Revisiting the Past.....

Lately I've been clearing out a lot of old "stuff" in preparation for moving. While going through a drawer, I found this old journal entry, written on the back of a technical support call document. It was written during a work day. I wrote it three months before I was declared permanently disabled. Please understand when you read this that I was psychotically depressed at the time.

Still, it's occasionally a good idea to revisit the past, to see where we've come from and see how far we've come.

Nowadays, I find it hard to imagine I ever felt this way ~ day in and day out. What an incredible waste of precious life energy. If nothing else, it serves to make me very grateful for my life now. I haven't touched a place this dark in 4-5 years now.

Come back Sunday for my "Sacred Life Sunday" response to this entry.

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3/10/2004

Today has been an exceptionally hard day. It has taken everything I have to stay here ~ to look around me at all these vacant faces. It shouldn't be any surprise. These are people who have had the souls sucked out of them by erosion more than cataclysm. It's as though they've accepted their fate and sleepwalk through their days, accepting the worst of the world ~ drudgery.

It scares me to be around this. I am afraid of becoming one of them. It's said that in Haiti, they feed people oil from a particular breed of fish. I can't recall the name of the fish but it's used in a form of voodoo. The result is a type of brain damage that doesn't take away the ability to function. It just wipes out the soul and the spirit. They're called "zombies".

I actually called A**** B***** and begged him to get me back to B (former workplace). I never realized I could miss anything so much. In the absence of being able to go back to Barclays, I told him to send me to Mars or shoot me. I don't particularly care which. I don't care. I can't do this anymore.

I look around me here and realize I am looking at Hell. Not the ninth rung ~ not a Chinese sweatshop or a Russian gulag. No, this has that uniquely American flavor ~ the hell of being the underclass - the proletariat - those without a voice - those who give away their humanity for a few sheckles and some bread. The living dead.

I refuse to justify this by saying they "chose" it or are consenting to it with any autonomy. Some of them don't know any better and the others have acquiesced. Again, that uniquely American form of torture. No bamboo shoots under the toenails - just a slow descent into the black hole of despair.

Neitzsche ain't got nothin' on this form of soul death. While it is so blatant elsewhere, it is the subtlety - the insideousness - that makes it so effective.

My body is okay. It's battered and bruised but probably good for another twenty years or so. It is my mind that has disabled me. My refusal to forfeit my spirit - my determination to thwart them, my unwillingness to sink into non-personhood. The longer I am exposed to the elements, the more my spirit fights and the more it shatters.

I nearly cried from the futility, my inability to abort this process. It's seemingly beyond my control. My efforts mean nothing. It is meant to be. I need to accept that I can simply no longer do this and save myself.

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