Considering the copious amount of written words I generate, it feels like a waste that I have not bothered to work harder to write a novel. I did have to spend a lot of time thinking what it would look like and be about. I already have a working title and its rough format. Not starting to collect words in order to allow a novel to take shape, is like letting water flow out from an open tap and not putting a receptacle under it to collect the water. I create so many words that seem to have gone down the drain. More than half of my life is already over, and that is assuming I would survive till I become an octogenarian. 

A part of why I haven't tried harder is because I don't think I would be able to get it published. But many writers lousier than I am are published, and not the fly by night self-published e-books found on Amazon either. I have too high a standard; I believe with such conviction that it absolutely has to be a perfect level of 'good', and that conviction is just like how I have been living my life of late. 

This striving for a high standard of perfection and obsession over details has become worse in the past two, three years. It feels like I am devolving. My psychiatrist says that my obsessive-compulsive traits - not a disorder - are maladaptive coping mechanisms in response to elevated stress.

It is getting even worse, I think. I am worried I am actually delusional, too impossibly idealistic. Whereas in the past I saw that as receiving an unction, a compelling vision to work towards - like when I was leading LKP before my sabbatical - I worry now that I'm merely having illusions of grandeur in trying to get back to work to execute such a vision. Even though intellectually I know that having a vision for an organisation ten years down the road is literally my job as its leader, I cannot reconcile it with how I actually feel.

How to get myself out of this hole? I think I have never felt this deep, profound sense of disability, ever before. Combined with my exacting standards for myself - something I have lived with all my life because my default mode is self-criticism - and my current state of being disheartened, my life is not going anywhere of use and purpose. So I am not able to extricate myself from this hole. At least that is what I truly believe.

I feel like I have given up trying to get out of this hole because so many continuous attempts to climb out have failed, and literally hurt me everywhere. I have almost no strength left. This is why I feel disabled.

It is that state you get into when you go trekking and for some reason, perhaps the expedition is behind schedule, the hiking is continuous for more than ten or twelve hours. People reach their breaking point. They are so tired that their emotions and interactions with others are deeply, negatively, affected. Their bodies may trudge on, but eventually they collapse to the ground in various states of catatonic consciousness. They withdraw into themselves. Nothing besides the very basic bodily functions work. Safe Mode. 

I am at that point.

I feel so alone right now because I have reached this breaking, disabling state, physically and psychologically. I am not kidding when I say this, I am not exaggerating either. I wish I could shed my life like a flesh mask and have someone abled to wear it for me at this point, otherwise this life cannot move on. And even if such a ritual exists in reality, I don't have the people willing or able to wear my flesh mask for me. I am alone.

Thus I slump over and merely exist. I do things that help me pass the time and escape fron the painful reality that is my life. A life caught in a bizarre cycle through the stages of perfectionism, self-criticism, obsessive-compulsive traits; physical and psychological disability, breaking point, Safe Mode, escape from reality. 

I dont have a parachute to help me continue surviving after the plane is about to blow up and I have to jump. But like the trekkers I will just take one tired step at a time. One step. One step. And if i collapse I will likely also stand again. And again. I just wish I wasn't trekking alone. 

worlds upon words