The Truth will set you free (but not until it's done with you)

I've been reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace since June.

After a few false starts, losing one copy of the book (while talking elder off his ledge on the train), re-watching The End of the Tour a few times, I hit page 400 sometime yesterday.

In some ways, it is, for me, an easy read.  He writes and thinks like me. I laugh out loud with recognition at amusing turns of phrase, people I can actually SEE and HEAR (and, I know these people. I've lived with them.) When he's in full-bore expository pyrotechnics, I'm in awe. But the flashing and banging isn't what's getting to me. It's the quieter, more melodic passages that follow the ebb and flow of someone wrestling the demon depression that are playing hell with me. There is an equal, unsettling amount of recognition.  Isn't that what true art is supposed to do?  Move you and piss you off, sometimes at the same time?

Check.

This isn't  a leisure read so much as a post graduate independent study that also serves as therapy in the absence of having a licensed professional talk to me about what I'm feeling and why I'm feeling it.

Instead, it's like I'm wielding a box cutter, and I'm performing emergency amputations on those parts of my psyche that are damaging the functional parts that are left. Which would be fine if cutting away the gangrene solved the problem and brought relief outright. But, predictably, I'm still bleeding, and I still need to function, but at the same time, I desperately need to heal.

And this damn book bandages one moment and rips off another mask (and part of me) the next.

But I need to finish this work because I will never have peace if I don't.

I'm thinking of Dave and his dogs. I'm thinking of Shadow, the rescue that was not ours, but who I desperately wanted to be ours.  Maybe I need that dog more than G.  I love the bird, but he's not a dog (although he's trying hard to be).

I'm thinking about the fact that even though I am doing what I need to do and how I need to do it that I will still be judged and stuck in a slot I ceased to fit in a long time ago. And I'm crying about that, don't know why, and feel somewhat ridiculous about it. I need to be done with it, but the past is not done with me.

The title of this blog showed up on page 389.

I spent a long time on this page.

I need to keep going.

But I need to take a moment and grieve, too.

Only, I can't stay here with the grief. I need to leave it behind and keep going.

I wish it would stop following me.