Living like an animal, with little to no thought to the past, future, or the opinions of others, was supposed to be the solution to all my problems. Either I didn't commit to it enough or I did commit too much, because things haven't worked out. I'm angry all the time and a failure by any reasonable standard, although I continue to stay alive. This is going to be my attempt to unpack what happened and what I need to do. It has to be done in public as a way to hold my self accountable and force myself to put some thought into what I'm doing. It's still a conversation with myself, but held in some obscure street corner where someone might walk by and hear. Will it lead to anything? Who knows, but at least it's one thing new, one thing that I'm trying to stick to. After a long time I'm trying to get better and hopefully I will.
Living like an animal isn't an accurate way to put it. It came after a long period of failure with art, both with my attempts to create it and art failing to "save" me in turn. I'd come around to the Artaud "writing is shit" view, but that left me with a big chunk of my ego and self image missing. Art was the one thing I could use to hoist myself up above other people - they may have had their worldly successes, but I had my art, nevermind that I had never published a thing or created anything that I was proud of. I was engaging with the higher ideals of humanity, answering the big universal questions, creating the food that sustained the spirit, all that. With art reduced to a natural byproduct no better than a booger, rather than scaffolding to prop myself above everyone else, I was back on the ground, on my ass in the dirt. Meanwhile everyone else had been doing the hard work of steadily climbing up. It would be a lot of hard work to catch up and I'd likely never would, as I was mucking around with art because I wasn't one for climbing, and now everyone else had a massive headstart. So why not stay in the dirt?