Rehab

The hardest part of being sick (and not seeing the doctor about it) is when you can’t really decide if you’re sick or not. There are times when you feel like you’re ill beyond all relief, and there are times when everything just seems to be fine and nothing could possibly be wrong, that you are just as you should be. I feel just that. I can’t decide if I’m just thinking too much these days or if I really need to get some help, a nice lobotomy or a good shrink maybe, and emancipate myself from my current addiction. Well I don’t think I’m sick, really. Just a little disturbed and deranged I guess. But as I’ve said, I’m not sure.

Yesterday, after attending review classes for my frightening yet inevitable foreign licensure exams, I went to the mall with my friends. Yes, the densely populated, heavily polluted mall. Again. I go there almost everyday now and believe me it’s starting to scare and distress and annoy me as well how I have become so psychologically dependent on the many escapist diversions the stores (and their cunning sales ladies) brandish at me. I’m starting to regularly visit the mall like it was my church, the clothes my gods, the stores my altars, and shopping my religion. Wretched, I know. All the directionless walking around and wishful staring and hasty fitting and reluctant buying somehow keep me from thinking too much about the deeper meaning of life and the purpose of me living it and other things I shouldn’t even be thinking about in the first place.

Besides, I just can’t help but try and look for a good way to calm and console my convulsing, spastic brain cells after all that redundant mental torture, reviewing for nursing exams. Every now and then I would check my nose and my ears for leaking cerebrospinal fluid as I could feel my poor cerebellum cramping. If ever any of that was physically possible. It’s just so tiring, desperately attempting to exhume all the lessons I’ve learned from nursing school that I’ve long buried somewhere deep in my mental cemetery. But I like it. Makes me feel younger. In some ways.

I must say, though, that loitering aimlessly in a dissociative fugue around the mall, lost in the crowds of unfamiliar people and tempting new clothes, is indeed a good way to empty your addled brain of all the discombobulating events and realities of everyday life. Instead of just leaving my wicked problems inside the shadows of my mind and giving them the chance to grow into some big, nasty monster that will ultimately just feed on and drain the life out of me, I find it better to just melt my brain altogether in the confusion of all the colorful clothes arrayed in the displays and the people around me walking back and forth in dizzying haphazard lines.

It’s good to be happy, to be stuck in a moment without the burdens of living and being, no matter how fleeting that moment might be, no matter how unfairly small that fraction of time might be before the troubles of existing begin to slowly crawl and creep back again to torment us. I think that is something we all share, our repugnance for the heavy weight that we carry on our shoulders everyday and our desire to once in a while forget that the weight is there and that we have no choice but to bear the weight while we are alive. After eating a heavy lunch that seemed to somehow satisfy not only my anatomical hunger but my starvation deep down inside as well, I went around the shops with my friends, walking as if my worries would sooner or later slowly slip away from my body, trickle and bleed out of my worn-out plum and electric pink high-cut Chuck Taylors and be left helplessly strewn across the floor like spilled milk. I played video games I had not played in a long time at the arcades and discovered I was still so good at them. I sang out my soul’s inexplicable, unspeakable sufferings, screaming and screeching like nails on a chalkboard at the videoke room. After all that, however, when the friends have gone home and I walk around the city and ride a jeepney home alone, the happy moments still start to fade away, and the world and the walls close in on me again. Why do we always find ourselves in situations and circumstances like that? We seem to cry six and a half days a week and then get to laugh half a day as a consolation. Why is contentment, and the peace of mind and happiness that come with it, so hard to find? I always feel like a hunter lost in a forest, looking for that elusive wild animal that seems to escape every single trap I set to capture it. And I don’t even enjoy hunting.

When I got home I realized something. My room’s starting to look more like a poorly organized boutique now. There are more shirts and skinny jeans and vests and jackets and scarves and bags in there than floor space to walk around in. Since late last year I’ve been shopping every single chance I get. It’s like I’m lethally allergic to money. It’s pathetic. My savings have dwindled dramatically like the population of endangered wild axolotls. See, you don’t even know what that is, don’t you? Well, it’s a cute, slimy little salamander, and the world’s quickly running out of them, just like I’m running out of money to spend on caprice and folly and merrymaking and amusement.

I ask myself why I buy all these clothes when I could very well buy sacks of well-milled rice with the money I spend on them instead. Well, unlike the clothes I buy, I can’t wear sacks of rice when I go out, for one. And there is some (twisted) form of happiness in it, shopping around and buying stuff. You feel a certain kind of power, of control over your life, when you get the things that you want to have. I feel like I have what it takes to create and become my own entity whenever I buy these clothes. I realize I am addicted not to the clothes, but to the idea of getting what I want and the fear of losing what I want to have before I even have it. It just so happens I want all those clothes. Among other things.

Staring at the receipts I get from my ATM card and the diminishing figures printed on them, I am now beginning to slowly wean myself from all this shopping. Maybe there is some form of rehab for this. Then again, maybe all I need is the time and conviction to get away from all the worldly and material things that surround me and cloud my thinking. I know that if I really wanted to I could go on sudden withdrawal, stop this nonsense and snap back to reality. But right now I can’t say I want to do that, because I feel good whenever I get to buy the clothes I like, and do the things I like doing, and be the person I want to be. That would make me a hedonist. Then again, aren’t we all? Don’t we all just want to be happy? To find happiness in whatever it is we’re doing? To find true happiness wherever it may be? Problem is, no one really knows where it is, or whether it can be found in this life or on this earth, or whether everybody can find it in the same place, or whether it can be found at all, or whether it even exists. We’ll all have to wait and see, although I’m sure we’ll all know one day soon.

Until such a time I find the path towards true happiness, if ever there such a thing, I will have to enjoy these shallow pleasures rather than not have any happiness at all. I guess if you can’t have the real thing then you’d just have to be content (or at least pretend to be) with an imitation of it or live with not having it at all, genuine or fake. As they say, if you don’t have it, fake it.

No, I don’t think I’m sick. Just a little disturbed and deranged I guess. But as I’ve said, I’m not sure. Where oh where is the brilliant Sigmund Freud when I need him? Perhaps an ispiritista can help me find him.