14:28

I need to care.

It is the thing I need most. When I do the things I do not -- or cannot -- care about, I feel a desolation of the soul that fuels an enormous anger in me. Why do I keep doing them then?

Dude, if I could answer that, I would have the key to my life and I would not be wasting it writing a fucking blog.

I need to care even though I know there is nothing to care about, that this which is passes. I need to care despite knowing that more thoroughly than I know anything.

*

Sometimes people ask what you want to be. They only ask you that when you are not what you want to be, of course. I do know people who are what they want to be. Mrs Zen is, for instance. It's not her she wants to see change.

I've never known. Sometimes I want to dissolve. Others I want to be important. I can never resolve the two feelings. Is one a symptom of mania, the other of depression? I don't want to know. A couple of years ago, I felt exhausted. I couldn't get through the day. I saw a doctor and she said, it looks like you have mild depression. Are you fucking kidding, I said. This is one of those times when I feel great about things. If the good times look like depression to the world, fuck the world's view of these things. I didn't want to know any more. I got out of there.

*

I have not given a massage for some time. Months. I don't know why. I know I won't have lost the touch. I only need to do one and the gates will open.

I used to smoke. I stopped when Zenella was born. I took off the last patch the day before she was born (and had to slap a new one on when I got the phone call). Sometimes I wonder if I should start it up again. It used to be a good way to create space, to find focus and detach myself. (If you don't ever feel you need to do it, you can't know what that is, but if you need it, you know how much you need it.)

I can escape the same way in a massage. I feel my self transported, transmuted. I feel the service I am doing makes me bigger and better. I feel calm.

And yet...

*

I stopped caring about my writing a long time ago. I let the feeling that I could never succeed, not in the world's terms and not in my own, overwhelm me.

What a stupid fucking thing to feel! I can think that but the problem is, you cannot unfeel just by thinking your way through it. You can tell yourself, you need to be wanted but you do not try to be wanted, but you cannot help the feeling that you are unwantable.

I do wonder what made me. They say, don't they, that you are moulded, that you are a block of whatever (hey, let's say marble, do yourself a favour), and life chips at you until you are the statue that everyone sees. I believe it. I sometimes believe it. It feels undoable. It feels like if I get my own hammer out and remake it, I don't know whether what I leave will be unrecognisable.

*

Another post I should probably keep to myself. But honesty is my whip. Who knows whether some day the audience at which this is aimed will pay it attention?

posted by Dr Zen @ 2:05 pm