End of Master's Check Up

I haven’t been sleeping well the last couple nights. I took my last final on Tuesday: that’s the very end of the Master’s in Computer Science. I have no doubt that I’ll pass the course, but I’m waiting on a final assignment to be graded to see whether I’ll get out with a 4.0. I keep thinking I could have done more, could have studied harder; you know, the usual shit. It’s been keeping me up at night, and I’ve been trying to distract myself. I’ve played around with Instagram and TikTok, but got pretty sick of them. They led me down a rabbit hole into pornography, which feels filthy every time. I don’t know: I just can’t enjoy myself like I used to. I’ve been devouring books (Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit, Fahrenheit 451, The Plague of Fantasies, currently on De Rerum Natura), writing, practicing the guitar, tidying around the apartment. I broke up with my girlfriend two weeks ago, so that’s put a lot of time back in my life. I’ve been spending more time with my cat.

I feel sort of pathetic with my little Master’s. The degree is hardly worth the paper it’ll be printed on, to be honest: it’s only interesting in my case because of how different my previous training was, but my previous training is hardly applicable in any kind of tech work. No one hiring a software engineer is going to give a flying fuck about my undergrad in philosophy and theology, a degree I did a pretty shitty job in anyway. It feels quite futile. The only degree that actually confers a level of legitimacy is a PhD., I think. Maybe I’m overreacting, but I certainly haven’t seen a single job listing that specifically requested a master’s-level degree: they either want you to have a bachelor’s or a doctorate. My master’s will basically serve as a bachelor’s for all it qualifies me.

I’m definitely competent to fuck around with computers: I know what the hell I’m doing at a very high level and can run with relatively big dogs. I at least know how to lie down humbly on my back so I can participate in the running some big dogs do. Lately I’ve been seeing-feeling my mother’s blood on my hands. I bring up the image in myself and it comes with no affect. I’ve been exhausted. I don’t want to kill myself anymore: my mood’s been far more stable and calm since the breakup. But I’ve been so sad. My dad said that to me when I was about 10, the only time I can remember him really talking about his emotions to me: “I’m not depressed, just very sad.” My ex-girlfriend suggested during the breakup conversation that the reason I’d stopped loving her was that I was depressed. I told her: “get out.”

I’m disappointed in myself, because the reasons I gave her for the breakup weren’t true. I’d been harboring a great deal of frustration and resentment, much of it a projection of my insecurities. I feel the superego injunction on me and take it out on other people: I’m not even so ascetic, but I want people to at least try to be as ascetic as I feel I should be. Maybe (Žižek-Lacan here) I don’t mean the superego, since the superego’s instruction is “enjoy.” Maybe I do mean the superego, since I’m not really enjoying as I should be. I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, but I was getting annoyed with my ex, and she was getting annoyed with me, and we spent more and more of our time mad at each other until it was a bummer to see her, and it didn’t help to talk about it because we’d just get in a shitty mood. There didn’t seem to be any way forward.

She said that she’d not listened to my suffering, and that I was clearly in pain. I resent that. She said (in writing, but not really: she wrote me a letter on her phone and sent it to me via email, whereas I’d written her a hand-written letter because the physical object is important) that I was chosing chaos over the stability she offered. I’d been telling her for months that we could always break up, that we didn’t have to keep on with our relationship if it wasn’t working. I guess that was escapist, or avoiding the challenge of working through it. But why work through something that isn’t working? We weren’t married, we didn’t have kids. I was a jerk for letting the future run away with me: first we were planning to move in together, then we were planning to move together to New York, then I was thinking that buying made more sense than renting, then the time in which we’d expect to stay in the bought flat pushed towards the time we’d both said we’d like to have children…. I think I was doing it to reassure myself.

I said to my therapist that I didn’t literally love my ex: I only said “I love you” to hear her say it back. I used to ask my mother, several times a day, whether she loved me, or whether if I did thus-and-such she’d be proud of me. I said to her “I’m thinking of asking you to marry me.” This was literally true, in the sense that the thought intruded on me. I wanted the validation and certainty. We’d just been to her sister’s wedding, and they seemed so happy together. I was the one who said “I love you” first in our relationship: she put it off because it implied to her a level of commitment that she wasn’t sure she felt yet. Maybe I’m not sure what “love” means: I love my cat; I love my friends; I love my family; I love travelling. I guess with my ex I felt infatuation, lust, pleasure. Enjoyment? I’m not sure. That’s a trickier one to pin down. But those loves are natural, fixed, absolute features of me; my feelings for my ex have gone with the summer. We can both be such pains in the ass.

My father, I’ll give him one thing, has, since my teenage years, been very proud of me. I never feel, anymore, that I need to impress him. Or rather, I feel like by just being who I am I’m doing enough. I went to London a few weeks ago (it was during that trip that I decided to break things off with my ex) and saw him for lunch. We’ve been more in touch lately, which is wonderful. If his parents are any indication, he has a long life left in him, and I’m glad that we’re interacting more. He seems to be in a good place.

