white noise

a diary entry

In hospital I have a Marian-blue notebook, a Moleskine like the others I’ve been filling since I was eighteen. I have a copy of the first volume of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I’ve heard people only read when they’re very, very depressed. But I should read it as it pertains to my interests, if they are mine, if any of them are left.

I have no words to process what has happened to me over the last year, two, three years, four years, and now it seems like there are things I’ll never be able to tell the truth about. I will never see justice. I have no idea how to live in a world where this is the case. It makes me want to die in a way that’s serious and final, no ambivalence, no time for intervention.

My boyfriend keeps telling me to stop running. I want to go to Rome, Athens, I want to see the Alps again, like I did so many times last year to remind myself of the world’s grandeur beyond the sad and ugly thing that was happening to me. Next to Hannibal crossing the Alps it was hard to think about myself. But I have lost things that mattered to me as they would have mattered to people then—a home I loved, my reputation and a chance to defend it. The only way I can remedy these is to go on building them again after the collapse.

In the forty pages of Gibbon I’ve read so far, my favourite line is ‘The forests and morasses of Germany were filled with a hardy race of barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from freedom.’

Weil lists liberty and truth among her needs of the soul. When these needs are not met it feels like something in the human animal has been sliced from its higher nature. Maybe this laceration is where supernatural virtues can come in, running contrary, as they often do, to natural ones. This was how I pacified myself for a long time when perhaps I should simply have fought for what I needed. Before my rhythm became deranged, to borrow a phrase from Anne Carson.

I’ve gone wrong in so many ways, chosen the wrong thing so many times, that I’ve taken on an intense fear of thought and ideas. I pick up a book and can barely get past the first page because the intense curiosity I used to have has been replaced by terror of having to take a position or assess anything. I’ve been listening to an unreleased Laura Marling song called Be Mine in the bath and liked these lyrics:

It's harder to find
the same peace of mind
When you've been so sure of your own
It's hard to relent
and know it's your own judgment
That's taken you so very wrong

My life became very narrow over the last couple of years. Even if I made it wider geographically, fleeing this way and that, most days I still preferred to lie on my bed staring at the wall, and almost nothing beautiful I saw could penetrate my heart. I spoke to as few people as I could—again, the curiosity I had about people replaced by a fear of listening to them speak and having to say something in response. I wanted to think about nothing at all. I wanted to lie and stare up at the sun and have nothing, nothing, nothing.

I hope it can widen again. Someone who loves me tells me it can. I’m going back to therapy (gravitating towards mentalisation-based therapy). It seems so silly to be afraid of books or conversation, as if my brain would prefer minimal input or output, as if it longs to climb down the rungs of evolutionary complexity towards vegetable.

More than anything I am afraid of my own judgement which has been so catastrophically wrong that I wonder how I’m ever to trust anything I think again.