Despair

Despair is a negative feeling. But you know mortality. You have to go through positive and negative feelings. Sometimes positive times and negative times. 

I don't like having this feeling of despair. Of hopelessness. But I know why it's necessary: because without it--I don't know. I mean, really, just from a neutral state hope feels hopeful and joy feels joyful. Do we really need these negative emotions to truly understand what Joy is? 

At any rate, sometimes while feeling this, I think to myself that I should just relish in it, or like, really be aware of my feelings. What does it feel like to feel despair? What does it feel like to feel hopeless? Because hopefully those feelings will not come back again. Hopefully I won't feel these feelings again and this will be the only time that I can really experience what it's like to be hopeless in the face of overwhelming odds. 

No, it's not a good feeling. But it's part of The human experience. This deep aching in my chest like there's a giant hole, a giant pit there and this emptiness inside. I'm documenting this so that in the future I can look back and I can say yeah, I remember that. I remember when I felt despair, felt that nobody was ever going to hire me because of a brief lapse of judgment. The brief second of losing my temper and punching a wall, and that's all that anybody's ever going to look at now. They don't care that I have a master's degree. They don't care how good I am at explaining concepts. All they care about, all they can see, is that one mistake and it's going to follow me for the rest of my life. No matter how far in the past it becomes, no matter how many other good things that I've done, that's all anybody's going to look at. 

And that that's what fills me with hopelessness. That's what fills me with despair. The fact that I know that I can be better--that I am already better, but then nobody's going to give me a chance. It's a terrible feeling, feeling it right now, and I'm recording it for posterity's sake, for my own future's sake. So later I can look back and take pity on my past self which is my current self.

You know the film October Sky? There's a part where the character Jake Gyllenhaal plays is forced to stop doing what he loves doing and is passionate about. He has to give up his dreams of space. And there's this one scene where he steps into the coal mine lift and it starts descending and he looks up and sees the satellite passing overhead as he descends into the depths of the earth. And he knows his dreams are over. Crushed. Destroyed. For the rest of his life. And he's forced to do something he hates just to make a living. Anyway, that's what I feel like when I think about giving up teaching.

My family is supporting me, which is good, because if they weren't--I don't know what I'd do. Starve, probably. I feel like I have it worse than Jake Gyllenhaal's character, because he didn't have anyone to support but himself, and I have a wife and four kids.

I've made dumb mistakes and now I feel nothing but despair.