To Those Who Numb Themselves

The thing I’ve realized is this:

It doesn’t matter where you go, it doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter where you live, it doesn’t matter what you’ve achieved or who you’ve met. It will catch up with you.

And you have to accept yourself for who you are. You have to be okay with yourself and maybe even love yourself in a profoundly mundane way. It’s the most minute acts of kindness towards yourself that stack upon each other like you’re building pieces of a mosaic, the art piece of all the moments of your life.

But here’s the thing: You’re the only one who’s ever going to know the whole piece. Ever. Only you. Period. It’s not going to be on display as a whole finished piece. Not even at your funeral. Your parents won’t see it or your friends or lovers or fans or followers or anybody else. It’s only you. It can be you, only.

So you can surrender yourself to a habit or impulse and slumber through it or numb every waking piece of it so you don’t even identify with those tiny building blocks and slowly but steadily you open your eyes to the fact that you’ve become a stranger to yourself and you’re filled with holes and you and life don’t know each other anymore so when you do encounter it, you find yourself unable to connect.

You may come across a wonderful human full of vitality and fully flourishing with joy and laughter who’s adopted all these charming practices of self love that overflow the space around them and fill the room with a contagious buzz of light. And you’ll realize how hollow you’ve become. You feel the cavity you’ve created by singeing your roots and all that held you together has fallen out the bottom and you feel far more alone than you’ve ever truly felt and you think “oh my god what have I done?” Life becomes magical and miraculous right before your very eyes and you are a butterfly who has lost its wings watching the hawks and eagles circle overhead.

So you exhaust your contact lists and binge your favorite distraction and wake up in a filthy state and it all catches up to you that none of these things really make a difference besides delaying the progress you admire so much when it’s reflected back to you in the form of other people. You realize that it is entirely on you to locate yourself in these moments and treat yourself with love and kindness and care even if you’re on your drive home or in the middle of a crowded street or wherever.

It’s just you with yourself and you have to be good to you which may have become impossibly, paralyzingly difficult because in order for you to care for somebody you first have to feel for them and you’ve done just about everything possible to avoid doing that because the feelings you’ve been running away from where so unfathomably painful. Maybe that’s why you picked up all those indulgent and seemingly harmless practices and habits (some of which are stigmatized more than others) that blacked out your tiles pieces and the library of your life is filled with shelves full of books with covers but no pages. Books that are supposed to hold the memories that you draw from when life gets hard in a way that is real and tangible, unlike depression which is maddeningly elusive but undeniably real. Maybe you’ve just become void of those memories and they are now so few and far between that the become an old sponge that has lost its capacity to absorb moisture anymore and they, too, become malnourished.

So, what are you to do?

You have to look at the immediate moment at hand. You have to absolutely vanquish the past and future and find yourself exactly where and when and how you are in a purely physical sense. Your perceptions of who you are, what you’re about, where you are in the course of your imagined narrative of your life mean absolutely nothing for this moment and those things will do you no good. I promise that attempting to draw from those things will have the exact opposite affect because you will have just armed yourself with an arsenal of reasons why you shouldn’t feel this way when it positively does not matter whether or not you “should” feel this way.

Maybe you’re just like, tipped over on a couple of chairs curled up in the fetal position under the kitchen table looking at the floor without really being able to see it because your thoughts or numbness have taken over your senses.

The only thing I’m going to ask you to do is to start noticing the pattern of the floor. Is it tiled, carpeted, wood grain? Just see it.

Then maybe notice how your head feels, where the pressure of the surface its resting on feels. Can you feel the sensation of it?

Just feel your body. Piece by piece. Feel the way your lower back hurts or those blisters on your feet or those way your teeth are touching. I promise that getting back into sensory feeling of life is the most prominent step in adding moments in life that you can identify with and later draw from. The more you avoid it the worse and worse you’ll feel and the more you tune into it the more momentum you’ll feel in connection with life. Not that this is going to take away your pain or suffering or misery right away or even in the near future. Those demons and ghosts are still going to be with you and whatever you’ve been running away from are all still going to be there and you will have to do this, I promise you, an ungodly number of times if you’re going to make it out alive. But it will give you a very tangible way to start to build a mosaic or library out of your life that you will recognize and know and hopefully maybe even love.

Best of luck,

Roman