Drain

Time is meaningless. I wake up, I eat, I drink, I use the toilet, I take my meds, I sometimes do other activities (this week I finished knitting the jumper that I started around New Year’s), I go to sleep. The days pass. Deadlines loom closer and I have no motivation to attend to any of the tasks I need to accomplish. My June recital has been cancelled.

We search for meaning in life because the alternative is that no one particularly wants to be around us, because we’re depressing. We make art. We tire of making art. Burnout, fatigue, depression. I started antidepressants this week; before, I couldn’t even do the bare minimum of things I needed to do to survive, and now I can simply do the bare minimum. I feel like a drain. I am draining, drained.

There is something deeply hypocritical about capitalism telling us that we shouldn’t centre any one person or people in our lives but we should do that with our work. I’m not surprised by this, I simply want to name it. It’s codependency — a term that’s overused and often misapplied — when it’s a mutually supportive partnership but not when it’s an inanimate job that, no matter how many hours you put into it, won’t love you back. Yes, it’s ideal for us to enjoy and be inspired by our work, but not all jobs are inspiring. Not all of us can realistically do work that we love. And some of us stop loving something when we start doing it as work.

I am living alone. I like the feeling that I don’t have to be “on” any of the time. (I guess I’m an introvert.) I miss the daily low-level social interaction that comes from walking to school, from riding the bus, from taking the tube. I miss my friends and my family. I miss having agency over whether I stay at home or go out, but I don’t miss the indecision that comes with that. The anxiety of schoolwork and recital preparation has been replaced with the anxiety of having to decide what to do with my time; the anxiety of what I’ll do for work once I graduate is still present, possibly even augmented.

Time is meaningless. I watch Star Trek, I play online games, I skype people, I write blog posts. The days pass. My task is to keep living, even without knowing the meaning or reason.