HAVE YOU EVER FELT DISGUSTED by your own existence? I have. My weakest days were the ten months before my obtaining a doctoral degree in 2016. No, living alone by myself per se did not make me weak. The feeling lack of support, instead, was the source of my weakness. In the process of finishing up "my most important work," I felt deeply insecure. I wasn't afraid that my work wasn't good enough.
In fact, I knew that I would graduate anyway whether or not my work was any good at all. I mean, unless my university was sadistic, there was no reason for it to waste more resources on a student who had reached his intellectual limit for another year. Instead, I was afraid of what would come next. After finishing this doctorate, I would be "forced to be free." I would be let go from the protected world of students, into the unprotected world of cutthroat employment.
Making me weak was precisely that feeling of wanting to finish something, while knowing that finishing it would put me in an even more vulnerable place. Again, this being "forced to be free" thing was not the kind that a high school kid thinks about when leaving their homes for college. I thought of it in a the same sense that the French enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau had thought of: The stripping away of a person's inalienable rights, dignity, and sense of morality as a whole.
Yes, I was that panic about being forced to be free, and the fear of which forced to be someone else but myself. How was I someone else but myself? Let's start with a near-death experience. Have you had one of those out-of-body experience? It actually happened to me, not so proudly, quite a few times. There is even a pattern.
Most of the time when I saw myself as a third person was when I engaged in a act of ferociously scolding at other people on mistakes for which, I knew very well that, I alone was responsible. No, I wasn't floating in the air like Casper the Friendly Ghost. And no, not true, I wasn't feeling as though the law of gravity didn't apply to me. In fact, I felt heavy, especially my beating heart.
My two foots were on the same flooring tiles on which the angry man who looked like me was. Feeling as though I was the invisible third person (yes, this time, like Casper the Friendly Ghost), I felt as though I was looking at myself. It was almost as though the better angel of my nature had escaped the body in order to see what the worse angel was trying to accomplish with its malicious desires.
Although I did not hurt anyone, I did not care about others as much my own self. Even though I did not do any harm, I did not try to help those distant friends who were in need. Even though I did not cause any one any trouble, I too- consistently refused to take part in activities I knew would have brought betterment to the society as a whole. I was extremely selfish: I was trying to stay afloat.
Not only did I lose some good friends during these weakest days, but I was also failing even in the very basic tasks that I was assigned to do. I'll return to the part about losing friends later. It's much easier to see how I had become a train wreck in my personal life. During these twelve months, my daily life was a mess. Sleeplessness gradually creeped in.
I tried to exercise, yes; but twice as much I had been eating unhealthy food and binge- watching television, with the hope that these could stray me away from having to think about what would happen to me the day after next. Before I knew it, I would be staying out all night musing over some unpleasant feelings.
I would be staying awake looking at the white ceiling of my apartment for hours before I realized that I would need to chug a can of something (mostly beer) to get my brain to stop working. Sometimes, I used old (and classic) movies to give me some meanings of life to my attempt to fall asleep.
Sometimes, I simply stayed up with my eye wide open thinking about what I could have done better until my brain wanted to shut down; in which case, my eyes would stay open until the alarm clock went off in the morning. A bonus to me: I learned how to make organic cocktails (which I made several videos about) so that I could pass time and use it as a bonus to go to bed (although alcohol rarely worked on me as a sleeping pill).
I wrecked my body that way until it could no longer take it, and hence automatically shut down, as in stopped working at an instance and left my body collapsing on a couch in front of a fuzzy television's screen. Without enough deep sleep the night before, and because I needed more sleep then, I would constantly skip breakfast when I should be getting ready for work.
"Bulletproof coffee" (as in, coffee with added butter) became additive, as it gave me the boost to stay awake but without any real calories to keep me going. I still showed up at work everyday not only because that which remained the only reason for my existence, but also because that was only because I had nothing else to hold on to. I kept all of this a secret from my family. I didn't want them to be worried.
The worst part of this scary episode was that I looked at everyone as though he or she was an enemy. To begin with, I tried very hard to be to be the center of all attention to overcompensate for my insecurity. I thought that be getting a lot of attention, I could distract myself from thinking too much about my immediate future. The results of all of these trying were disastrous. I took on more jobs that I could finish. I accepted more tasks that I could ever accomplish.
I also made too many promises that I knew I wouldn't be able to keep. Because I was far from being able to meet my own expectation, I became defensive. I felt as though the reason why I wasn't able to finish things was due to some conspiracies. I felt that I was in a war zone and my enemies were my friends and colleagues in disguised.
