The past two weeks I've actually been in a hypomanic state (which is like HEAVEN for me). SO RARE I'm not depressed and suffocating and drowning.

And I've managed to run with it. As best I can.

Then this happened.

Traumatic Monday.
Fell.
Mom — 25k gone. wtf. can you believe it?
Fuck this life. Fuck everything. I hate everything.
Fucking FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.

I had to call the local police precinct for her. And then follow up. I needed a night of alcohol and weed and now it is 3am.

I am lost. I need help. I don't know who else to turn to. Or talk to.

This morning I ran to yoga because I forgot to set an alarm. My whole right side hurts from a fall. I didn't do a single pose. I just laid on my back on the mat and stared at the ceiling and held back tears while everyone else moved around me. The teacher didn't ask. I didn't explain.

I forgot my matcha on a park bench.

I'm very raw right now. Like literally gaping open wound pain. Beyond just this — life seems to be shutting down, falling apart, disintegrating on other levels for me.

I posted something on the internet. About being a halfJew from Bensonhurst. About not belonging anywhere. About what I believe.

Too Jewish for non-Jews, too non-Jewish for Jews. Too agnostic for my Church community, but still feeling compelled to participate. Too this, too that.

I literally believe that as Jews we went from undergoing and suffering from an external genocide of the body to transitioning into an INTERNAL HOLOCAUST of the soul. Of ourselves. It is as if we gave up and said "well Hitler did this, let's FINISH it."

I stopped participating in leftist groups a long time ago. Because I can't deal with the casual antisemitism that pops up. God knows I have said the harshest, most hurtful, most disgusting things myself in moments like this where I am just bleeding out. And I hate myself when I do that.

God I am on the verge of destitution or sometimes it feels like it. But I am holding on. I haven't killed myself yet.

People showed up today. Strangers. Said we see you. Someone made me cry in a good way.

I am still here. Barely. But here.

I stumbled across a photograph today I couldn't stop looking at — a Joshua Tree VFW post. Something about a veterans hall in the desert with a Joshua tree standing guard over it felt like exactly the right image for a day like this.

Kodak 250D AHU / Nikon Coolscan / Zeiss 50mm EF — photo by Chris Schlarb

I wanted something destroyed in my life to finally enact the complete doom and destruction I felt in my head. Instead of continued managed decline with the fear of endless precarity and an inevitable doom — why not just fucking speed it all up to get it over with? Or can something serious just break. Make collapse feel more like Hollywood and less like a slow spiral to madness.

Opening and closing of life — society / the internet — made to feel like options were increasing, connections growing, links multiplying. Now all captured. Closed internet, options fading, control and surveillance and enshittification rapidly increasing.

Couldn't bear to live. Didn't know how to live. So much anxiety. So much reckless abandon. Never a plan. Always a present and an explosion. Never thinking to the future or that I'd have one.

Once I finally found the time to live — all I could think of was now I have money, now I can go to a bar and drink. Never tried at all how to just live. Just be. Just exist as someone now adult and independent. God I could have done so much more.

Hard to live when you have to lie to yourself endlessly about what's going on. It's all a black hole.

I miss the smells, the sights, the variety. Not the monoculture, the endless banks and fast food chains.

The working class world destroyed — automats, food markets, honest food at low prices for hard working people — priced out by real estate interests. Maximize real estate value. Everything is $$$. Squeeze out the imagination. The possibility.

Communities disintegrate. Those dive bars and neighborhood taverns and cheap eateries and old school diners can't make the economics make sense when the lease ends and the rents skyrocket. There are no laws to protect small businesses or less glamorous entities and they get swept out.

Our communities and our lives and our histories and stories and cultures are all just nothing to them. They don't exist. That is why they like AI sterile art and film and music — the elites. Because they don't get the soul of anything. To them it is all the same and good enough.

Their mediocre minds. Their mediocre minds.

Too pushy. Too thirsty. Too desperate. Too transactional.
Not respectful. Not caring. Not empathetic. Not understanding.

I could maybe write an email that expressed something. But didn't know how in the flesh. Shy. Guarded. Closed down. Trying to avoid being vulnerable or exposing myself. Always feeling the need to be in control. Then lashing out when I wasn't.

Late bloomer. Going after the wrong things. Wanting to skip ten thousand steps and make up for lost time. Just full of anxiety and stress. Constantly.

