The last time I really wrote something for myself was almost a year ago. It’s really something to be sad about, because I’m known as a writer. I should write. At least that’s what I'm paid to do, collegiately speaking. This considerably unbearable creative drought I’m in speaks so much about how I have poor time management skills: always lugging around, always everywhere, always online. The amount of time I've wasted online could have been useful for me to create or produce something; instead I decidedly chose to kill myself through useless scrolling and liking and refreshing. The internet is so exhausting to keep up with. So exhausting I somehow lost myself in it, forgot about the simplest goals I have.
It’s been almost three months since I lost the drive to live. Admittedly, it wasn’t that bad, as I imagined it to be when I slowly sank into depression on the third week of November. But everything happened all at once. I wasn’t watching enough films (I wasn’t checking off enough titles from this little list I wrote in my head), I wasn’t writing enough—the only writing I did was for the school publication. Heck, I wasn’t even writing, I’m merely editing the works of others. And many other personal (too personal) events that made me conclude that hey, I think I should just stop.
But I was wrong on the “not too bad” part. It was bad—nefarious, in all aspects you should check—and it felt like I was being swallowed by own insecurities and demotivation. It’s like I wanted this to be done, but I can’t, because I’m too sad to function or even think. Some days I’ll just lie awake in my bed, stare at the window for hours on end, and cry out of nowhere.
I’ve recently read Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection, “Ariel.” I’ve read The Bell Jar months before I started reading Ariel, so you can imagine the transitional spur of emotions I had. Reading TBJ offered a lot of space for me to think and rethink myself, how I view myself, and how I should view myself. There were a lot of goings-on in the novel itself and to dissect it per narrative renders a vast number of perspectives. In this New Yorker article I recently came across to, it was made clear that one cannot read TBJ without treating as an autobiography of some sort. I somehow disagreed, but agreed right away after some rumination. By the time I finished the whole article, I can’t help but think that TBJ must have been a call for help from Sylvia herself. But a month after its publication, she took her own life.
With this new, realized pain I have after reading the article, I can conclude that I’ve forgotten a big (massive) part of myself after I read the novel. The months leading up to when I bought and read Ariel were gone, invisible now to the cluttered trove that is my brain (my soul). What was I doing before I read Ariel as a whole? When the only poem I knew from the collection was “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”? When “Lady Lazarus” had no certain thug, no cosmic pull, when I read it before Christmas, and regained a new stature in me? I don’t know. Beyond these titles, beyond these questions, I don’t know what happened to me.
There were waves of sadness, happiness and nothingness in those lost months, that I’m pretty sure of. I must have felt a certain kind of newness that spurred within me, but I also forgot about that, too. I remember how one line always stayed with through time, gelled in my brain with every situation I run into, fair weather or not. In my twenty years here on earth, with every interaction I faced, every heartbreak, every ecstatic moment, I always found myself crawling back to that single line. In the novel, it was associated with negativity. But with me, it always had different attachments.
I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
Reading the line, for me, must always come with wild imagination and reminiscing—both the good and the bad memories. Filtering these memories and putting them into categorized boxes when given the chance to reminisce, I realized (the hard way) over the years, is not very helpful. I learned that sometimes, to identify and connect with your whole being, you have to stop believing that only the good ones stay with you. And maybe, just maybe, this learned aspect I gained must have been the best lesson I got from the novel. Not the best lesson I could wring off of the story, but a conducive one, right now.
So here comes Ariel. Reading Ariel appointed some newer, edgier sets of emotion. I regained a sense of self, somehow. And this is where the whole novel gains a new verdict from me, a rebranded closeness I should feel, a wrenching importance. Around this time, I felt so unimportant, so disregarded by everyone around me, so ignored. I felt more temporary than ever, and that ate me whole. I never fully appreciated how The Bell Jar helped me accept the fact that I’m sometimes, in many distant aspects, separated by a glass from other people, until I gave Ariel a read. Ariel gave me what I lost in The Bell Jar, during and after reading it. It’s not that The Bell didn’t have a momentous role in my life; it’s just that Ariel is, and always will be, for me, a symbolic thrust in which I should drown myself into.
And Ariel taught me that sometimes to know yourself and your pains you really have to drown and suffocate in pain. And no matter how unimportant I must feel, today, in the future, I am calmed by the reality that everything, everyone is.
So the time I felt stuck and dry and floating listlessly on the small spaces of my idle creativity, it was me just probing, self-questioning, thinking and sometimes praying. And it was just me preparing to move along.
