Distractions

This blog post is an excerpt from an email that I sent to my friend Mike. I feel that it pretty much sums up what is going on with me presently so I thought I would post it:

Things have been pretty crazy for me. The travels have been going fine. I have just been hopping from one major city in Ireland to another. Today I am heading off to Dublin. So things on the traveling side have been fine. Except that I am not enjoying my travels due to my current state of mind.

I was hoping that by going to new places and experiencing new cultures on this trip that I would be able to change the way that I feel about myself and life. I was hoping that I would find a place or a person or peoples that would inspire me in my renaissance of the mind. I now know and understand that it does not matter where I go in the world or who I meet, I will always feel like shit until I figure out how not to. I have come to the realization that there is no person (no matter how wise) that can change me and the way that I think. There is no place that I can go (no matter how beautiful and amazing) where my mind will be in a "more receptive state" to bring about change. There is no culture, peoples or religion that will inspire me to bring about a change of my mind. This realization has made me feel completely and utterly alone in the world. I feel as though no one can help me and no one can understand what is happening in my mind and this brings about a feeling of solitude and loneliness no matter how many hostels I visit and how many people I surround myself with.

I have been going through massive states of depression and fear. I wake up early in the morning and cannot go back to sleep because I am constantly in a state of worry about my future and I fear that I will always feel like this for the rest of my life. Because I am going through all of this mental torture I have not been able to enjoy any of the places that I have been to since my trip to Scotland. I have also come to the realization that everything that I do in life, now and in the past, has all been a distraction from me and my feelings. When I say distraction I mean: every action that I take on a day to day basis that is meant to bring me a state of joy or happiness at any moment in time which is essentially everything that I do. Examples being: watching a movie, sleep, sex, eating, talking to a someone new, talking to someone I know, traveling to a new place on the map, etc, etc, etc. Basically everything I do, day in and day out, is a completely selfish action that is made with the sole intent of making myself feel temporarily better by distracting me from what is truly wrong with me. In which case, this means that all of my relationships with people are built on that of a selfish nature. I am friends with someone because I expect them to be able to make me feel better about myself which is a terrible job to place on another person and is completely unfair and selfish. It also makes me wonder if I have ever had a proper relationship with anyone.

As long as I have a goal and something on the horizon to work towards, my mind has been distracted from the underlying and fundamental problems that exist for me. During this trip I have come to a point where I had no where to go, nothing on the horizon and nothing that I was working towards. I was doing nothing, I had no plans to do anything and there were no people around to distract me. There was nothing to keep my mind from everything that is wrong with me and the way that I think. During these periods of no distractions, I was in a state of massive anguish, fear and pain until I got on a bus and headed to a new destination effectively temporarily relieving the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness by giving my brain something else to concentrate on. As soon as I got to a new location or city the feelings would return as once again there was nothing for my brain to think about except my own mental problems. This has made me come to the realization that until I change these fundamental issues within my brain I will be in a state of depression, confusion, anger and fear which will forever dominate my life unless I figure out how to change them. It does not matter who I surround myself with, be it my friends or family or Irene; it does not matter where in the world I am, be it the most beautiful and majestic place in existence; it does not matter what job I have, be it the best job suited to me...I will always be in the routine state of what I can only describe as "depression" and daily distraction from that depression until I can learn to change that which is fundamentally wrong. I just have no idea how to make that change and yet I know that I am the only one who has the answer to that question. I am the only holder of the keys that will unlock the hidden doors of my brain. I am the only one who can find the keys, find the doors and figure out how to unlock them. There is no person, place or method that I can encounter that will help me in this change. Again, this makes me feel completely alone and disconnected from the rest of the world.

So now I am at the point where I have no idea what to do. I know now that traveling itself is one more distraction from me dealing with my underlying problems. I am burning through money just as fast as it comes out of the ATM. Where am I to go? What am I to do? Do I continue with my travels that I am not enjoying with the hope that it may help me in the long run? Do I return home? If I do return home I will risk falling back into my old routine which was filled with distractions that I have meticulously developed for years that kept me from dealing with my problems.