I’ve decided to stop drinking. In a moment, I had poured all the alcohol in my apartment down the drain. Alcohol had taken a symbolic position in my life, things ran in cycles and the times that I bottomed out and got smashed helped mark the cycles. I would plunge into life-threatening oblivion and wake up the next morning and find myself disappointed at still being alive.
At the same time I’d feel refreshed, I’d get on my feet and feel a sense of renewal. I could stand on my feet and it would feel so good that I was able to. I could be dead and I may still wish I had died, but I’m not, here I am, life goes on, start picking up the pieces of the previous night, day, or week. Go about my day and don’t let anyone know what had just happened. When things went too far, alcohol helped throw everything in the air so that things could resettle and restart.
But now I feel that alcohol has served its function. It helped me get through college and the type of stress college life brings, but that’s over. Now it’s life and alcohol is not going to help me function in life. I don’t need the anger it brings, not the depression, not the pain.
I was in bed and I couldn’t get to sleep, staring at the ceiling. I started thinking about every aspect of my life and everything in it. It was all so depressing. There wasn’t a single thing that didn’t frustrate me and seem futile. I realized that despite how real those stressors seemed, those feelings were being exacerbated by the alcohol that I had consumed earlier. The function alcohol served has ceased to be productive.
In a few days, my time at Oberlin will be over. It feels like it has been my whole life. Whatever happened before Oberlin is so inconsequential now. Everyone says “congratulations”, but I don’t see what’s the big deal. I didn’t have a choice in the matter, I was tracked into college, and completing the course work was inevitable. It wasn’t a huge challenge and I didn’t even find what I wanted to study until too late. Kind of a waste. But at least I got a lot out of the last year when I did study what I wanted to.
What I’ve studied hasn’t prepared me for the next step. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I’m directionless with only a vague plan to go to Japan and find something there. I keep fading between realities. Sometimes I feel that the symbolic world really is all of reality, which is where most human beings seem to be. Sometimes I feel that I’m missing many simple things that other people are able to get, and therefore they are able to get more out of what they are doing than I do. Sometimes I realize the impermanent nature of the symbolic world and that is the basis of truth, the beginning of a journey that I want to be on. And that is the perspective I feel I’m leaning towards, that the symbolic world isn’t all of reality, but only that - symbolic of a reality that we can’t touch with our limited knowledge of life, reality and existence.
