Decline and Fall

It has been quite a long time since I have posted anything. The fact is, I haven't felt up to it. Those final months in Iraq were more taxing, mentally and otherwise, than I could have expected. I simply did not have any thoughts that I deemed worth sharing. I thought, and wrote, that my diminished posting quality and frequency was due to a lack of intellectual stimulation, but as I have since discovered, it had less to do with that than with a sort of emotional distancing from everything and everyone that matters to me, to include my own sense of self. I was, and most likely still am, angry and depressed.

I know this sounds like a whiny, selfish, prozac nation excuse for what could have been chalked up to simple writer's block and staying too busy to keep up with my blogging, but it's the truth. The Iraq War, surprise surprise, is really hard on people, and its effects are felt in many ways. In the past five months or so I have removed myself from any real engagement with the world around me. My realization, open-eyed from the beginning, that the war I chose to involve myself in was immensely destructive and morally despicable took its toll in the form of ennui and biting cynicism. I noticed that I had grown more callous toward other people when I found myself sneering at everyone, particularly my friends and coworkers, for even the slightest breach of my standards of conduct.

At least I noticed before I left, which allowed me to warn my girlfriend a couple of weeks before my departure that I was a changed man, and not for the better. It's a good thing that I did, because even despite holding my tongue when I knew I was about to say something cruel to her, she observed that my usual joking was noticeably more caustic, and the light had gone out of my eyes. It's a testament to her that she recognized it as a symptom of my loss of compassion in the face of gross inhumanity and remained the caring person she has ever been.

I left Iraq on March 7, and have only in the last few days begun to feel a bit more like myself. In the intervening weeks, I have visited the Carribean coast south of Cancun, spent about a week and a half seeing friends in Arizona, and have now spent four days in Luxor visiting temples and learning, the hard way, how to haggle. The time in Mexico and Arizona was a time of emotional disengagement and relationship difficulty, but I've grown more at peace since coming to Egypt. I start classes in Cairo tomorrow.

I am finally back in a proper headspace to renew my blogging, and I am sure Cairo will provide many opportunities to do so. Also, I no longer feel the need to keep myself out of the blog, now that I no longer work for the Masters of War. So there will be more of me in the future, although hopefully not this sort of thing.

Labels: personal