Is this life? People, especially men, just fucking desperate not to be lonely and doing all kinds of weird, reckless, selfish, hurtful things because we are desperate to be seen and known and on the radar.

IBS — you robbed me of so much. Made me so afraid to go out. To do anything.

I have snuffed out many hearts as I too have been snuffed out by others. I know how it feels on both sides. So am I any less guilty? Absolutely not.

Feeling like I could cry, but I won't.

I'm still more agnostic than not so who the fuck knows. Very likely just some acute episode. But I have a 3 to 4 hour conversation in bed that night with some unknown thing.

It was verbal, it was non-verbal, things shot through me, it was like a force was touching me, holding me, comforting me, reassuring me.

My wife kept waking up, alarmed. I told her I was afraid. I told her I was talking with something. I told her don't worry. Everything is fine.

The next week I walked into a church. Still a skeptic. Still afraid. Still insecure. Still expecting to freak out at the creed.

But this time the creed moved me to tears. This time I felt it was beautiful. Look at these disparate people gathering over something. Something I can't share. Something I used to think was a mental circus.

My priest has tattoos, likes punk rock, rides a motorcycle, quotes Marx in sermons.

And that is how you become an agnostic Jewish Catholic who has an affinity for Orthodox theology and attends an Episcopal Church.

It reminds me how small your world can be, whether physically or mentally. Like if you're a gang leader who controls a 4 block stretch of 38th street but you can't safely go anywhere else. You are a big deal in that 4 block stretch and they know you and are looking for you just outside of there. And maybe they love and hate you or hate and respect you or just root for you — but go far outside that zone and you're a complete nobody. Your world doesn't matter in the big picture. It's nothing. It's ignored, neglected and allowed to be because it is not important. But once it is — it will be stolen and taken in a second.

And that old Italian world was just taken from us. And by whom? And was it good? Was it bad? What are the consequences? How did we fail to plan for it? How did we get here?

What are the uncomfortable truths and realities.

Pacing up and down the sand. The boardwalk. The decay. Emptiness. Sunlight. Waves. Quiet.

The bend in the D train.

How do I write my childhood vibes / impression / memories in words? Like a Neil Diamond song?

A neighborhood that at the time of my birth was 93% Italian-American and extremely Catholic. I didn't even know what a Protestant was until the 7th grade. A classmate told me she was a Lutheran and my mind just like EXPLODED OUTSIDE of my head. I went home and told my mom. She flipped.

Born 1981. The year the door closed. Everything since has been the consolidation of what was set in motion that year.

I think part of the reason I don't write or do stuff is I don't feel confident in my voice or expression. I feel like with my beliefs, when I try to explain them I come across like a crackpot or insane person. And I don't know how to communicate my beliefs in a manner that is not infantile and totally misrepresents my thoughts. Words don't come naturally.

And I think everything is so fucked, so much of a lie, it is weighing me down.

I feel lonely and isolated in my inability to communicate, to relate, to do anything but process and then sit with whatever I processed until it destroys me.

I didn't function with external structure either, really. I mean I was a bit better at doing things and also I had a job so I had to do stuff. But I wouldn't say it was easy or successful or provided any meaning to my life.

How to write: have to have faith that it matters. That it's worthwhile.

I live as like death has overtaken. I've lived this way for a long time. This has been my life. As if the end is imminent.

You don't need credentials. You need the nerve to write down what actually happens when you try.

Writing is how I actually communicate. When we talk on the phone I freeze up and go quiet and walk away feeling like I didn't say anything real.

I know this pattern and I know it can turn.

Philosophy would've made sense if I had had the confidence to build a life in academia. But I wasn't at all ready. Full of regrets.

If I could've imagined myself doing anything it was writing or academia. But severe depression. Not social skills. Didn't deserve. Not worthy. Can't do.

First saw that I have a brain. It was late. It counted.

And there is just no one to talk to.

Real darkness, real paralysis, the kind where getting off the couch feels impossible and I go quiet on everyone I care about.

There's a mountain on my shoulders and I've been letting the pressure build instead of saying anything, which only makes it worse. This isn't everything I want to say, not even close, but I needed to stop being silent.

I want to fight. I want to live. But the price of investment is too high.

I completely fail at vulnerability.

The closest anyone comes to seeing it is when I explode — shaking, pacing, feeling insane. Otherwise it's invisible. Otherwise I disappear into the walls.

Need to find a reason to live. To push. To indulge in something guilt and shame free.