On rediscovering my humanity

2009-11-01T14:30:00.000-08:00

With which words should one describe that which has conquered, suppressed, and stifled description? How can one convey the existence of an emptiness that appears to permeate the very space that radiates with the luster of humanity in all its tragedy and beauty? What adjective or what noun can possibly point to a feeling that is distinguished only by its absence of feeling, its estrangement from sensation. It is numb and it is dead and it is cold, yet these words overpower and defy its nothingness and presume a world that teems with light, warmth and vitality. And yet I know the world is such. It is simply that for me, the ripe fruit of life's enjoyment, which once dangled patently from the lowest branch, is of present separated by manifold layers from my position at the center of the earth. It is within a fiery purgatory of inestimable depth, my breath perpetually suppressed, that I continue to struggle upwards to the surface, to a place wherein I can breath and live and feel gentle warmth again.

Conceit aside, I began this blog to begin to attempt to materialize the struggle to come to terms with how my life has become in the proceeding years. Since around the age of 15 or 16, my ability to feel--to perceive profound sadness, mirth, love, bereavement, and the entire smorgasbord of life's emotional treasure has not been a part of my existence. The onset was 3 or 4 years after I initially took anti-depressant medications with the consent of my parents after considerable lobbying by medical and psychiatric "experts" who saw only the potential for good in these medications. There was and is no remorse or understanding by these parties of the extent of the damage that the medication has wrought on my life. My massive weight gain and frequent complaints of emotional blunting and a lack of interest in everything I once enjoyed did not phase them in their tyrannical conquest of my mind with medicinal tools they barely understood.

A lack of inhibition and self-control along with bouts of euphoria induced initially by the medication, in several years gave way to a state of constant and unmitigated emotional emptiness--no access to anger or anxiety or depression but the inability to gain joy from anything in life, whether relationships, life events, school, music, television, or sports. I naively assumed that I could consider this a mere side effect of the medications, and when I dispelled the pills from my life (though i was discouraged by multiple psychiatrists who told me I would never live without them) with it would dissipate the fetters that restrained all the feelings I never felt. My perception blunted by the medication, I never had the awareness to foresee that my life as I knew it was in jeopardy. It took until the spring of my freshman year of college to definitively conclude that my life was proceeding on a course that was no longer tolerable. I was fat and perpetually tired, I lacked motivation in school and altogether in life. I had no ambition, no desire, few friends, and derived no sense of enjoyment or fun from anything in my surrounding environment. I was alone in Boston, thousands of miles from home spending an equal amount of my parents money on an education I hadn't an iota of interest in. Had I not made that determination then, which was not as simple and obvious as it may seem now due to my impaired mental and emotional state, I shudder to consider the extent to which my life may have deteriorated.

Yet as I have alluded to, it was not as though terminating the medication that day was the panacea for all the problems the medication had itself induced. The emotional blunting did not subside with the dose, and I find myself 19 months later virtually impregnable to all stimuli that others find enjoyable or tragic. Things have relented slightly from the unyielding, frigid darkness that once found myself immersed in. I live for pockets of abiding and authentic emotion, when I can bereave my uncle or celebrate a Miami Dolphins' Touchdown. The rest of my life is a grinding, bitter exercise in monotony in which I can never achieve any kind of continuity or purpose because I experience no reinforcement from any activity. I spend my days in a self-defeated manner, waiting for unquantifiable external variables to improve so I can continue down the course I deviated from so many years ago. Much of the day, when I am alone, is spent in a foggy stupor or frantic, fruitless debate about what to do with myself and my life.

In response I am, as of this Autumn 2009, trying to seize the reins, so to speak, of my situation in the only way I know to the extent that I can. I have committed for now to an academic and professional route, which is excruciating in the minimal excitement it provides, but comforting in its stability and representation and structure in a life that otherwise seems meaningless. I have begun writing this blog because I need the competing thoughts and concerns that monopolize and confound the space in my head need a place to rest--and perhaps a place to be understood or related to by others. I hereby commit to documenting the quest for renewed humanity, so to speak, my struggle to deal with life as it is while I await the profound changes that must undoubtedly occur as my brain continues to learn a day at a time, that it is once again safe to re-admit the emotion that it was systematically programmed to reject and to spurn.

The Aftermath

On rediscovering my humanity