Content note: I’ll be talking about personal issues regarding relationships, fighting, depersonalization and derealization. Feel free to skip interaction if it’s harmful to you or it feels like I’m asking for free therapy. Feel free to just comment “get therapy” if you want lol.

I don’t know how to start this train of thought or necessarily articulate it properly, but I’ll try. My partner and I broke up recently because they think they are a lesbian. We still live together and will for the foreseeable future. We’d been together for about 4 years. My sibling lives with us and I had two more roommates who have since moved out.

That’s just context. I have been… not very good to the people around me for the past year or so. I became jobless and carless in February and had been trying so very hard to get a job and a car, but never really communicated how hard I was trying to my roommates or partner. At times it was all I could do to apply for one job a week or beg my family for money. I was going to doctor’s appointments back-to-back to deal with my disabilities. I stayed up all night disassociating or playing video games and slept all day. I got lost in a lot of niche theory/history and spent hours doing nothing but reading and listening to podcasts. Sleep. Disassociate. Isolate. Sleep. Where did the weeks go? The months? Where the hell am I?

I continued scraping by enough to pay rent and utilities, and bought my own food with food stamps but couldn’t afford household stuff. I mostly stayed in my own bubble and cleaned after only myself. My roommate approached me about not helping with chores, very annoyed, and I got angry. We got into a shouting match where he accused me of not doing anything and of being rude. I felt like I was doing as much as I possibly could with the unending fatigue I was feeling. I isolated further. Anytime we saw each other, it was a shouting match. My partner and I began shouting at each other, too. Social interaction meant shouting and crying for me.

But the weird thing is, and the point of this post, is it was all also just so very… funny? I was angry and I was sad, more than I ever have been in my entire life, probably. But a combination of study, psychadelics and mental illness have sort of forced my brain into a permanent birds-eye view of my life. Everything, everything has systemic roots. The personal is the political. The issues I was having boiled down to poverty, unemployment, and disability, all symptoms of a larger societal sickness. Literally millions of people go through the same and worse. Every fight I was having was happening literally concurrently with thousands of other fights around the globe over petty shit like dirty dishes or unbought paper towels. My partner told me our roommates were moving out. I laughed and said something like “isn’t that a bit of an overreaction?” It all seemed so silly.

When my partner and I started fighting it was over my isolation, alleged rudeness and lack of proper communication. Even with tears streaming down my face there was this lingering sense of non-urgency in the back of my mind, a sensation of utterly mundane, banal absurdness to the whole ordeal that made me feel like we were just stealing lines from TV dramas or scenes from movies where couples fight. We were playing the part of the happy couple for years and now we were playing the part where it all collapsed. It meant nothing even though it meant everything. “Couples break up all the time” was juxtaposed snugly with “my world is disintegrating.” The systemic, empirical lens I view everything through was battling for supremacy over the part of me that gave a shit for my and others’ emotional well-beings, and I think it won. The minutiae of our suffering meant nothing to anyone but us, and it pales in comparison to the collective suffering of humanity, which also goes unseen by the universe writ large. It’s all unimportant unless we make it important. So why does it matter if I isolate? Why does it matter if I’m rude? These thoughts won’t leave me be.

I guess I’m just stuck in a perpetual thought loop where, for instance, me being depressed is so insignificant that it makes me more depressed, which I then view as insignificant, which makes me more depressed, ad infinitum. The systemic supercedes the self. I feel like an actor in a play that no one is watching and I’m begging the void to let me take a smoke break. The “actor” metaphor itself is so cliché that it reminds me of how manufactured our thoughts are by our environments and our media. The systemic supercedes the self.

Thanks for reading my rambling if you did. Thanks for skimming it. This may sound strange, but I want to know what pains you, comrades. Do you feel like you’re acting? Are you okay? Do you think that thinking about whether you’re okay or not is an act of futility and insignificance? I can’t replace a professional and I may suck at giving proper advice, but anyone can feel free to DM me anytime about any of the emotional nonsense we have to deal with as people. I am the void you can scream into, and I will listen.