Four months ago

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 19 May 2006 13:42:19

I wondered whether or not I exist.

I feel like that again, so my instinct is to write, again, that I feel like I don't exist. But then how will you respond? You won't want to say exactly the same things again because you've already said them. But what else can you say, because you said exactly what you thought last time and your thoughts haven't changed. What options are left? Well, I suppose you could ignore me and not respond at all. Or you could grumble that my feeling of nonexistence is something that has already been dealt with, implicitly saying that I shouldn't speak of it again.

Alternatively, to save you this dilemma, I could just say nothing about how I feel, since I'll just be repeating stuff I've already said. After all, if your response was to comfort me then I should allow myself to still be comforted by what you wrote before. And if your response was to act to help me feel differently then the result has obviously only been temporary so it hardly seems worth going to the effort of doing it again for such a temporary relief. And if your response was advice to help me stop feeling this way, then either I have failed to take the advice, in which case I should take it now, or the advice has failed me, in which case by speaking now I will be rebuking you for giving poor advice, and how can I then expect you to give better advice now?

As you can see, I find it hard to deal with recurrent problems, and easy to talk myself round in ever-decreasing circles that achieve nothing.