I have found what I have been missing, the idea which has eluded me for much of my life.
I have been depressed, and I had not recognized it, for most of my years. I had not seen it to be so because I had not felt necessarily unhappy, at least not in a contiguous way. Life has been good to me, I’ve had much fortune, many good friends, and I’ve always been able to make my own fun.
But within the core of my being I had been frozen, and isolated. When it came to the responsibilities of my life, when it came to living not for fun, or for someone else, but for myself, for my own wellbeing, I had been immovable.
I had questioned why, why I was so frozen, why I could not take the critical action, why my livelihood was not motivation enough? Why the most simple and elementary tasks always eluded me, why I had always delayed their completion.
I have found something, and I have found why.
In these essential tasks, in these tasks on which my life depended, there was something I was avoiding, a question which I had so alienated myself from within the dimmed and timid heart which I held, that I could not even recognize it. I was not avoiding the tasks, I could complete them, and with stupendous ease, it was not a lack of confidence, it was not an inability, it was an aching wound which kept me.
It was that question: Why should I do any of those things at all? For what purpose ought’ I to live?
In the times of my life where I have been most capable, most competent, most diligent in my work, it has been when I had an answer. At the end of high school it was to be edified. At community college it was to act on that edification through YDSA. In my first semester at UIC it was my art and my hobbies.
But recently, in the past year, I have had nothing. UIC is really a very hollow place. As a school, it is good, but it really has and is nothing else.
And really these previous things were incomplete, not quite satisfactory in their form and nature. They relied and consisted of things outside myself.
But I think I have something. I think I have found what will be, for many days and years, the anchor of my life.
...
I'll avoid saying what precisely it is here, because I'd like to develop the thing before I constrain it with definition, but besides that, this idea is complete.