regards to what I presume I will take action on in the future; but when the future arrives, I don't do what I know I should do. I guess I'm more disciplined than lots of people, but I really don't do what it is I need to do to achieve the things I need to achieve and become the person I know I can become. On top of that, I spend the time that I could be using to contemplate, do yoga, make music, read, write etc beating myself up for not doing said things. There's an almost constant undercurrent of pain pervading my entire existence, I know this is self-created, and yet I cannot stop it. I feel lazy. I do not want to get out of bed in the morning. I don’t want to stretch. I don't want to meditate and I don't want to exercise. I am a lazy hedonist and all I want is the fruits of these labours without getting my hands dirty and putting in the hours. It's like I cannot accept the fact that results occur following long and dedicated periods of hard work and concerted effort. I know this to be true, but I can't seem to accept it.

And so what is the result? The result is that I am unsatisfied with my life and the person that I am. I am bored. I am unable to summon enough enthusiasm to put an authentic smile on my face. I'm not depressed, I wouldn't even say I'm particularly sad at this moment. I'm apathetic, fed up, unable to come up with a good enough reason to explain why someone would want to continue to live the life I'm living. That is not to say that I don't think life itself is not worth living, just that the current way that I live my life sucks a massive pile of dicks, to use an apt metaphor. My boredom and lack of action leads to incessant social media and YouTube addiction. Scrolling again and again and again for hours, days and weeks on end. Sometimes I think there's something wrong with my brain, that I'm just catastrophically low on some key neurotransmitters that has made me an apathetic, useless, unenthusiastic pile of dogshit. This could be true, but that doesn't really help the situation. It's a deflection of responsibility unto everything but myself.

There just is no passion in my life anymore, and that is really what I want at the end of the day. I want to wake up in the morning and feel genuine gratitude for being alive. I don't want to feel like I'm just running out the clock, chewing at the bit for the next little hit of dopamine until one day my receptors look like daffodils in autumn. I want to write in my journal someday about how awesome life is and how wonderful it is to have this experience, but when I look back at literally every journal entry I've ever written, they are all tainted with sadness, despair, anger, confusion and frustration. I just feel like I don't care about much anymore, I enjoy things, but I could really take them or leave them. That intimate love and connection I used to have for my family is all but gone, I seem to be unable to feel genuine heart-felt love for my girlfriend, I have no more passion for books or creating music anymore. I feel like I've slipped back to the same life I was living years back - albeit in a new environment and without the drugs. It's painful to think that all that 'work on myself' was for nothing, meaningless nonsense, but I feel like that is probably the case - I don't really know how I would verify that anyway.

 

What effect did all that meditation have really? All that contemplation, journaling and reading, was it all bullshit? The rapture of psychedelic insight is but a distant memory and what I feel now is a sense of complete meaninglessness. I'm stuck, I don't know which direction to go, everything I would normally do when I find myself in this state seems useless. All techniques suddenly seem like distractions from the gaping hole inside. I've spent years experimenting with all sorts of supposed spiritual methods in the hopes of breaking through into some abiding embodiment of absolute truth. Tonight, I am feeling vulnerable, humble and very human. 

 

Floating in a void with nothing to hold on to, no signposts and no more ideas. I'm not one to pray, but if I were I would just ask for one thing, it would be clarity.