I bought a new journal yesterday from one of those artsy bookstores in the Mission District. $20 to start my life over. Hopefully, I'll actually write in it this time because it's green.
I graduated from university last weekend and have no idea what I'm doing with my life. These days, a bachelor's degree means virtually nothing. I was severely depressed for like 20 months because I got declined from a fellowship and felt like the biggest failure on Earth. Now I'm just happy to have a part-time job and have some money coming in. My family really wants me to move back home, and I'm not sure how to tell them that the thought of waking up in that bed makes me want to vomit. My sister even offered to paint my room green, which is very sweet of her.
They came over for the weekend and for some reason unbeknownst to me, my body shivered with discomfort every minute of it. It's not like I hate them or anything; their presence just made me want to crawl out of my skin and rip my eyeballs out. They're really not that bad though, just a bit pretentious and annoying.
I settled on it being a symptom of CPTSD (which I'm aware that I have after two conversations with my Medi-Cal-covered psychiatrist), which has gifted me with the inability to form healthy relationships with people. Anyway I think my bitchy attitude made everyone hate me a little extra than before. I don't know if I'll ever be able to make the people I love like me. I'm self-destructive as fuck and it's so annoying. Now that I think of it, I don't even think they really like me all that much; they just have no one else to talk to, and they can never get rid of me.
I'm really excited to stay in Berkeley for the summer. I love being able to walk to the bakery and order a decently shitty coffee for $3 and walk by the house with the chickens. I'll buy some...whatever it is chickens eat, and make it a daily routine to feed them. Perhaps I'll start some healthy girl routine like pilates or something. I told myself I'd run every morning before studying for the LSAT in an attempt to subdue the dread that comes with it. I can also take the train to SF whenever I feel like it, I can sit by the ocean and wish I were drowning in it, but never touch it.
More than anything, I'm excited to finally be alone. I know that I should like community, and people, and relationships, I mean, for god's sake, I majored in anthropology, the literal study of humans. But right now I just don't want that. I need to know what it feels like to come home to absolutely nobody, to worry about no one except myself, in proper American style. God Bless this isolationist ass country. I feel like I need to truly be alone, so as to learn how to deal with the voices in my head that make me such an awful human being to be around. To feed the chickens without caring what others think about me. To lie in bed in nothing but underwear and read a really pretentious book that I have to convince myself to get through. I need to appreciate the deprivation of human connection to thirst for eventual contact.
I don't know, I guess I've just been feeling very mentally ill lately. We had a curious souls meeting last Monday where we talked about AI and our fears of it. My friend Zara said something brilliant, like always, where she pondered on what AI means for humanity, like what exactly does it mean to be intelligent? and what does it mean to be human? How does AI further complicate these already repressive categorizations, and what is prioritized when developing them? I think about this a lot because I genuinely often feel like I'm not "human," I mean, I know that I am a human, but the threshold between human and highly intelligent machine that operates quite successfully seems obfuscated to me. I mean, if we can just make machines that look and act like humans, what defines us? Our consciousness? Our sociability? Are we all just circuits of neurotransmitters? If a brain is a machine-like entity, then maybe that is why I feel like one. Fuck I mean I have this pulsing desire to disappear, to isolate myself so that I stop unintentionally hurting people because its literally so easy. If I just distance myself from people, then all of my problems would go away. But we can't do that because we're human. We can't be machines because we're "social creatures" with an innate need to build relationships.
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