It’s been what can only be described as a shameful amount of time since I’ve last written here. I’ve started a post so many times, only to bury the pages once more through inattentiveness or purposeful forgetting.
I have fully graduated and emerged into the world as a post-graduation former postgraduate. The process had been happening for months, ever since August when I electronically handed in my dissertation with the typical anticlimax of the digital era. Since then, the months have passed in a dizzying whirl of unexpected and expected crises. I had imagined that my graduation would be a new level of torture, solidifying a year which was filled with more regrets and mistakes than perhaps any other year of my life. I expected to be plunged into daily, insurmountable ruminations of each and every one of my decisions and how very poorly they served me. Yet, thanks to some undeserved and unknown source of mercifulness, it went by easier than I had expected. When imagining the worst, one is often pleasantly surprised.
I created an indisputable narrative for my year. The story plays out as a tragedy, a form of endless descent. From the very first decision—perhaps the most flawed, to do a masters immediately after my undergrad—I set myself up for a series of choices that would lead to a months-long crisis in whose claws I still exist, sitting captured on the couch in the darkness of clouded Edinburgh daylight.
Most of my friends and I watch The Good Place, and recently many have been comparing me to the character Chidi. [If you don’t watch the show and want to watch it eventually, please skip this paragraph] Chidi ends up in the ‘bad place’ because he can never make a decision and that becomes the torture of all those around him. The most recent episode focused on Chidi and how his indecision stemmed from his belief that there was an answer to every question if only he thought hard enough about it. At first when my friends began comparing me to Chidi I thought it was a bit of a stretch, that they were just feeding into the modern phenomenon of trying to stretch everything far enough to circle back to the self. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I had indeed become Chidi this year.
I feel crippled by indecision for nearly everything—from the big choices of life such as which country to live in, to the small choices of what to eat for lunch and what coat to wear when it rains. The other day, I realised what had disappeared from my life: intuition. As I thought more about it, I realised that as every major decision I had made this year turned out wrong, I subconsciously decided early on that to avoid making the same mistakes I needed to think far more about the decisions as I make them. I would spend hours contemplating what makeup to buy or what colour journal to get or which café to go to for a coffee. My old roots in American perfectionism from which I thought I had freed myself came clutching at my ankles and snaked their way up my body until I was trapped in the futile search for perfection. I thought that spending more time going over every aspect of a decision could only be beneficial; then, I would be that much more sure that I was making the right choice. Instead, I spent far too much of my mental energy agonizing over every possible choice, enveloping myself in a toxic haze of decision fatigue.
Looking back, I remember some major instances in which my intuition cleared her voice and gave her opinion, speaking out before falling back asleep, exhausted by the effort. But I wholeheartedly ignored her, thinking that through logic and thorough analysis I could arrive at the best choice, even though I was far from logical. I ignored obvious signs that things were not what they should be, drew connecting lines between things that should never connect, navigated rumblings of negativity and regret with a belief that I could get through to deeper layers of people.
For my own benefit and maybe some scrap of interest to others, let me make a list of the beads that strung the necklace of my current dissatisfaction, clasping around my neck with its frightening weight—choosing to do a masters (intuition: take time away from studying after burning myself out at durham; logic: further my career goals, stay in the uk, avoid crushing existential crises that would accompany being at home) – choosing this program (intuition: mainly silent, but a bit unsure about the caliber of the university; logic: a qualification that would boost my cv, a combination of academic and pragmatic learning, a city i love) – choosing communal isolation (intuition: screaming, screaming, feeling the heat of the fires over which hung the red flags and frantically tearing down the flags to dampen the flames; logic: as an introvert a few close relationships is all i need, i already have a strong group of friends from undergrad, sometimes sacrifices must be made, this will cause the pattern of durham to repeat ) – choosing my dissertation and most essay topics (intuition: something feels off (i stray from medieval into contemporary; logic: but this colour fascinates me, i will be able to string these fractured jumbled feelings into complex theories (something I only pulled off once before), this fragmentation is a sign of inherent intellectual complexity).
I could fill pages and pages with other petty decisions where my logic went against my intuition and resulted in gnawing, endless stores of dissatisfaction (choosing too complicated of a bullet journal theme, choosing the wrong blush colour, choosing bad quality tights) but we need not bore you or me any longer. These big decisions set me up for my slow and untidy unravelling. Perhaps they began even earlier, at the end of my third year in Durham, when I tried to turn in a writing piece that intuitively felt wrong but I thought I could fix it through extensive editing and rewriting. Reflecting on this makes me realise that perhaps this crippling indecision was also caused by university; there, we’re constantly taught to ignore emotions and feelings and think about things in a complex, logical, analytical way. Seeing things complexly has always been incredibly important to me, but now I think that I let myself drown in it. Yes, everything is inherently, unimaginably complex, but if you constantly dwell on it down to every little detail of complexity, you will cease to move forward.
