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[a-vision-of-paradise]

12/5/2021 - Things I’d Write About if I Manage to Start a Blog

1. How MeToo Movements are Modern Day Conciousness Raising Sessions 

2. The Bold Type Vs Reality: How Scarlet is Fantasy World 

3. How everything sucks and is a struggle 

4. How I feel guilty for enjoying a career path my past self never would have chosen for me 

5. How I want to be an activist and a good person but I just can’t life anymore 

6. On the power of writing crap and how relieving it is 

7. On how feeling alienated and alone is the worst feeling ever 

8. How I’m incapable of organizing my life and constantly feel like I’m in a meat grinder 

9. How it feels like I’m constantly struggling and fighting to do things that I don’t actually want to do 

10. 10 Times Khally Balak Men Zizi Was Way Too Relatable 

11. How I constantly feel like I either just jumped off a cliff and am plummeting into the deepest depression or just standing on the edge of it about to fall off and never on safe ground

12. How even when I’m not drowning in utter despair, I’m still constantly terrified. It makes me feel like I’ll never fully kick the misery because I’ll never not be anxious. Feels like a never ending circle, doomed for life like sisyphus

13. How I started this list with a completely different thought in mind and turned it into a sob story I don’t want to share with anyone. Kind of feels like this list is just like my would-be writing blog 

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8/12/2020

This is purely a product of procrastination. I’m sitting here trying to write anything about women’s rights progress in the Arab World so I could send it to May (AbdelAsim/ What Women Want Boss) so I could confidently send her the email asking if she’ll hire me. 

As I sit here dreading the whole concept of work and having a million thoughts a minute about how nothing really matters in the end and I don’t have to be good at anything, I can just half ass everything and edit later, my mind goes back to all the times I sat at this desk experiencing the same anxiety and dread. I remember one of the therapy sessions when Dalia wondered what I’d be like if I’m working, if I’d have the same anxiety or hate myself as much as I did when doing assignments. Right now, the answer is pretty much yes, I do experience the same anxiety and hate myself just as much! 

What I always think really is true. It was never about University or the assignments themselves, it’s about me. I simply cannot handle responsibility even if it gives me a false sense of fulfillment. 

Even though I feel a lot better, I might even dare to say that I’m happy now, I’m still really anxious. I can still be going about my day normally and then suddenly feel an all-consuming sense of dread. I feel like I just backtracked into the pre-severely depressed phase and I could go into it again any second now. I’m scared of myself, scared of losing the clarity and perspective I’m experiencing now. It feels too good to be true, like it could slip away any minute. I’m wondering why it took me so long to feel like this, if I’m feeling like this because of the pills. I’m wondering when I’ll realize it’s not real and have the fog/bell jar that never shows itself descends again. 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

11/14/2020

I’ve been thinking about starting a writing blog so I’d get myself used to writing and actively pursuing it as a career. I still haven’t started it though.

There’s so much that I don’t know how I feel about, I can’t decide if I’m better or not. Somedays I feel like a go-getter who’s pushing through and gathering my shit so I can put it together and other days I feel like I’m just pretending and I’ll show my true sad colors any second now. Sometimes I feel as though yes, I’ve made it into the recovery phase, I’m getting out of this depression, but then a week later I’d find myself wishing to die again. 

I don’t know if I like what I do now, I work at a women’s magazine, I do fashion pages and follow celebrity news and ocassionally internally brainstorm ideas of what I want to write about that I know my boss will never approve of. Somedays I feel so happy to finally be liberated from Academia, I was given no choice, I had to come to terms with the fact that the next two years will not follow the plan that had always been at the back of my mind. Will I be a journalist then? Will that make me happy? I have no idea honestly but I don’t completely despise my existence now so maybe that means I’m enjoying this. 

I think I’m struggling to say that I enjoy it because it feels like I’m betraying myself a little. I’m wondering where’s this girl who was going to become a revolutionary socialist human rights activist, who scorned those who wanted the comfortable picket-fence life with all its 9 to 5 dreariness, who was going to live in poverty but be happy anyway because she’d be doing something that matters and she’d feel fulfilled. Now, I feel like everything would be easier if I could just work at some company, make a lot of money, and spend it all on snacks and pretty clothes and outings with my friends. I’ll admit it here but not out loud, I don’t want to change the world, I want to get what I can out of it and just get by. I acknowledge now that I’m not fit to help anyone, I can barely get myself to take the next breath. 

