A Journal Entry From December 1ST

Today is December 1, 2024. A few weeks and it'll be a new year. Time sure goes by quickly - it terrifies me. 

When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot about time and about it passing and me remaining stagnant, absolutely no growth, because I’m preoccupied with the swiftness of time and its unyielding nature. I created a Procrustean bed of sorts. Cutting out moments of my life to accommodate my fears, rather than cutting out my fear so I can live. 

At 16, I saw my life stretching before me, and I, trudging along with anxious indifference. Sometimes my stomach would drop when I pondered the question of my life. How fickle it is. 

"Lord, make me to know my end and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am."  I am indeed frail!

 My life in the face of time's vastness is fleeting. Compared to its enormity my existence feels insignificant. This awareness unsettles me. I can't come to terms with it because this life is all I have. I even thought that if I could see time, I could bear its passing and what it's doing to my life, I could bear its relentless flow. But I cannot. I can't control it. It's fixed, and will take its course. I can only yield, and make the most of this little life. 

At one point I felt it wasn't a fair deal. This short, fleeting life yet I had to choose one course. How could I choose, when I wanted to make the most of it by being as many things as I could be? Sylvia Plath perfectly explains this in her fig tree analogy. I feared not being able to make a choice on what life I wanted to lead. I feared ending up being rooted in that spot of indecision my whole life. 

I'm afraid the fears of those years are becoming my reality. I am afraid. Cold fear is gripping my neck and I…

I feel like a child again, but not in the joyful innocent sense. I feel the same naivety a child has because life hasn't taught them yet. Their fears are magnified because they lack understanding. They don't know anything yet and so their imagination fills the gaps, believing in monsters under the bed and shadows that come alive and even Santa Claus. In the same way my fears are magnified. The world is so large, and life is...tricky, a treacherous road, and I have no experience to navigate it. I have no logic to fight my fears with. Whatever logic or experience I have is clouded by the heaviness of my anxiety about time and the unknown. 

A child eventually learns that Santa isn't real. The monsters under the bed vanish after a while. Growth and understanding solves that. But right now, I am a child and it's just raw fear and vulnerability as I think about these things. Weak. Impuissant. That’s how I feel in the face of time. Insignificant and unarmed. I am afraid. 

I feel like I got older without growing. Time seems so obscure and distant that I can't believe it's happening to me. It's aging me, eating away at my life. I am aging, but I fear without the wisdom that comes with age because I've been half asleep for the past four years. Or better said, it feels like I've been in a coma. A coma induced by this fear and other circumstances. I want to wake up. Life is happening without me and yet I'm stuck in this half dead state. 

This body goes before me; it maintains homeostasis, it goes to work, it looks after itself, dresses, eats, it even hugs and occasionally laughs. But my mind is stuck in this state of waking and dreaming.  I fear to be lost between this state and the other. In this liminal state of what I am and what I could be.