That is perhaps what has happened to me in the past few months. I am getting carried by life. For the first time in years, I let myself stop making decisions and let life decide for me. Where to go after my lease ends? A friend needs someone to stay with, so I’ll stay with her. And after? The only place I had (and so generously) as an option. And when I realise that place is carved into a corner of hell’s craggy landscape? Move out. In my exhaustion that followed a depression-filled, dissertation-filled, love-filled summer, I subconsciously reduced my free will to staying motionless until forced to make the only possible decision that remained.
While this sounds like an inherently bad thing, I think for me it was necessary to help awaken my intuition. Though my intuition is still groggy and continues to nap most of the time, it’s been calling to me a bit more frequently lately, and I’m finally starting to have the sense to listen.
I suppose it began to awaken in July, when I truly met him. Something felt so easy, so comfortable, so familiar yet so otherworldly and heady and intoxicating. He pushed something back into place within me, and my intuition began to shake off her furry coat which after her hibernation had become covered with thick layers of paralyzing ice. My depression this summer stemmed from an identity crisis caused by the loss of my old self—not her death, but simply that I could not find her, and I now know and can accept that I will never find her again. But with him, my soul or core or whatever one will call that tiny unchanging part of oneself began to speak again. Though she too had changed, I felt many of her choices to be familiar and right, and this was comforting. Reviving this part of myself to connect with his equivalent drastically decreased my indecision which had stemmed so fundamentally from suffocating myself with logic and inherently flawed choices.
In this above metaphor I described my ‘soul’ and my intuition as different creatures. But as I’m writing this, I realise that they are the same. When my intuition speaks, it speaks with my ‘soul’ inherently inside her. What is intuition if not some semblance of a true self reaching out and making itself known?
These days, I continue to let life carry me. The forces of the Visa have rendered me impotent, and I see little point in wearing myself out in a futile struggle against invisible beasts. Yet my intuition awakens more and more each day. Sometimes she even stays around for a few hours instead of a few minutes. I felt her most clearly recently when I was roped into going to an EDM club. Never had my intuition been so utterly confounded by the choices I had made to end up in a stone-lined cellar, standing in a silent, swaying circle beneath flashing red lights as a base line masquerading as music pounded into my ears and suffocated my throat. [yes, my intentions to please were there and for that i have no regrets, but you must understand the disjunction of self this caused]
When big decisions arise, I have subconsciously started listening to my intuition once more. When I was offered a job in a tiny Scottish village, my logic said to take it, as it would provide stability, money, and career furtherment. Yet my intuition awoke and roared against accepting a role which had felt off from the application to the interview to its aftermath. I could not ignore her. Turning down that role felt like a harsh slap in the face for the logical self I had built up this year, but such pain was necessary to decrease her power and feed more strength into my intuition.
This post has unravelled more in the form of a journal entry than an exercise in good writing. But these thoughts need this medium for the sake of permanency, so when I mindlessly look over my blog in the ruminations of quiet depression, this post will remind me to reconsider the narratives in my head. I will end with one last loop of reflection.
As mentioned, I saw this past year or year and a half as a decline. Every decision and its repercussions dismantled another layer of myself until I had fallen down the dark hole of identity crisis, a type of crisis I had never experience up to this point. Since I waded into the ocean this July, one of my secret goals had been to find myself once more. This year was a mistake that needed to be rewritten, unwound, reframed into positivity or erased from memory altogether. My old self was gone and that was an inherently bad thing.
But just yesterday I realised something so startlingly simple that I was startled I hadn’t considered it before. There is no way to write such a realisation without any traces of cheesiness, but I realised that I had to accept that I had changed, that I was ‘growing up’, that I was never that perfect version of myself in my final teen years and that there was no point in continuing to long to go back to that self. I thought at that point in my life I had achieved a special, idealistic, and optimistic wisdom that seemed beyond my peers and beyond what I had seen of adulthood, but various circumstances broke that idealism into crippling pessimism.
Instead of clawing my way back towards that seemingly profound state, I need to accept what I always have needed to accept, the inevitability of change that affects everything from the most fundamental parts of the earth to the seemingly unchangeable core of myself. I can still listen to this core, this intuition, this soul, even if it changes. Because I find myself changing doesn’t mean I have completely lost my old self or soul, it means that it too has changed, however subtly and over however much time, and I have to recognise its new form.
The conclusions of these jumbled thoughts still seem jumbled. But now when I look into the reflecting pools and decisions float like bubbles to the surface, I will know that though I have changed, I can still tap into my intuition, and above all, that I should tap into my intuition. In a world where research into every life choice can become literally (or as close to literally as possible) endless thanks to the internet, listening to your intuition is the only way to step out of the haze of decision fatigue and the pursuit of perfection. Both wrong and seemingly wrong choices will always happen—they are inevitable, as I must, must accept—but listening to your intuition will help lessen past regrets, lessen present indecisive struggles, and lessen pessimism for a future in which you never learn that logic so often fails.
My intuition still has a long way to go in waking up, but the end of my university career and the (hopeful) lessening of my logical self seem the perfect time to continue to gently awaken her, awaiting the day when her eyes glow once more with hope and idealism, the same core traits but now coloured with new, time-given shades.
the rambling medievalist 