What does that mean though? Was I a hypocrite all along? Was I expecting too much from myself? As always, I find myself thinking that I am my biggest disappointment. I can blame it on my parents all I want, but even I have set impossible standards for myself. I don’t know if it comes from arrogance or self-loathing though, self-loathing is less harsh so I’m probably going for it. 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

13/7/2020

It’s been a rough day. Nothing really happened at all, a lot of the usual, I just felt extra shitty about it. I had a terrible headache in the morning, my sleeping’s off again. I could’ve gotten up at 8 but I kept going back to sleep. I woke up and the first thought in my head was that I hated myself for sleeping again, that I can’t get anything right ever. I feel like such a mess, all the time I feel like a walking cry for help. 

We’re in the middle of a global pandemic right now, I’ve been at home for the past 4 months, I gained weight but somehow lost my appetite. I think quarentining has made me even more incapable of dealing with the world or with people. I doubt every single thing I do, every text I send is risky. I feel bad after talking with friends over the phone or even commenting on their posts on social media. They’re my friends, supposedly I know they love me, but I feel like I don’t really know because everytime they do something to show it I get surprised. 

I had a final yesterday that I surprisingly did well on, I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown and I only cried like 5 mins so that was nice. I was more shocked that I actually did well in the exam though because I feel like I can’t do well in anything. I can barely get out of bed, and I don’t really want to. I think I only pretend to want to because it’s somehow normal to be annoyed you can’t get out of bed, the truth is I’d stay in bed forever unashamedly if I could. 

I want to tell my friends that I’m not okay, but I know there is nothing for them to do about it, I don’t want to burden them. I feel so self-centered all the time, I feel like shit and worry about how shitty I’m feeling and want my friends to worry with me, to deal with my shit with me. It’s just impossible though, I’m putting way too much on them. 

I got professional help so I wouldn’t expect things from them, so I’d stop being a burden, so I’d have someone to call and talk to when I’m feeling like this who can actually tell me what to do, so I’d get better. But really all it’s done is that it’s made me realize how not okay I am, it gave my sadness a name and made it more visible to me. Every week I talk about how I feel, and the more I do, the more I realize what I’m feeling and what comes out of me scares me, what scares me even more is my therapist’s reaction to it. 

I want to kill myself again today, but the feeling isn’t as all consuming as it was a week ago. I still somehow think I don’t have that long left, but when I think of what my family will think if I kill myself I feel like it will really bring them shame and I feel bad. Then I think that I won’t be there to deal with the crap of it all, I won’t be anywhere, It wouldn’t even be like I’m sleeping, which is the feeling I crave all the time. 

I just think it’s really odd that I want so desperately to disappear, but when I feel like it’s actually happening it upsets me so much. Whenever I miss an outing or a hangout I feel like my friends will forget about me, they’ll get used to my absence and won’t miss me anymore and I feel horrible about it. But killing myself will definitely do that though, eventually people will forget about me, as they should, and I’ll really disappear completely. Some people might even hate me for wasting all their time, the years they spent loving me and trying to help me get better, I’d hate me for that too honestly. 

I just wish I could press a button and be someone else, I was going to say I wish I could press a button and feel something else but it seems impossible now, the way I feel has kind of become who I am, I can’t really think of myself without the shittiness I feel. 

The thing is, I say I need people, but when I actually talk to them all I want to do is to hang up. I can’t handle the small talk, I can’t handle the worrying, I don’t want to think of how they feel about what I say. At the same time, I wish they would notice that I feel like I’m on the edge of a cliff and I’ll fall off any second. 

I expect my friends to help but when I think of my family knowing anything it terrifies me. I never think of asking them for help or even expecting it from them, I don’t know if it’s because on some level I know they caused all of this or because I know they won’t understand or because I don’t want them to worry. 

 I just feel like I’m in a fog and I’m getting suffocated, I’d do anything to get out of it. I actually have to get out of it because I have another test in two days and I don’t have time to be sad right now. 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

15/5/2020 Relaxation

I turned off all the lights, lit a scented candle and opened the windows all the way trying to wake up the part of myself that used to enjoy the smell of the air at night and the music-video feeling listening to music while staring out a window brought but I felt nothing. I sat down and closed my eyes and tried to just do nothing but my heart was still beating erratically and the unbearable heaviness was still there. 

I am forever restless and exhausted. No environment is relaxing for me, everything is just exhausting. I wake up and opening my eyelids is painful, getting out of bed and announcing that I’m awake is exhausting, having my parents speak to me is like having them ask me to climb a mountain and I just can’t anymore. I’ve lost the will to do anything. Everything is unbearable and too much. 

I want to be left alone but I’m really lonely, I call my friends but I want to hang up after the first 5 mins. I miss my sister terribly but I don’t want to talk to her over the phone. 

