As I wait for the digital clock on my stove to read 11:26 A.M., a brittle wave of that icy sensation is enveloping my chest cavity. I only scrubbed my body in the shower this morning and left my hair for tomorrow, something about doing it today bored me. This is the third day in a row I've woken up and cursed my brain within 30 seconds of waking up. Outside a gray sky seeps through the glass door. I can feel how humid it is, even while inside though at the same time not actually feeling it. A twelve hour shift awaits me, driving back and forth between the hospital and the most recent victims of body tragedy. I don’t feel like helping today.
	Never a day passes where the weight of my self hatred isn’t pushing down on the back of my neck and head with deserved unbearable weight. But today I feel like Atlas. I don’t even want to think about and consider why it’s especially bad today, yet that lack of desire is precisely what’s making it so bad today. Has the lack of desire grown through the years? I don’t have the desire to find out. My current preferred kicks of self expression are just to escape the awful thoughts I feel towards myself, which is done by writing about them to an excessive and obnoxious degree. This month it’s this, next month it will be that. The people who I will never meet yet inspire me to the core will be inevitably switched with someone new, and I forget everyone’s name and face after a month has passed since they’ve been replaced. Does this futile chase for validation even qualify as being of artistic integrity? Just because these thoughts are coming from my head and no one else's? It sure doesn’t feel like it. All I know is disgusting ego stroking and contempt for what makes myself a human. Now here comes the part where I shoehorn in an awkward quote to prove to myself that I’ve read something others haven’t. This feeling of exclusivity gives me some sense of worth, but it’s canceled about the bile coming up out of my stomach, so it’s best to avoid thinking about all the things in this world that give me that feeling. It’s 11:29 A.M. now. This comes as a joy to me so that I have something a little fresh to hate myself over on the way to work.
	I accomplish a decent amount at work today, which means I’m free to think all night about what a good person I am. In the morning this feeling will fade and I can try to achieve this again at work tomorrow. I listen to music I haven’t heard yet as I cook dinner. Tonight it’s an obscure 2000’s abstract hip hop album as I sauté spinach that I will have trouble finishing. I can’t focus on the lyrics because the only thing on my mind is how people can become so self aware and talk about their self awareness until they loop back into becoming completely oblivious of themselves. I don’t need to pay attention to the lyrics anyways; all that matters is I listened to the whole album and enjoyed and appreciated its artistic prowess. It feels like I’m getting better at this, what a relief that is. The second thing on my mind is how good I feel about myself for barely looking at my phone today. The conditioning my brain has suffered at the hands of this dopamine feeding box of light is a prison, and I’m making real progress on weaning myself from this conditioning. Once the process is complete I will undoubtedly be a better person on the whole compared to how I was a year ago. I will have more to offer to myself and the people around me, which is beneficial to everyone.
	As I swallow my dinner my thoughts linger on today’s list of people that I had an itch to catch up but didn’t get around to doing so with. People in high school, the ones I call my closest friends, and a girl in one of my spring courses who I fantasized about marrying almost everyday for many months. I felt deep love and care for these people in my prime times with them, but now I don’t think of them very much anymore. That’s supposed to be a bad thing, right? I’m always told the worst part of human relationships is when you lose the desire to continue said relationship with someone; that seems to make sense to me. I think about the powerful emotions I used to feel for these people on a frequent basis, their absence fills me with dread. It makes me want to cherish the powerful relationships I have yet to form with people I have yet to meet.
	Before going to bed I read fifty pages of a book that I can’t stop congratulating myself on having read this much of. But now I’m tired and can only think of how much of myself that I blame on my self diagnosed ADD fills me with the all too familiar feeling of inadequacy. But now I have grown tired of that and have to sleep. Maybe in the morning I’ll be refilled with enough drive to focus these dark thoughts into ideas for personal creative projects that I will forget about once I get off work. As my mind drifts into sleep the last thing I think about before I start the thoughts that transition into dreams is how jealous I am of people that have realized their potentials and created what they were always capable of creating, only to still die cold and alone but coupled with a sense of satisfaction from realizing said potential.