ouroboros

i had a very cool experience on friday night. a pair of our friends came over and spent the evening with us, we ate indian food cooked right here in our very own kitchen (except for the naan - that's done out back on the grill, friend), and sat at the table for the next 5-6 hours and drank wine and talked. and talked. and talked more. and across the course of the night one of them opened up just a hair.

this person is reserved and wears as much emotion as possible on the inside. i get the impression that to have such a conversation for this person is rare, and to be let in on it either implies a special level of either trust or drunkenness or both. in any case, there is some measure of darkness that marches in lockstep with my own, but it was the admission that struck me. when talking about it all, and the ability to recognize it and snap oneself out of it with relative ease, there came this: 'sometime i like it'.

and that's just the thing. sometimes we all like it. B has always made fun of me for wanting to be a 'tortured artist'. she's always contended that i am, in reality, far to happy-go-lucky to be such a thing, and my life hasn't really ever been terrible enough to qualify as tortured. point taken. agreed, my life has been relatively kind to me, and i try my damnedest to be happy-go-lucky. but i do love to be tortured. many of us do, and some of us more than others.

what our friend said struck me for the truthfulness of it, and it was a strange repeat of a conversation i had had earlier in the week with someone else. to hear other people admit that they like to be in that place sometimes was oddly freeing. i don't know that i had ever really admitted to myself before that i like to be there to some degree. B and i talked about it a little, and she nailed it right on the head: for me, it's because it feels natural. it is, at my base, who i have been for a long, long time, and it's easy and comfortable for me to be miserable. it takes work to be happy, it takes little effort to swim around in one's own head.

and this seems to be where the problem lies. like the mythical ouroboros, i eat my own tail because i like the taste of it, never realizing that all along i am consuming myself. i refer to my depressive cycle as a downward spiral, but that is only half right - it is truly an inward spiral, one that turns in on itself more and more and more until the outside world ceases to feel familiar and my own tail is the only flavor that becomes acceptable. social anxiety makes it that much easier for me. if one fears others, there is a convenient excuse not to eat with them, and simply to withdraw into my own dinner party with and of myself.

that cycle is a tough one to break. i taste good to me. my own sadness and anger are the meat and potatoes on which i have raised myself, and that i consume myself in feasting on them is immaterial, or just goes unnoticed. this is how i got to where i got to. i enjoyed it. i loved it. i ate myself, gorged on my own darkness until i nearly ate myself whole, and if i consider myself as that mythical lizard i ate my own tail and had to get a look at the back of my own head entering my jaw before i could stop.

that is how close it was. writing that made me see it for real, and i can admit it to myself. i was likely within weeks, if not days, of finishing the meal. thank god for that fight, thank god for that one single clear moment, and thank god for that god-forsaken place i went that made me stop eating.