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February 23, 2015
09:17

I have been thinking about purpose and happiness a lot since hearing an interview with Elliot Ackerman. He talked about how he thinks part of the depression that accompanies PTSD is going from having an intense sense of purpose to having no sense of purpose at all. Hearing the interview kind of illuminated something I didn't really think too much about before. I mean, I've thought about how I have plenty of things that should make me happy, but it's not things that make us happy, it's how we feel about ourselves. But I never narrowed it down to purpose before. My life has felt purposeless as long as I can remember, and I wanted to feel purpose through art but putting that weight on something that is capable of initiating emotional catharsis just turned it into a burden.

I keep questioning myself lately. Like I wonder if I'm really a bad roommate. A bad employee. If the reason I judge my coworkers so hard is because there's something wrong with me. I think my standards are high or at least above the minimum. I said to someone from another department, "I don't get why I hate all my coworkers, maybe I'm retarded" and she, like a sage at the top of a hill, said "maybe they're retarded". I think that actually spurred me to think about how my roommmate talks to me like I'm incredibly damaged, and how she's somewhat convinced me of that, and then I look at her past behaviors, in case my perspective is too skewed to judge current behaviors accurately, and I realize, she's stolen people's credit cards (and gotten in trouble for it), has a history of drug abuse, and has cheated on her partners despite saying she doesn't cheat. I've got problems, not the least of which is associating with people like this, but a bigger problem seems to be how I let them determine my self worth.
Dairyland