Journal Theme: Loneliness and Isolation

From the journal of Madeline Sisson:

“I will, though, try to cure myself, she said (adding that it was like a drug addiction). If I keep on going this way, the house is going to fill up with my clothing before too long. And so she locked herself in the house for a week, and managed to keep away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. “

-Tony Takitani by Haruki Murakami

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My Sophomore year of highschool I was suffering with clinical depression and an abuse issue with prescription drugs. This time of my life was extremely difficult for me to live through, and I don’t like talking about this experience too much, but this passage from Tony Takitani really made me feel a connection with his wife.

I began abusing Hydrocodone, Oxycontin, and Adderall in November of 2014. I was in a deep state of depression and isolation from the outside world, including my family and friends, and prescription drugs are what made me feel a little bit of warmth and happiness inside for just a minute, but that made it worthwhile to me. One of the hardest things about this time of my life, was the ending of an eight year friendship with my then best friend, Sara. Sara didn’t understand what I was going through, and most importantly she was confounded by the fact that I didn’t want to talk about my issues with her. I tried to explain to her that what I was experiencing was like a glass wall, separating myself from the rest of the world, but she still just couldn’t understand, so as my depression and isolationism worsened so did our relationship. I never told Sara about my abuse of pills, and when she found out about it from a mutual friend, we had an argument in which she cried and I sat there not caring. In fact I felt nearly nothing towards her or the situation at hand, and at the end of the confrontation we were no longer friends. My absence of feelings and sympathy scared me so, I began seeing a therapist every week and she was able to help me overcome many symptoms of depression that I was experiencing at the time, such as drug abuse, and about a year later I felt completely normal again. Much like Tony’s wife I suffered through a deep period of loneliness caused by me isolating myself from the world around me. I was suffocated by the intense feelings of loneliness I had, just as she felt during that time of her life. I think that this is why Murakami’s work is so spectacular. Not only is he bringing up something that the Japanese culture chooses to ignore, but he is also writing about something very human and that everyone experiences at some point in their lifetime.

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