From The Heart 3: The wake-up call to start living fully again
By: Reverse Monkey
Tags: Life Lessons, Diary, Psychology, Emotions, Personal Growth

Unlike the first half of my twenties, the second half was quite eventful, from the start. I started working full time shortly after finishing my studies. In the beginning, I was a bit excited because I finally joined the ‘productive’ life after many years of passively living by. I was hopeful that this new role will bring me some real excitent, some authentic joy, some deep fulfillment. I was longing for experiencing those positive subtle emotions that I was reading about (I started becoming quite the reader by that time) but still never experienced fully. I thought that the issue was external, not internal (it turned out to be both, but here I am mostly focused on the internal aspect — basically my role in all of this). And, indeed with time, I ended up experiencing some of the deepest emotions I ever felt, not the positive ones that I had in mind though… After a couple of months in the new job, I experienced despair, I experienced self-loaf, I experienced nihilism…

Here as well, I won’t go into too many irrelevant details. The most important thing to know is that my expectations were unrealistically high compared to what I found, which was also considerably shittier than at most jobs (I worked at 6 companies so far, and the context — as a whole — at that one was by far the worst). Bit by bit, my failure to re-calibrate my expectations to a never-ending degrading work situation (there were some serious political problems with the projects that I was working on) led to more stress, which built up to reach anxiety, and finally exploded (or rather imploded) with a beautiful burn-out. Within a couple of months, I was brought to my knees and this time not only my emotions were dysfunctional, everything in my life was broken. Ultimately, even my body let me down (asthma, exhaustion, pain in my chest, pain in my limbs…), something I considered quite catastrophic since I always considered myself quite sporty and athletic.

I remember how one night after I got back from yet another stupid day of degrading work, depleted out of energy, I went to take a shower and broke down crying. I wasn’t just crying. I was sobbing, something that never happened in the entirety of my emotionless life. I felt that I failed my life as a human being. That everything is just meaningless: my pride is meaningless, time is meaningless, people are meaningless, life itself is meaningless… I was scared of my own crying and this new vulnerable state I was in. I tried to stop the tears that were competing with the water in running down my face, but couldn’t. I surrounded and kept crying… The more I cried, the lighter I felt. I started liking the feeling but hating it at the same time.

After a couple of minutes, I finally regained some control over my lacrimal glands and pulled the brakes. The sobbing episode is officially ended. I felt the lightest I have been in months (probably years) but also the saddest. I dried the water but also the tears, put on my clothes and I went out to my room. As I got used to doing every night, I threw my exhausted body on the floor like a corpse and spaced out. My spacing out that night was different though. It was colorful. Mostly with dark scary colors but definitely better than that fucking ugly gray shit that has characterized the past 15 years of my life. Within that horrifying mix of dark emotions (the ones I mentioned 2 paragraphs above), a bright one started shining: It was hope for a better future, a future that I later decided to take control of and build up myself step by step.