Music is just noise now to me, books are just useless words, I don’t want to do anything and I’ve lost the sense of urgency that tells me some things have to be done and I don’t really have the option. Everything in life now feels like an obligation, and I have to adapt, to push myself and do it because that’s what living is. But it feels like I can’t adapt anymore, I can’t cope with life anymore. I can’t bring myself to do the assignment anyway even though I don’t see a purpose to it. I can’t bring myself to live life anyway even thought there is no purpose to it. 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

14/5/2020 Breaks

No break is ever enough for me, I’m constantly exhausted. We’re currently in the middle of a global pandemic, everything’s stopped, I haven’t lef the house in 3 months and I still feel exhausted. 

I got my first C for a research paper in my 4 years of university. It was an easy paper, in a topic I like, I had an extra 2 hour to fix things and I submitted it knowing full well it was below average. But I hadn’t slept in 2 days and I was exhausted. 

I couldn’t push myself this one last time. It’s my final year and I just can’t do it anymore. It’s the most important year and this is when my downfall happens. The rock has fallen off the top of the mountain and I can’t will myself to pick it up and continue pushing it to the top. The simple act of waking up feels like climbing the steepest mountain.  

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3/5/2020 AIC submission

In less than 4 hours, I am supposed to submit the final paper of my academic life. I can’t wait to be done with this. I’ve been unable to sleep properly for days, I didn’t sleep yesterday and I drank so much coffee, my ears are popping and I feel like my vision is impaired. I spent days in a constant state of anxiety on the one hand and indifference on the other. I am only able to submit a paper when I absolutely must and this puts an unbearable strain on me. I’m drained in every way possible. 

Every paragraph or sentence feels like a huge mountain that I have to climb, and after taking hundreds of breaks, going to the bathroom millions of times and spending hours staring off into space with the dread slowly filling my insides, I manage to get out a paragraph, and just the effort it takes makes me want to repeat the cycle all over again. If someone looks at me now, I look fine enough, but on the insides I’m screaming at myself to just finish, to write anything and be done with it and then I can relax. But every time I stare at the words I’m supposed to paraphrase I freeze, and I have this necessary urge to get up and do something else. After I get up and do the thing, my walk back to my desk is dreadful, it feels like I’m walking to my death. 

I can’t wait to not feel like this anymore, everytime I submit a paper it feels like I’ve escaped a death sentence. I fantasize about being a normal person who can just read and write and not take years but throughout the 4 years, I haven’t discovered how people manage that. 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

13/2/20

Lately, it feels like I go through the days just happy to be getting by. Every day is an attempt to get through the day, when I’m not crying at the end for one reason or another it’s cause for celebration. 

Today I went to the first Zatek meeting, I wrote first because I feel like there might be more, at least I hope so, I can never really trust I won’t quit. The woman was laughing so excitedly, she seemed to be full of energy, I wrote seemed because I feel like I could sometimes seem that way too but it’s actually the furthest from the truth. Anyway, she talked about how the idea of Zatek came to her at the time of the revolution when she was applying for a masters -it was supposed to be about women’s political participation in Egypt from the 1500s to the 1900s- but she couldn’t find anything about it so that’s what made her decide to start a “digital museum” for women. 

The small part of me that isn’t dead was excited to be in a room with her, and to listen to her use words that I hear really sophisticated people who I aspire to be like use. She also talked about this project and how difficult it was to get it going when the women it was designed for didn’t believe in their own work. As she was talking about these frustrations, all I could think about was why she would even bother. The woman was paying rent and hiring people and traveling to places, going miles and miles and hearing horrific stories and all I could think of was how could she muster the will to do this. 

I can’t even get myself out of bed, I can’t fulfill the requirements of my own life, how could she do that and also try to help others? I constantly think of other people’s miseries, their misfortune in life compared to the unappreciated fortune in mine is one of the reasons I can’t handle life anymore. Yet, I don’t do anything about it, I talk about it a lot, but at this point, if I’ll let myself admit it now, I’m not sure I want to anymore. I heard people today say they want to change the world, they want to help women and be useful and it was like I was listening to them from this far off place where this was once relevant to me. It felt like I was listening to my past self who was idealistic and opinionated and who cared about all the things she says she cares about. Now, I feel like I whenever I talk about something that supposedly matters to me, I’m just conjuring my past human self to play this part and make that speech, but in actuality, I’m a zombie who says these things out loud but in the end, has come to terms with the fact that I’m useless and helpless and incapable of doing anything for anyone let alone myself. 

