But
I fear that custom, which confirms most things, implants this vice more and
more deeply in me. Long acquaintance with both good and bad people leads one to
esteem them all alike. What this state of weakness really is, when the mind
halts between two opinions without any strong inclination towards either good
or evil, I shall be better able to show you piecemeal than all at once. I will
tell you what befalls me, you must find out the name of the disease.
The numbness, that sense of moral
exhaustion, goes together with becoming too accepting of my own mediocrity. I
see so much going on around me, some satisfying, some unsatisfying, but most of
it is just mixed together, with one aspect no longer distinct from another. The
familiarity leads me to no longer clearly distinguish between right and wrong,
and I grow indifferent to caring one way or another.
It is like staring at something for
too long, only to find that I am now unable focus my eyes. My attention is
blurred, and I can’t make out the details.
It is like studying for hours on
end, trying to cram more and more information into my memory, and then to
discover that none of the words make sense anymore.
It is like consuming too much food
and drink, feeling tired and bloated, and realizing that everything has come to
taste the same, to taste like nothing at all.
At a low point in my life, I was
sitting at a dive bar with a fellow who found life just as discouraging as I
did. We had long lost track of how many beers we’d gone through.
After a time where we both stared
into nothing, he suddenly turned to me, and asked, “Wait, am I drunk or sober?
I can’t tell anymore.”
I hope you have never been to that
place, but if you have, you know something about that sense of becoming
accustomed to dullness. As an old friend once put it, “I feel like I have
calluses on my conscience.”
I may be so worried about building up
some new good habits, but I forget about the need to first break down those old
bad habits; I am so used to them, grown gradually over time by constant
association and repetition, that I hardly know they are there.
I have faced things poorly, pushing
myself in the wrong direction, and now I am still moving with the momentum of
my past actions. It isn’t that the world is uncaring, unfeeling, and worthless,
but that I have unwittingly made my own attitude uncaring, unfeeling, and
worthless.
I did it to myself so slowly that I
barely noticed. After being overwhelmed by feeling so much, I have shut myself
off from even feeling. This may seem like it makes me stronger, though it
actually makes me weaker. My habits have separated me from my own humanity.
Written in 4/2011
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