Mild Existential Crisis

Always happens. Makes me wonder if I'm slightly manic-depressive in reality, or if it's just a natural fallout (hormonal basis, mebbe?) from living a couple weeks with intense focus on one particular goal.

Teachers' workshops are ending tomorrow. I've been throwing a lot of myself into them, giving up the old MMO routine for oodles of effort and long hard grindstone work.

Now there's just a vague relief, and a huge chasm of emptiness. What was it all for?

And more importantly... NOW what?

It brings to mind the Nanowrimo of a couple years' before. 2006, perhaps? Or 05. I forget. With a crucial difference. I was exhausted but ludicrously happy on finishing Nanowrimo that year - maybe it was the whole self-directed goal thing, maybe writing is really my soul's destiny in life? It felt...right, kinda. Though I was plenty pooped and ready for a long long break after that month.

This hard effort stemmed more from my own personal perfectionism and ideals - that I wanted to make something good, matching up to my high standards. I don't know if the teachers appreciated it, or if they sleepwalked through it, or how much impact it did or didn't have.

Not knowing...is kinda a letdown.

It's sorta like, gee, I did all this for you...I wonder if you appreciated it? Or if you even have a clue as to how much work it all was?

But it's not that I want profuse appreciation. I don't think I'd feel any better if my workshop was praised to the high heavens. It's a little bit like I'm asking myself if I should really be doing all this stuff for other people... when maybe I should be putting in effort into myself.

Sounds sort of selfish, but maybe it's saying that I have been ignoring myself and what I would like, in this mundane outwardly-focused routine.

Then the whole existential question falls down on me and I go, "But... I don't even know what I would like. Or what I want out of life."

And the old career bugaboo creeps up. No, my job is not the best paying thing in the world out there. I'm underpaid. But is it really so important to be highly paid if you can get by with what you have... is having a high salary a mainstream goal that I shouldn't be buying into? Is it the real world equivalent of having uber Tier whatever legendary epics in WoW, in other words. Is it just a means of keeping score?

My job isn't horrible. It's not Gggrrr-eeaat (to quote Tony the Tiger) either. But then, is anything? Surely all those people out there saying they love their jobs (or whatever) 100% of the time are just big self-deceiving hypocrites like religious hardliners who forcibly rework their perspective of the world to match their chosen dogmatic line of thought?

There's bits I really like, personally. I don't have to have a heart attack over being 31.723 seconds late in for work. (Or <30 minutes for that matter.) I get to go home early in general, in contrast to nearly everybody else I hear about who may end up stuck in the office until 9pm or worse. (This is my ultimate nightmare - that I will spend 12 hours of my life in some job for somebody else, and another 6-8 hours asleep, and end up with hopelessly little time for myself.)

I have things that change up every few months, and a quirky unique work venue. (And sometimes this is good, and sometimes this is bad. And some things that don't change are really bad.)

There's free food very often (I'm such a hedonist), I can surf the net without some goddamn corporate watchdog alarm triggering, I have private cozy retreats where my introspective self can duck into for sanity refuge, and there is a part of me that does thrive and get excited about teaching. Unsoweiter.

Of course, there is politics, mundane mind-numbing repetition, rampant incompetence, bureaucracy, frustration and lots of other bad stuff.

Then again, I don't think there's anywhere on Earth that I can run away from human stupidity either - cue the overused Einstein quote on universe and stupidity and infinite amounts of at least one of 'em.

And round and round I go in a little existential struggle where all my other peers are leaving for other (better or worse) waters, and I wonder if I'm the proverbial frog in the well, or if I'm the smart philosophical one who has completely dissimilar values from the mainstream and so chosen appropriately for my deviant lifestyle.

On the bright side, googling has popped up an interesting revelation I had no clue about before.

Turns out that Mother Teresa herself had a long dark night of the soul regarding her faith in God.

They published a book last year, compiling personal letters to her spiritual confessors about her deep, dark, despairing, depressive, and completely 180 degree inner self versus the public smiling saintly face. (Which were, incidentally, kept against her wishes, which says something rather nihilistic about general human society, if not one organized religion in specific.)

Obviously, this has many people in a bit of an uproar, all trying to resolve this in their own special ways - some of them managing some very standard fundie Christian black-and-white views and so on.

Me, I find it oddly comforting. To know that someone who was lauded so much, and put on a pedestal by others, who yet followed with single-mindedness an originally personal chosen path (come on, God speaking to her => her interpreting whatever she heard from wherever, God, her subconsious, an inner voice, whateveryoucallit)...

...had an existential struggle. (And a bloody long one too, lasting 66 years?!)

Just like me. (Though I hope I can seesaw out of it, rather than endure for that many years.)

Just like probably most of humanity, given the plentiful writings on Google.

Everybody's human, after all. A comforting thought.

Though we may all face our personal demons alone and ultimately each man an island to himself, it's nice to know there's an archipelago of humanity out there.

Can't quite put into words why it's a comfort. But it is.