My blogging has sort of slowed to a halt since mid-August – apologies (especially to those of you using neither RSS nor Bloglines, who have to actually bring up this page to see if there's anything new engraved on it – that must be a bit like switching channels and seeing only reruns). Have felt both complicated and dull, with flashes of change – none of which seemed terribly interesting from outside (i.e. from your side), nor terribly comfortable for me to write about (nothing really weird is going on, it's just, well, personal).
Being two weeks into the cognitive behavior therapy for depression/anxiety, I am struck with two things: one is how vast and how unknown my internal world of thoughts, feelings, and reactions is – whole huge stretches of a strange landscape that it seems as though I've never seen; which seems very peculiar, given how self-oriented (or, if you prefer, self-centered) I am, and how much therapy I've gone through, and how much of my professional work has engaged with my own reactions and emotions.
But no matter how much work I ever do to explore this internal landscape, the reality is so much vaster, its boundaries invisible beyond the horizon: it feels as though the choices I've made, the identity I've chosen, is just a few small fields scattered across this land.... no wonder we hold on to our identities so strongly: the vertigo of possibility is daunting.
The second is how flexible, how fragile, how unreal – ultimately, how contingent – my own thoughts, reactions, habits, are: how easily changed, how lacking in any essential or concrete nature. This is good of course; it means that perhaps I can change, from the rather hopeless and dull and too quickly aging person I've become, into – who knows what.
But, for the same identity reasons, it is disorienting: I'm certainly not wedded to my self as I am, but it's simply hard to get from moment to moment without the illusion that one's identity is 'real' – how do you make decisions, how do you think anything at all?...
Perhaps it is a blessing to experience myself as this uncharted landscape. I've always been interested in such landscapes – my work on the more elusive and bizarre aspects of high modernist music, poetry, literature; my fascination with the more outré tangents of psychology, language, and so on....
Perhaps I can even get interested in my self, again.
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