I voice my ideas and I see people are impressed by them but all I’m thinking of on the inside is that I hope they don’t ask me to do anything because I won’t be able to do it. I want to sign a piece of paper that says I am not responsible for my own life and I need someone to handle it for me for the time being. But that’s been the problem all along, I have no control and I’m miserable, and the little control I have is just exhausting, so what do I do? What do you do when you don’t want to do anything? 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

6/2/20

I’m sitting here googling why love suddenly disappears when all I want is to swallow my pride, pick up the phone, and talk to him about it. I want to tell him that l feel like he doesn’t love me anymore, that I feel like he’s sick of me, that I feel like he’s distanced himself from me because he couldn’t handle all the sad and crazy anymore. That l feel like he’s followed the pattern of everyone else in my life who’s gotten close only to realize they don’t want to be around me anymore, that I’m not as fun as I seemed at first. 

I don’t know why I care so much. Actually, that’s a lie, I do know. It’s not that odd that I feel shitty about myself because someone I love isn’t loving me all that much. My whole life, my own feelings have been informed by how others felt about me.  

To be fair he probably hasn’t stopped loving me or anything, I know he does love me. He just loves her more now. I didn’t think I was a jealous person but clearly, I am. I just need him so much all the time, he makes life bearable. He’s always my reason not to kill myself, I love him. He’s an amazing person. For a little while I felt secure, I felt sure that he loved me but that’s all gone now and the absence of that feeling has become another reason to kill myself. 

How I’m feeling, what I’m doing to our friendship is unhealthy to say the least, it’s toxic. He means too much to me, I get too much out of him, and that’s a dangerous thing for the average person let alone a bag of sad like me. I had to stop. Just hearing his voice made me less sad, and now I have no one. I have no one.

My friend just told me that a guy she knew committed suicide by sniffing toxic gas and then putting a bag on his head to get it all in, he did it in a car. All I can think about is that guy going to buy the gas and sitting alone in his car killing himself. Oddly enough, it’s the alone part I seem to be fixating on. Sometimes I picture myself when I think of how he did it. It doesn’t seem like something distant from me, like something I’d never do. If I’m really being honest, one of the first thoughts I had was that I hadn’t considered that gas option before, that it seems like a quick and easy way to go. But my mind always goes back to his funeral and how he actually died, his thoughts weren’t just thoughts anymore, he actually did it, and it worked. This person has disappeared from the world now and that’s the way he went. I think sometimes, did anyone in his life see it coming? did anyone blame themselves? How are his parents going to live with the fact that their son chose to die? How will the people who loved him cope with the fact they weren’t enough to keep him here?  

Then I think if I ever did it, would the people in my life claim they had seen it coming? I think they should, I’ve kind of made it clear they should. 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

I would do anything to live as anything or anyone but me right now. I wish I was an inanimate object just so I could rest from feeling like this just for a little bit. I just need a little break, that’s all, a real break where I really don’t feel anything, the unconscious kind. I just need 5 minutes where I don’t exist, or where I go to some kind of different realm/dimension where I’m not myself and my life isn’t like this and I’m not me. If I can just have this break I promise I’ll be okay, I’ll get up and I’ll be a person and I’ll do what people do and I’ll function, but I just can’t right now, I just need this break. Is that impossible to ask for? 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

Misery

Can I just skip to the end of my life? Then hopefully, I’ll be spending my days drinking tea, reading, knitting, or watching TV. No one would expect anything of me because I would’ve already done all that could be done. I couldn’t possibly be a failure, because I would’ve already fulfilled my so-called purpose of a job and a family and a house and a car, I would be at that age where it’s completely natural, even encouraged, for me to relax and wait for death; I wouldn’t be doing it with the self-loathing, the anxiety, or the guilt. There would be no future for me to fear or wonder about, and it would be completely natural to constantly think about death because it’ll be coming a lot sooner than it is now. Knowing me though, there’d probably still be a lot I’d worry about; The feelings of inadequacy that are my constant companion will probably then be about not having done enough, wasted away my life, zombie-d on; I probably won’t really end up having had the house or the family, not even for the sake of the job; I’ll probably still be thinking about death just as I am now, and I’ll probably be alone thinking of all this and not just feeling it. I was wrong to think there is something to look forward to, the problem isn’t my age or my circumstances, it is all me, as it always is.     