I don’t have much more to say, but I feel I’ve got to bring some sort of conclusion out of all this. My ex, very perceptively, said that this blog was a space for me to work through difficult feelings. Writing, in general, is a space for me to work through difficult feelings, but a blog is different from a diary in that it’s public. I’m speaking to an audience in a way I’m not when I write in my journal. And the difference isn’t just that I’m typing rather than hand-writing (I’ve been sending more hand-written letters, inspired by seeing Ellery again: she and I both found old letters of ours during recent moves): I’m writing in a different register here than I do in my journal.

My ex wasn’t a big fan of how I introduced her on the blog a few posts back, and the subsequent posts have been fairly dismal. I selectively present a vision of my life that’s worse than it is. Bonhoffer, in one of his letters from prison, said something like “the crisis of psychoanalysis is that people are by and large happy; the psychoanalysts have to first convince the people that they’re miserable, so that the people can be cured by analysis.” I’m also writing here to convince myself I’m not happy, when really I am happy. My ex asked me to try and write something positive about our relationship, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I wrote pages and pages about it (in a paper journal) and all of it came out negative and sad. I just couldn’t do more about it. She wanted me to tell some specific stories about fun things we did together, but I just didn’t feel moved by those things the way she did, somehow. Or I only feel moved by them when I remember them through her remembering of them. I never could express myself very clearly to her, and we basically had the same fault lines in our relationship from the beginning.

I’ve reread, once again, the email she wrote me in response to my letter. I’m ashamed of what I said to her: I’m ashamed of the ruminations and frustrations I had. I was tired of them and couldn’t stop them. I felt that my projects were being stifled by spending time with her. Maybe that’s because I needed to assert my need to spend time alone more. But I didn’t want to make her sad. I don’t know, honestly, whether or what I should have done differently. She could be very controlling and very particular. I would sit still for her and watch her in a way she wouldn’t do for me. I sat on her toilet and watched her do her makeup. I sat at the dining table and watched her cook. I slept in her bed every night because she didn’t like my shikibuton. I miss her, and I don’t miss her. I’m relieved, and frustrated. I tried to turn her into an authority over me, someone who would decide what was right and wrong, because I felt unmoored; then I resented her decisions and control; I disagreed with what she wanted for me, for us.

I asked my therapist whether breaking up was the right thing to do, and she refused to answer the question: she said that I didn’t need another woman (my mother, cousins, significant others…) set up as an authority in my life. I needed to make my own decision. I asked a professor whether I should get a PhD.: he said I was the only one who could make that decision. It’s frightening as hell, that I’m the only one who can decide for myself. Sometimes the decision is made on the basis of certainty. My mood is better now that I’m not with my ex. I think about killing myself far less. I practice the guitar more, clean more around the apartment, write more. When my mother was having her first seizure, I held her arm while they put the needle in it to sedate her; it kept coming out; her blood got on my hands; I had to hold her arm as she writhed and Michael Terrien held the other arm and nurses held her legs. What’s the right thing to do, anyway? Everything’s brutal, life is cheap, people are dust. We’re all going to die. How we cope with that’s different for everyone, but we’ve all got to face it in one way or another.

I’m poised on the edge of another long travel period: I’d like to spend time visiting people I haven’t seen in a long time. I’d like to tend to connections I haven’t been able to. I’d like to be in places where I feel relief, to practice languages I’m not good at, to exercise my creativity. I’m hugely privileged to be able to do that. I can either not exercise that privilege or exercise it. It doesn’t seem to me that I’m harming anyone by taking advantage of the opportunity. I don’t deserve what I have. But if I truly acted consistently with what I deserve I’d be dead. It is the objective case that people have been lynched or imprisoned for false accusations of things I’ve actually done. The money I have came from investments in the US economy of imperial hegemony seeded by assets from the tobacco industry. My objective position is one of untenable hypocrisy. All I wanted to do was scoop my friends up and take them away from the dreary working world into the miserable early retirement I live in. For her birthday next year I was going to pay off her remaining student loans. I guess I felt about my ex the anxiety my mother used to feel about me: that, freed from the constraints of being economically profitable, I’d do nothing at all. It wasn’t rational in my mother, and it isn’t rational in me.

The problem with writing on the blog is that it’s the truth that I’m putting out there, the open-hearted bleeding self that I pour out for you. I’m learning all the time; I learn by writing about myself, about the world. I want to, need to, leave a trace as I go on my journey: a trace, an utterance, something to say that I was here and that I put these words together in this way to express what it was like to be me in this moment. This is more true than I could be in speaking; this is more honest that I can be when writing for myself alone. This is the truth of me. This is the best I can do with the sense I’ve got right now. And my mother would’ve said, “that’s all you can do.”