I just came back from a 5 hour programming competition, and my team won first place. We are planning on going to regionals now, and they are over the moon; but I’m just unhappy. I somehow was happier before the competition, and winning it I just feel apathetic. I want to attribute it to the fact my mom didn’t want to take care of hash for the one day since she is working on Friday and Monday now at a library, but regardless I hate this feeling. I wish I felt happy or enjoyed this moment rather than whatever this is.
Since starting the blog, my transitioned new years resolution was to post something every day. Now that that streak is broken, I’d like to fix what I was unhappy about with this. For the last while, I’ve more or less been posting something just for the sake of posting something, which I didn’t want to originally do; I’d like for this to be effectively a journal, and that isn’t something I would just write in just for the sake of another entry.
Going forward, I would still like to post semi-actively, but only when I have something that I’d like to talk about.
I feel like living like a dog would be a completely blissful existence; there’s no point to things like self growth, introspection, or overthinking. Living life fully in the moment, just focused on napping, food, and play. While it’s unreasonable to say you can live like that, I think it’s important to try to emulate that in the brief moments we can, to just enjoy living in the moment and enjoy a random grass field you can sit in between events; this is my protest on the lives we’re forced to live.
I’ve been thinking about why artists are listened to once they die, specifically due to the lines in the song immortal by j. cole:
To die a young legend or live a long life unfulfilled?
'Cause you wanna change the world but while alive you never will
'Cause they only feel you after you gone, or I've been told
And now I'm caught between bein' heard and gettin' old
I think one big aspect of it is a dead person doesn’t have interest in profit, or pushing any sort of agenda for personal gain; to me that makes what they say pure, and unadulterated by greed.
He loves history. He wanted to write a biography of John Quincy Adams. I, shamefully, knew almost nothing about John Quincy Adams, so I went online and bought every biography of him I could find. One day, he called me, claiming that we wouldn’t work out long term. He said he loved me but that we had different interests. “What does love mean to you?” I said. “That’s an impossible question,” he replied. I, however, find love to be quite simple. Love is the stack of biographies on my nightstand with a bookmark near the end.
Yesterday, on a whim I decided to go to the gym and drag a friend along. This was the first time going in YEARS, and it didn’t take long for me to be barely able to lift my arms up. Today is the morning after, and sweet lord am I sore; and I love this feeling. It feels like I’ve done something, and I can see why people recommend the gym for circumventing depression. I want to make it my resolution to start going to the gym more often, especially when I start feeling like I’m falling into a slump.
To me, Sisyphus’s struggle is to be human. Ultimately, so much in life ends up as things we do and toil at without any guarantee of our efforts paying off. In life we often struggle with these boulders, and it can be an incredibly overwhelming task to face, for me a big boulder has been dealing with depression. I wanted to write about this today because while going on my walk, I remembered how futile efforts felt due to anhedonia. Doing things like exercising, working on homework, getting sunlight, talking to friends all seemed like they did nothing and ultimately had no benefit; yet I would still force myself to do them. I think the only way to stay sane in life is to fall in love with the task of pushing the boulder, by doing something with no guarantee of success, and in some ways the unending reminder of failure. If you can fall in love with that, you can keep going.