[a-vision-of-paradise]

Random

I’ve been feeling very sad lately. I don’t even know if it’s sadness really, I just don’t feel good. I get up in the morning, I catch the bus and for a few minutes I feel like I’ve accomplished something, like I’m not a complete failure as I’ve been thinking lately. But then when I get to Uni and I meet my friends, I see people and I hear my own voice for the first time in the morning, and I feel utterly bored. I’m irritable all the time, everything they say annoys me and somehow I find ways to get hurt by things that I would have otherwise taken lightly, I look for reasons to be mad and to blame them for my sadness and I can’t say I have a justified reason for it. I love my friends, they’re a blessing to me and I understand them better than anyone, but lately, they’ve become too exhausting to be around. I’m constantly wondering if I said the wrong thing, if I unintentionally hurt their feelings, or bugged them, or was too negative about something they’re excited about. I can’t help but think of all the reasons not to do something before I think of all the reasons to do it, I don’t know if it’s laziness or cowardliness or just pure pessimism but the simplest tasks seem the most difficult and the most trying. I don’t want to do anything because I don’t find joy in anything. I don’t read anymore, I only say I do because it was the one thing I used to do, I have no talents or other hobbies, it was the one thing that was mine and that I felt like myself doing. Now it just feels like I push myself to do it because I’m too scared to admit I don’t enjoy it anymore. I think I’ve lost the ability to understand or relate to the books I read, it could be because books are about people who have real things happening in their lives, they probably don’t have nervous breakdowns about a test or a paper to submit, or if they do, they eventually get to a place where they realize there are more meaningful things to life. I agree wholeheartedly with that, but then this depresses me even more because I realize that I’ve dedicated my whole life to something that ultimately means very little. I put so much pressure on myself, to the extent that it’s become the only measure of success I value, and yet it still isn’t satisfying when I have some degree of it. This is because I don’t actually care, this isn’t my own measure of success. I miss the bus every morning simply because I don’t want to be on it, I barely want to get out of bed. When I do, I push myself so hard, I do something that takes 5 minutes in 2 and I take the small walkway to the stop running, I’m always a minute too late and I watch it drive away every time, constantly running after it, trying to get the driver to see me, willing myself to run faster than I possibly could and missing it anyway. 

[a-vision-of-paradise]

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea—how free.”

— Sylvia Plath, “Tulips” (via goodreadss)

[a-vision-of-paradise]

Reading

It really sucks when you lose interest in the thing you were once most interested in. I love reading, maybe I should say loved. When I read, I used to feel like the words are portals to the realm of the story. I would be somewhere else, not just sitting on bed in my room in my house where nothing happens, well, nothing good at least. On this side of the page, there's no magic, no fortunate happenings, no chance encounters or tragic events. There is just life and it’s predictable unpredictability, and now that’s all there really is. I lost the ability to get caught up in someone else’s imagination, where my own surroundings would disappear. Nothing disappears anymore, it’s always there, unflinching and unimpressive, and now there isn’t even a hidden door I can go through to get away from it even for a few hours.

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Anxiety

When I’m anxious, I feel like I’m being squeezed through a really narrow tunnel that’s crushing me, or that I’ve been thrown into an ocean that’s very deep and very wide with nothing to hold on to and I’m floating in nothingness, the waves colliding with my body pushing it this way and that and I have no control over it.

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“Happy” Memories

The ways human beings comfort themselves is funny. When we’re sad, we’re like lost babies. Our minds always take us back to a time when we were happy. Like when people look through old photos, or contact their old school friends or even remember something they used to study that they don’t anymore. Somehow, we always seem to find comfort in the past, and when we’re vulnerable, our minds fool us into thinking we were happier. When we take a moment to think however, we realize that, at the time of all those great memories, we still felt incomplete. We were still in some way unhappy with our lives, yet it seems so stupid when we think about it now. I don’t know what that means. Does getting older and wiser just mean we’re getting more miserable? Are our age and our level happiness inversely proportional? Will we ever look to the future for comfort? I think in a way it’s another survival instinct. Like a fight or flight response from the big, dark and gloomy future monster and the crystal clear unwanted present that was never a part of our plan. The desired effect is never reached though, because all this mechanism ends up doing is making us feel even sadder that we weren’t even aware of how happy we were back in those memories, and how we can never go back to change that now. 

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People Memories

It’s really strange the way some people never leave you. Not literally, not physically but metaphorically. Like when you once knew someone so well, and they meant so much to you, you loved them and they loved you too, they made you feel things no one else had. But then these feelings evaporated and they hurt you, and the thought of them stopped making you feel good and only made you feel bad. With time though that changed, and instead of replaying all the awful incidents between you that made you feel small, you started recalling all the other great things they made you feel. Even though this person isn’t really there anymore and in reality, they will never again be the person they were when they loved you, you are still comforted by the thought of them. You still smile at the memory of an inside joke you had, or a song you once listened to or even a book you’ve discussed, and it all just makes you feel better because you remember that you were once loved by this person. Somehow, even though the real person left you, the memory of them never has; and as pathetic as that sounds, you find that it’s the only thing you look back to when you’re feeling down.