I have been dwelling on dissatisfaction with myself recently.
This is summer, a season I usually love, but I am beginning to hate it now because of this warm weather and my occasional inability to work in this heat.
The sky is shining, but I’m not outside most of the time, enjoying my life, meeting people and laughing. Instead, I’m writing and writing and rewriting again, and reading whenever I can, and… drinking and smoking more than usual, which is a clear sign of my stressful and a bit sad mood, even if it is not completely low. I did in fact slowly choose this situation throughout my Erasmus, in order to concentrate on intellectual work and clear my thoughts, and I can be quite thrilled to overcome many long-time difficulties that I faced before this semester in my personal commitment to philosophical thought: I am effectively beginning to see more and more clearly through all this shitty philosophy which I so much hate-love. But I ask myself now if sacrificing some ordinary enjoyment for intellectual satisfaction, to the point of worsening my well-being, is worth it?
I spent an entire week more reclusive than a monk could imagine, reading Heidegger to understand better why I disagree so strongly with him. There is no use in behaving the way I do and being consumed by these paper-made discussions, or more precisely by a Streit with an old dead “conservative” German philosopher, when I can talk in real life with living Germans of my age and jump into the Seepark lake, and enjoy the big world more than the big books. I cannot continue to have periods like that, lost in thought, barely eating and enduring the warm weather, sleeping three hours, and still pretend to talk and think about caring practices, and practicing care.
It sometimes seems that I lose myself in intellectual practices, neglecting other parts of my being, and then I end up lost in thought. I like my last two articles, for example, but it took me an extreme amount of time to find what exactly I needed to write. Despite this, I’m proud of them and I think I now have the formulations that I wanted after weeks of rethinking them. Still, the way I came to my conclusion sounds symptomatic of a much more theoretical and devouring abstraction-driven behavior than was needed, and that ultimately quite literally dries me out. Other parts of me are now asking if it is not a crippling attitude to become so obsessed with these posts (among other work I have to do) to the point that I become really perfectionist.
I don’t want to become a non-living thinker, nor a non-thinking living being. I prefer to indulge myself in these moments of philosophical meditation without sacrificing these meaningful potential moments with potential friends and acquaintances. I say, “I can stop thinking and begin to live”… but really, can I? Can I find an intellectual practice that is not just a mutilation of myself, and harmonize the way I live on a daily basis with my way of thinking about things? Because I see that I write and think about care and practices, but at the same time I don’t feel that I remain involved in caring practices for most of my days.
After the seminar this morning, I then decided to put my two feet in the Dreisam. Instantly, I felt better. How could I have forgotten to commit myself to this simple pleasure of feeling the water, so cold, flowing over the rocks and right up to my ankles? Even my own blood hadn’t flowed like that, for at night I could feel the heat making my extremities swell. I felt it was right and at the same time I was angry because I had neglected my own well-being so much. How was it possible? It is always the same thing: I can’t take care of myself. But am I sure? No! I did it pretty well throughout the semester overall, and it is also a fact that it is the first time that I have lived alone in a foreign country, that I have ADHD issues and so probably more difficulty recognizing my own state, then all the work and adaptation I went through, and the heat waves can explain it. We are not all equal when facing this injunction to “take care of ourselves”.
I don’t have to blame myself. Nor do I have to excuse myself too much. I can certainly do better, but this is definitely not something to moralize. It is something to think through in a concrete way: how can I learn not simply to practice “self-care”, but to care more generally, knowing that everything I learn for myself may also become useful in caring for others and, more broadly, in being truly present to them? In the previous articles, I argued that care is not a particular activity but a quality of practices. Standing by the Dreisam, my feet in the cold water, I suddenly realized that this idea could also help overcome the familiar distinction between “taking care of myself” and “taking care of others”. I have to admit that it is impossible to cultivate one while neglecting the other.