Saturday, April 15, 2006
Change and social suicide
24th March 2005
All night long there's been a strange feeling building in me.
It's intensity is unsettling.
It feels as if passion, sadness and introspection are all searing through me.
And inexplicably, it creates in me this burning desire to write, to cry and to be alone.
It is a strange yet familiar feeling, like when you spot your old schoolmaster twenty years after graduation and are still instinctively gripped by a sense of fear. So strange a feeling in its circumstances, yet undeniably familiar.
I know this feeling has been in me all this time, restlessly dormant. The duties of everyday life had forced it into oblivion because the inexplicable urge to write, cry and be alone is simply not compatible with the demands of life.
I'm not sure why it resurfaced again tonight.
Perhaps it was when A asked me all those questions at cell group. I think it was the question about how I'd changed in my year here in Glasgow and whether the change was good or bad that did it.
"Both," I had replied, dying in my heart to explain how I'd become more analytical but also more judgemental, more fun-loving but also more disdainful, more extroverted but less introspective. I wanted to share with them how change is a double edged sword. How when you gain you often must lose.
But I couldn't. How could I? I mean, who would understand? I did teeter on a moment of indecision, almost crossed the threshold to the point of no return before reality checked me back to my senses.
"Gosh, you weren't really going to tell them all that were you? How weird would you sound?" was all I could ask myself when I came to.
I felt like a suicidal jumper pulled back from the brink of death-- just in the nick of time. I suppose it was, in a way, suicide -- social suicide.
And like all thwarted suicide attempts, there was a sense of intense relief at the realisation that one is still alive, but also of intense sadness-- the sadness for not being true to oneself, for not having the courage to take the plunge.
Then from that point on, all that dominated my mind was just this need to write-- to express all the thoughts and feelings that lay on my heart-- pent up and throbbing.
And here on this page it finds release.At last, somebody knows how it feels.
All night long there's been a strange feeling building in me.
It's intensity is unsettling.
It feels as if passion, sadness and introspection are all searing through me.
And inexplicably, it creates in me this burning desire to write, to cry and to be alone.
It is a strange yet familiar feeling, like when you spot your old schoolmaster twenty years after graduation and are still instinctively gripped by a sense of fear. So strange a feeling in its circumstances, yet undeniably familiar.
I know this feeling has been in me all this time, restlessly dormant. The duties of everyday life had forced it into oblivion because the inexplicable urge to write, cry and be alone is simply not compatible with the demands of life.
I'm not sure why it resurfaced again tonight.
Perhaps it was when A asked me all those questions at cell group. I think it was the question about how I'd changed in my year here in Glasgow and whether the change was good or bad that did it.
"Both," I had replied, dying in my heart to explain how I'd become more analytical but also more judgemental, more fun-loving but also more disdainful, more extroverted but less introspective. I wanted to share with them how change is a double edged sword. How when you gain you often must lose.
But I couldn't. How could I? I mean, who would understand? I did teeter on a moment of indecision, almost crossed the threshold to the point of no return before reality checked me back to my senses.
"Gosh, you weren't really going to tell them all that were you? How weird would you sound?" was all I could ask myself when I came to.
I felt like a suicidal jumper pulled back from the brink of death-- just in the nick of time. I suppose it was, in a way, suicide -- social suicide.
And like all thwarted suicide attempts, there was a sense of intense relief at the realisation that one is still alive, but also of intense sadness-- the sadness for not being true to oneself, for not having the courage to take the plunge.
Then from that point on, all that dominated my mind was just this need to write-- to express all the thoughts and feelings that lay on my heart-- pent up and throbbing.
And here on this page it finds release.At last, somebody knows how it feels.
# posted by H : 3:53 AM
