I had every intention of writing about politics. I had every intention to write, to you, the reader of my work. But I can’t. Not this time. It is now my intention to write to myself, and maybe you can find yourself in the words I write.

Ever since I have left college, I have felt lost. I don’t have any responsibilities anymore. I have nothing that is stimulating me intellectually. I don’t leave the house because my friends are in other states, doing other things, living out other dreams.

I’ve thought about picking up a lot of jobs for the experience, for the money and for the possible contacts. But I don’t think that it is my true desire. I think it is just me trying to find a way to occupy the emptiness that I am surrounded by.

I spend my days looking at my computer or phone screen. I get aggravated. I hate looking at these things. I feel sick afterwards. I feel like I am rotting from the inside. What am I to do?

I spent money on a gym membership, and I have yet to go. I feel dispassionate about karate—one of my favorite hobbies. I feel dispassionate about traveling—one of my biggest dreams. I just feel… dispassionate.

I am shutting myself off from the world, distancing myself from people. I’m not as happy as I once was. I am still very optimistic, but just not happy. I feel myself getting irritated and annoyed and angered so much more easily. I don’t talk to my friends as much. I make up excuses to not visit them. I make up excuses for myself. I am becoming a hermit—a physical one that doesn’t leave the house and a cyber one. I no longer reach out to talk to people anymore.

What happened? Am I this way just because I’ve graduated? Am I this way because life keeps throwing me obstacles that I constantly have to get around? Am I this way because I am seeing a dear friendship of mine fall to pieces? Am I the only one that is going through this? Is this normal?

I feel so stuck. I am desperate to pull myself out of this hole, but I have no motivation to do so. I feel like I am in a constant, “¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” It is my personal hell. Plateauing is not my favorite activity. I like to excel. I like to better myself. I like to self-improve. But I feel like I am disintegrating, losing myself. The self that I have so carefully created.

Though I yearn to do things, I can’t find it in myself to begin. There’s the saying that goes like, “The hardest part of anything is starting,” and I haven’t found so much truth in a statement before. I feel like I am watching my world spin around me, melt around me, and there is nothing I can do. I don’t know what to do.

This is all so weird, if you think about it. I just graduated! I’m young. I can do anything. Actually ANYTHING, and here I am on my porch, in a rocking chair, sitting next to a burning citronella candle that is warding off mosquitoes. Since I have the world at my fingertips, why do I feel so incredibly distant from it?

Hope and faith. These two things have been ingrained into my personality since my inception. They are very bittersweet traits. As much as I have sat and wallowed these past couple of days…I know deep, deep, deep down inside that things will work out in the end. I know that a day will come where I pull my own self out of this well of despair, kick myself in the butt and tell myself to get over it—it is myself, my own thoughts and my own issues. That day can be tomorrow. It can be a week from now. It could be hours from now, really. But it will happen. But for now, I sit in a sludge of tar, waiting.