filling the void

marin told me this evening that since i've started this diet, she's noticed my distractability has increased. now i'm just better than average, not totally amazingly super human. i'm happy to let her believe that it's due to hunger, which she has naturally assumed. most people don't seem to grasp the nature of my real problem, my only real problem, and so trying to explain it is both exhausting and generally fruitless. it's definitely hunger, no doubt. definitely not some existential crisis that has been exacerbated by extreme living conditions and a heightened attention to the necessary elements of life. who thinks about that?

the thoughts are nothing new, and dealing with them is something i've been doing for a long time. i was of the mind that i'd gotten pretty good at it; maintaining composure, doing necessary things. not inverting myself until i disappear into a small speck of nothingness. of course i falter all the time: alone, at night, usually when i'm not sleeping, thinking thoughts that rarely articulate themselves into words. sure, sometimes it spills over into my days, and i sit and stare, or don't get out of bed, or generally fail to be what i've always referred to as an effective human being. but for the most part i can pull it together, save face, be totally amazingly super human.

i suppose i'm probably just like everyone else, really. it's change that most predictably forces my hand. no one likes change, right? i remember, in the weeks before college graduation, landing in a professor's office, barely choking back tears, feeling empty in ways i knew she was unequipped to deal with, and trying to hide it in a 'search for practical applications,' and a 'do this with your life' type of solution, neither of which did anything to assuage my real concern.

and now, ever more deeply, i find myself wading through the turmoil of change. i am taken off guard, in being shown how flimsy my facade of purpose and meaning truly is. i had assumed that changing my diet would not come to bear on my big picture issues. it would seem that what i use to sustain my body is of little to no philosophical importance, especially in relation to what i choose to do with my time, what for and whether i choose a life purpose. but as it turns out, the closer i come to understanding myself rudimentarily, manipulating my needs, examining how they interact with my desires, the more i find myself unable to relate to my own sense of self and the universe i occupy.

perhaps i am pushing myself too fast, expecting too much. it is one thing to finally exctricate superficial, culturally originating desires such are most possessions, fashion, even 'hygeine' in the overly americanized style. but those based genuinely on sensational experience, these things that i cannot remove from my body because they ARE my body? they have built me into the person that i am. surely they are not my livingness. certainly losing my desire for them will not cost me my life. but this thin thread of sanity to which i grasp, desperately, needs to be spooling from somewhere. all that i have built myself up and through, my life and all my experiences, are held together by what filament of meaning i have found in these apparently internally derived pleasures. or perhaps in a sense of righteousness that i find in examining them and developing my values around them. i have waged a war on my deepest sense of self, and daily i find myself losing battle ground; i am afraid i do not know what the war is even about.

and so i leave the dog food out on the counter. and have to enter a room twice before i realize what i went there for. sorry, marin. i'm just hungry. wait til i get more foods back into my body. it'll pass. it always does.