Several significant aspects of my nature seem to be disappearing, you see. Where has my need to write gone? Where has all the delight in the little things gone? Where has my fascination with the human condition gone? Where has my sense of humour gone? Why doesn’t my old friend the llama ever nudge me and start up a conversation these days? Where has my ability to shrug it all off and keep paddling down the rapids gone?
The fact is, I feel emptier now than I’ve ever done. And it feels different this time. My sense of self has assumed the appearance of a battery that has run out of charge.
I’ve been advised that this is a natural condition commonly experienced by the INFJ/HSP type. It’s normal, apparently, for such people to run out of fuel and submit themselves to the bench on the train station, there to wait quietly and invisibly for the last train out. It’s all to do with having a life of almost unremitting stress and sense of responsibility to others. It simply drains the emotional energy, or so they say. And then we feel guilty and ashamed. And being a loner doesn’t help. Loners don’t attract support because they don’t want it. The faculty of support is seen as a one way process – all outgoing. And so when they do need it, there’s none to lean on.
I’m wondering whether this is just the latest example of a lifelong phenomenon to which I’ve referred on this blog several times. I mean the habit of being driven by focuses which amounted to examples of monomania – the fishing focus, the classical music focus, the photography focus, and so on. Maybe the need to write was simply the latest, and maybe even the last. It is a fact that, at the moment, I seem to have lost the will to write. It’s been a predominant feature of my life for around twenty three years, and has therefore outlasted most of the others. For now, however, I do feel like a candle that has been finally extinguished by its own guttering.
Or maybe it will prove to be just a glitch when the weather warms, the sun shines, the garden calls for attention, and the new leaves whisper seductively from the trees. We never know what’s coming next, do we?
* * *
One aspect of the news which has kept my interest piqued lately, though, has been the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Two seemingly reliable sources have emerged to provide credible evidence that Mr Epstein didn’t go into that goodnight voluntarily. Is that just another conspiracy theory? Well, let’s take a step back and ask what would have happened if he had lived and been brought to trial.
Being the kind of person he obviously was, there seems to be
little doubt that he would have succumbed to the obvious response: ‘If I’m
going down, the rest are coming with me.’ And then names would have been named,
heads would have rolled, and the issue of corruption in high places would have
been even more evident than it already is. That being the case, I think Mr
Epstein’s premature demise was all but inevitable. Maybe it was the ghost of Jack Ruby who strung him up.
And a final note: We can be fairly sure that corruption in high places happens everywhere, so maybe there’s one good thing to say about Trump’s presidency. Being in possession of an ego the size of a planet, a brain the size of a walnut, and an ethical sense that would be hard to find with an electron microscope, maybe Trump has done us a favour by clearing some of the fog between the people below and the corruption above. Unfortunately, I doubt anything will change.
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