A leaven of sadness

Feeling melancholy and introspective today, so be warned :

Here comes the angst.

Dunno why I feel this way. There’s no obvious reason for me to be sad. My knee is still messed up and I am somewhat stressed by the whole house hunting thing, but neither of those has gotten worse lately.

I guess it is just that time of my mood cycle. The time my body and/or my mind sets aside for actively feeling a measure of the deep and abiding sadness I carry within mr.

One possible trigger, however, is this documentary I watched about the hallucinogen ayausca, and its active ingredient, DMT, or di-methyl toluene. You might remember that I spoke about this topic once before.

Don’t worry, I won’t be ranting about transcendentalists today.

In the documentary, we follow three Canadians as they journey to Peru in order to take part in an ayuasca ritual run by a wise old Shaman who will be their guide through what will be a difficult and profound experience in both the physical and mental realms.

Seeing people go through the emotional purging of the ayuasca ritual got me thinking about my own demons, and how good it would be to be able to cut through all my resistance and confront all my demons all at once, and be done with them.

I would definitely try the ayuasca ritual if I had the opportunity. I would be scared out of my mind, but I would do it anyhow. I don’t care what kind of hell it unleashed. It would be worth it to rid myself of the emotional residue of my forty one years on Earth.

For someone who truly believes in catharsis like I do, ayuasca is the ultimate drug. A new kind of drug : a cathartic.

Imagine what something like that could do for the world.

So I guess that seeing other people deal with their deep issues and imagining myself in their place helped me bring up some of that deep sadness that I carry around with me in my sad and lonely heart.

Right now, I don’t feel good at all. I feel cranky and restless and that reliable demon self-loathing is very close to the surface and threatens to break out at any second. When I feel like this, hating everything about myself is very easy, and it takes a certain amount of will to resist it.

I can only resist it by pushing the thoughts back down when they emerge, which is no long-term solution, I admit, but it gets me through the day.

It’s times like this when I wish I had access to a gym so I could take all this raging energy and expend it via exercise.

It would be especially good if said gym had a heavy bag, the kind boxers use. I bet spending twenty minutes punching the shit out of a heavy bag is almost as cathartic as an ayuasca ritual.

Well, maybe not. But I bet it would help a lot.

Instead, I sit here trying to let it out through words. I suppose that is also a sort of exercise, but for mental as opposed to physical muscle.

And quite frankly, my body needs it a lot more than my brain.

It is times like these that also make me realize, acutely, how unsatisfying my life is. I want so much more out of life, and yet I can’t seem to find it in myself to find a path between the life I lead and the one I want.

Applying to VFS was a big deal to me. It was supposed to be my ticket out. Losing that, after convincing myself that I was a shoe-in to get it, really took the wind out of my sails. I have never handled disappointment well, and this was a doozy.

I tried not to let it take all the hope out of me. I tried to stay focused and work really hard to find some courses to take so I could reapply in the new year. I tried really hard to stay on track.

But there’s a hole in the bottom of my motivation bucket, and when I got rejected for VFS, all my motivation drained out of me and I went back to being the lump that I have been for 20 goddamned wasted years of my life.

That has a lot to do with why I am getting back into doing videos. It might not be much, but it is a way for me to give more purpose and focus to my day and make my life be something more than distracting myself between meals.

I find the prospect of living the rest of my life like that fills me with horror. I want my life to mean something. I want to be noticed. I want to be recognized for my abilities. I want the chance to apply those abilities, and in doing so, develop them further. I want to make things that make people happy and maybe even create a little magic in their lives.

And I can rail against VFS, fate, my parents, and all kinds of other things for “holding me back”, but that sort of answer has never really satisfied me.

And I know the truth : there are millions of possibilities open to me, right now, from this exact position in life, and I am just too sick to pursue them.

And that frustrates me to no end. My newborn will and ego rail against the very notion of such petty limitations. They want to roar onto the world scene like a lion, rise like the sun, and shine so bright that the whole world can see me.

But that alone will not heal the broken bones and frostburn that scar me inside. Healing is never easy and it’s never as fast as we want it to be.

So I wait, and I sigh, and I do my best to heal a little faster today than I did yesterday, and continue this process known as recovery.

The lion will have to stay in his cage… for now.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

One thought on “A leaven of sadness

  1. DMT is dimethyl tryptamine, not dimethyl toluene.

    This is a big difference; tryptamine is similar to the amino acid tryptophan in chemical structure, while toluene is paint thinner.

    “A new kind of drug : a cathartic. Imagine what something like that could do for the world.” See Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Island”, where he does just this. He calls his cathartic drug “soma”.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine has some interesting things to say also. (Probably mostly covered in the documentary, though.)

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.