Apathy

A Chapter by Annabelle

“I don’t care,” rings my heart’s anthem, lacking life and enthusiasm.

Why don’t I care? I’m not sure. It’s not that I want to die, it’s just that I don’t care about living. So if a car were to jump lanes and strike me dead, well, so be it. It’s not like I was doing anything worthwhile anyway, it seems to me.

For some reason, I have been measuring myself by the number and quality of tasks I have accomplished lately. I measure myself by the amount of monetary value I add to our family’s bank account, and since that equals nothing right now, I feel incredibly useless. Then I turn to tasks and even just the spending of quality time with my family as my “contribution,” but that fails to satisfy as well. I always find myself, at the end of the day, thinking the amount of time was not accompanied by sufficient quality, or I think of the rooms that still need to be cleaned despite having done a load of dishes, laundry and vacuuming. I think of the things left undone to the exclusion of what I have accomplished, and thus find no sense of worth in my activities.

Then I turn to writing: maybe writing enough words will give me the satisfaction of accomplishment. I can usually finish a short work, whether a blog post, a poem, or a scene in my novel within a day’s time and be certain that the work is complete. But this does not attain my goal either. I still feel aimless, pointless, and worthless.

Seeing all of this, I realize that maybe the problem is not that I don’t care but that I have become defeated and hopeless, and thus I pretend even in my own heart that these things don’t matter. Perhaps it is not lack of feeling, this apathy, but the overwhelming nature of many feelings that causes me to feel numb. Have you ever noticed how you will put pressure on a throbbing finger that was slammed in a door? This is because the added pressure overloads the nerves in your finger to the point at which they cannot feel anything. I think the pressure of many emotions has caused my heart to feel numb and cold, moved by nothing because in reality it feels moved by anything, even the smallest of things.

How does one such as me overcome such a thing in her life?

Just as the throbbing in a finger diminishes with time to the point at which pressure is no longer necessary, it seems that the stress of many emotions should subside with time and allow me to really feel individual, specific responses within me again. I wonder about that. Will the feelings within me settle down eventually? Or will they, like overlaying waves, lap at my sanity forever? Will the consistent dripping of unfeeling eventually become like the sense of gouging in Chinese water torture?

I might be like this forever. I cannot wait for inspiration to lift me, for motivation to propel me or for clarity to guide me. I have to step out in faith and use my mind to know and pursue what is worthwhile.

A crowd once asked Jesus: “‘What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?’ ²⁹Jesus answered and said to them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in Him Whom He has sent.’” Worthwhile work, then, is to believe: to believe and to abide. Out of that will flow actions that are worthwhile, creating responses that are worthwhile, feeding friendships and activities that are worthwhile.