2004-01-17
"Libet On Depression"--Excerpts from Vin's Diary
*Remember this? It's an entry that I wrote a few months back during my depression bought. While I erased all of my former entries (fear, shame, who knows...) Vin was kind enough to keep this one:
What happens when you feel so confined? When you realize that you have already outgrown the place in which you live and the people with which you live? You become depressed. I come home everyday to the same house, the same neighborhood. I eat, and begin my homework, and I do not finish until it is eleven o'clock at night. This, unfortunately, is an everyday thing, save for Fridays (work) and my monthly board meetings. The same thing over and over. You want adventure--I want adventure. When I go out on a regular day, I want to see people busy on the streets and walking everywhere. I want to see life. I want to see a small tofu place down the street, and an avenue peppered with cafes in which a plethora of artists/intellectuals are engaged in conversation over who knows what. I don't see that! I see a small confined place--so small, not secular enough. I am serious when I say that it is enough to kill myself. Vin says that it will end, and I just have to maintain my sanity until graduation, but I am so impatient. I want change now! However, I must wait, good things do not come from haste.
I am also going to confess something, although this I am ashamed of. I feel alone--nothing fills me. I feel so detached from this world, and it's not that no one understands me (because plenty of people do) but that such coldness is penetrating. As you can see, this is reason enough for me to be depressed. Knowing that there is a world out there, and you are trapped here! It is finite, I must tell myself. I seek adventure, but in order to get that adventure, I need a co-dreamer, a co-philosopher.
Despite this desolation, there is one hope--moving to New York. Well, moving in general. Independence, and spiritual growth. Oh how I crave for a small coffee shop that bustles with intellectual life--the real kind, not forged intellectuality that comes from getting all A's in school. I want secular people, I want idealists, I want artists, and radical thinkers. I want friends with ink-stained fingers from constantly scribbling poetry. Or friends with paint-stained shirts from constantly trying to capture beauty's essence with their canvas and brush. I want to be a person who under a sea of disheveled hair and books pressed to her chest hurries across a courtyard everyday. Yes, that would be routine, but it is one that I can escape anytime. I want to argue philosophy until the early morning hours, and even make love to a philosopher. Is this only a dream? Or can it come true?