Friend visited me on Thursday and while it was fantastic and filled with funtimes and lots and lots of Dragon Age, it was only a temporary escape.  Now I'm back to reality (as usual) and staring at the pad of paper on my desk with some words scratched on it, most of which I have written before but still just haven't been able to internalize as "this is definitely what I am going to do."  I'm supposed to have concepts and definitions and assumptions by today, but my apathy and inability to focus on anything of substance have been blocking me from writing anything that I would even be able to pass off as "I tried."

When I have some good days with a friend, one would think that I would come out the other side feeling refreshed and ready to get back to work.  However, that doesn't seem to happen.  Instead, it is, as I said, a temporary escape.  I just return to my bleak reality where I care about little to nothing and longing for that comfort to come back to me.  The desire to run away, to just pick up anything that I find valuable and get out of here without any notice, has been getting stronger and stronger, to the point where I need to consciously tell myself not to do it.  That I sit in the car with the ignition on and wonder if today will be the day I leave for...somewhere.  Anywhere.  Anywhere that would make me feel some semblance of purpose again.  My mind works against me: it tells me that I must stay for x and y reasons, but also tells me that what I am doing (hell, what most people are doing) is completely useless and will never actually help anyone.  That I'm here in this limbo I will never get out of, and that my young desires of intellectual pursuit and helping others have backfired.  Instead of feeling more fulfilled, I seem to find that the more I learn, the emptier I feel.  When you choose to study the worst cesspools of humanity, I suppose that isn't too surprising.

I want to disappear.  I want to run away.  I want this void inside my mind and heart to cease existing.  Truly, I want something that will spark the love of learning and work that I had not too long ago.  It might seem otherwise now, because of my avoidance of work and things that would make me feel anxious.  But I've just been tired.  Once in a while I will have bursts of energy, where I feel like I can do things and get them all done and have a prospectus by the end of the summer, but those are usually short-lived and the space between those bursts has gotten continually longer.

Fictional worlds and characters have been my way to escape without actually disappearing, which is why I think I have clung to them more very recently than I have in some time.  I'm more interested in my Inquisitor's politics than in the politics of the real world.  I'm more interested in whether or not the writers of Supernatural will have the balls to follow-up on all the subtext concerning Dean and Castiel, thus adding to bisexual representation on television.  I'm more interested in analyzing characters from the Legend of Korra, and seeing how they are great examples of awesome ladies in fiction.

Somehow, I'm trying to fit this dependence on fictional worlds into my research, but I will probably be unsuccessful in that.  Despite what people say, my department does not seem very open to the idea of the analysis of fiction, even if you tie it in to the real world (my thinking that having awesome ladies in children's shows decreases implicit bias against women when those children are older, thus giving them more willingness to vote for them, etc., etc.).  Tying reality with fiction and vice-versa just...seems like it would be the best way for me to do something "relevant" while also not wanting to do something drastic to make myself feel like I have a purpose again.