A cognitive behavioral psychologist later told me that was what happened when one felt insecure: Everyone became your enemy because you were not secure about your own role, position, and, emphasized by the psychologist, "your own existence in the minds of others whom you cared." At the time, I outright rejected this assumption. I did not believe that anyone could have any influence over my own opinion about myself. I also did not believe that I could care about someone so much that I became neurotic.
I wasn't realized that I cared so much about what other people thought about me. I let the feeling of how others might feel about me get under my skin. I allowed other people's perceptions of me to dictate my behavior. I felt that someone was coming to take my job, my spot light, and eventually my livelihood. Many whose promises I could not keep promptly disengaged themselves from me as soon as they knew that I was a freud.
Yes, I know that calling someone who couldn't keep his promise a "fraud" may be a bit too harsh, but that was really how I felt about myself. I was harsh with others as much as to myself. There was a "feedback loop from hell," which went like this: I was anxious about being insecure, and therefore wanted attention; such craving for attention led me to pursuing things that I could not deliver, which, in turn, gave me even more anxiety as a result of criticisms, complaints and grudges.
Eventually, I crashed. Luckily, I was not burned; even thought it perhaps would have been nice if I was burnt then to see whether I would still be writing this today. This feedback loop from hell kept on going for a few months. It, eventually, slowed down. For it to not have an effect on me, I deliberately detached myself, almost completely, from engaging with people -- from the social life that this feedback loop from hell desired. But it, alas, never completely stopped.
I am still feeling its kinetic energy, like a ceiling fan that continued to rotate even after you had already switched it off. These were the months (December 2015 to May 2016 to be precise) during which I acted most erratic.
There're friends who unfriended me because I "got upset so easily over a small thing" and "became ferociously angry over trivial things." The worst thing I did was to an old friend, who meant nothing but the best for me, but I gave this friend my worst, including unmotivated yelling, incessant anger, and, worst, the untrustworthiness. There're my weakest hours, my darkest moment, and my saddest sonnet. I want to apologize to everyone who had to be a part of it. Ok, what's the reason for writing this Saddest Sonnet.
Honestly, this month marks the tenth anniversary of my discovery of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by the legendary writing coach Roy Peter Clark. The book is still considered by many one of the best writing guides of all time, alongside classics such as Bill Strunk's The Elements of Style and, my personal favorite, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by the psychologist Steven Pinker.
As I wrote to my close friends earlier today, I discovered this book during my graduate school days. Walking home one evening, I felt as though I needed to do something to improve myself. I was feeling blue, as my teachers had just scolded at me for "not knowing how to write." Back then, the master's program in which I was enrolled was writing and reading intensive.
I, somehow, had survived reading a book a week during the first 1.5 years of the program; yet, I knew that I was going to fail miserably in my very final assignment. Walking while thinking obsessively about my incompetency, I found myself at a footstep of a university bookstore. I ended up spending the next three hours browsing through books with the hope that I would find something to get me through my final semester -- yes, that dreadful thesis writing semester. I hated writing and did not understand.
I was studying architecture. Architecture! It's about drawing and making models. Why I should have to write at all, let alone write well? My feeling begun to change when I learned, not from my professors, but my best friend the importance of the thinking clearly. Not only did Reilly graduate as the top student of my class, he was also the best writer I have ever met. Things Reilly said and wrote about not only made sense but sounded so reasonable.
I later learned that it's his ability to think in simple terms, and convey his feeling his simple ways. His secret, I later found, is that he talked the way he wrote and vice versa. When his thinking was clear, his writing, too, was clear. Through the art of putting string words in the right order: Reilly always began with a simple verb or subject, and then magically incubated his ideas to place words into a logical flow.
As the string reaches the end of the sentence -- just right before the period -- he would subtlety placed the emphatic word to remind us what he's trying to convey. To me, that's like magic. No wonder Reilly has gone on to become such a successful architect. He can express himself clearly! I would say, meeting Reilly and picking up a copy of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer were two essential moments of my becoming a writer.
So, in commemorating the tenth anniversary of my indoctrination into "writership," I would like to give myself an "impromptu writing prompt" to write about utilizing all the tools that Roy Peter Clark encourages us to use.
These are 7 Roy Peter Clark's writing tools that I use in this post (the other 45 are, sort of, embedded within the writing itself): Beware of adverbs; Reject cliches; Prefer Simple to Technical; Use verbs in their strongest form; Dig for the Concrete and Specific; Begin sentences with subjects and verb; Control the pace of the story by varying sentence length. So, in this Saddest Sonnet, I gave myself just one rule here: No more about my father! (Yes, the internet has spoken and therefore.
overruled that I have been writing too much about him already. That's enough and I should just move on). I have also talking about my father here, here, and here already. What's your weakest days?
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