Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

This blankness is one of the scariest things to me. I don’t enjoy having time that’s been unaccounted for because it immediately makes me feel like I should be doing something with it, and then I can’t think of anything that I could possibly be doing that would be worthwhile enough to live up to the raw potential of any amount of available

In the same way that sadness is always there, I find the idea of work, and working, comforting. It feels like I can leave everything else behind, but as long as I am with myself, I can always work, I can always do something with my time. It is something I can always turn to.

I’ve found that acknowledging good things as Really Happening usually sends me into deep spirals of doubt and anxiety and so I’ve learned to float through most good things without acknowledging that they’re real or happening at all.

“But what about joy? Can you make joy necessary?” I pause, then say, “Well, I guess I feel a little relief from building up the guilt and then absolving it by getting things done.” When I reach for an approach that incorporates joy, this is the closest I’ve come.

The most productive years of my life so far have also been my loneliest. I don’t know if the loneliness was a requisite for this, but I also don’t have any productive years where I haven’t been lonely to compare this to. Even knowing that “most productive” should not be the goal of my years to begin with,

with, I have still learned to be more comfortable with being isolated than with being unproductive.

When I am not able to work—when I am out with friends, or having a conversation with someone, or traveling, or buying groceries, or doing the laundry, or eating—I get this itchy, hollow longing that doesn’t go away until I am in front of my work again. If I were talking about a person, I suppose that mi...

And I am bothered by the fact that my feeling peace requires an external trigger, and worse, that the external trigger required is work.

“Don’t worry about everything else. This is what’s important. Trust me.” And I enjoy believing it. It is a soothing lie.

fear that I have learned to look forward to burning myself out like this, to love this numbed exhaustion, because it is the closest thing I can get to some form of rest.

Feeling lonely is for people who have arrived somewhere, I tell myself, not for people still on the way there. Escape

We cannot seem to escape the desire to feel productive with our time. I’m not sure if that’s by choice or by trauma, that this pressure to produce has been so engrained in us that our deepest fantasies are still tied to some idea of working on something.

Perhaps after a life of working to no end with no promised outcomes, what we think we want more than anything is to escape into this fantasy that something reliable will happen when we put our time into it. Plant a crop, tend to it, and something will grow.

Within this anxiety, every moment feels like spinning a roulette wheel. Am I: stressed, terrified, exhausted, EXCITED!, worried, worrying, INSPIRED!, stressed, upset, sad, overcome with guilt over letting people down, overcome with guilt for not working enough, EXCITED AGAIN!, worrying, exhausted, exhausted, exhausted?

Everything turned out fine; all I needed to do was live under constant and overwhelming stress and pressure forever