Skipping The Semester

This summer was the most difficult of my life. I was reeling from my first semester back in school since 2018. Unlike 2018 and every prior year, I actually tried talking to people this time, and the results were disastrous. I had dug myself into a very bad reputation owing to a complete lack of self-respect, social incompetence, and a level of desperation so terrible I likely gave people second-hand embarrassment merely from looking at me.

Eckhart Tolle gives us the concept of the pain-body, an accumulation of emotional pain due to trauma and suffering. This pain-body, as it worsens, possesses a person and leads him to act in ways that are illogical and chaotic, without regard for the world around him or even himself. It is comparable to the idea of a caged and abused animal. If that animal has sat in its cage for years, suffering, then when one day someone comes to help it, it will snap back at him violently. It may refuse any food he offers out of sheer mistrust and terror.

This same phenomenon takes place within a human, though it manifests itself in a higher form. My first experience with a pain-body (though I was not aware of it) was back in community college. A man came up to me demanding that I listen to some music he had created. I at the time was a timid person who still feared the bullying and mockery still fresh in my mind from middle and high school. I could not refuse him because I felt something dangerous about him. I listened to his music and complimented it despite not really caring for it. I wished very badly that he would just leave me alone. His eyes were intense, and his posture embodied that animalistic terror you would expect from someone who has been caged and suffering his whole life.

At one point during the prior semester, I expect that I looked like that man to certain people. In my heart, I never had any bad intentions toward anyone. My greatest wish was always for people to like me. After I had received feedback that people were afraid of me, I left them alone. That feedback—in the form of concerned stares—imprinted itself onto my psyche. Initially, I did not think of them much. I was still possessed by the pain-body, I just had the situational awareness to know that any further action might get me into trouble. I altered my behavior to ensure that I would not offend anyone again, though I was still a pathetic wretch that would run around begging for attention and affection from people who found me repulsive.

After the semester ended, the pain-body possessed me for a while longer. I wandered the streets of Boston, begging, until at last the mental exhaustion brought me to the point of surrender. Now the pain-body was stronger owing to the chaos I had whipped up in and out of school, and the trauma that came with it. Furthermore, the only thing that this pain-body could direct its malice toward now was the sole living being in its vicinity, myself.

I spent the whole summer deluged by anger and regret. People’s faces haunted me every second. I screamed and cried in pain. I begged God to end my life because of how terribly I felt I had treated people. I was still chained to my desires, but now I also felt how shameful it is to be dragged along by them. The level of self-resentment ground my ego down into dust. I was no longer a person but a nearly empty husk.

There was still something within me though. A little hope. An idealistic vision. It told me to hold it together and lose the weight. And so I kept moving forward, one day after the next, until the last day when I would finally face judgment.

I purchased a new set of clothes since my old ones no longer fit. The first day of school came and I went eagerly. I immediately realized that I could not look anyone in the face. Everything moved so quickly. I saw one person who I wanted to apologize to. I hoped this apology would solve everything. I had been emulating the conversation for weeks prior, growing more nervous leading up to it. He greeted me politely though I felt he did not like me. I apologized immediately and was clearly freaking out while doing so. He seemed surprised and told me that I had to apologize to another person directly, and then he was gone.

It was at that moment that I realized what I had become. A new semester at university had begun, and people poured into the buildings bright-eyed and cheerful. A real sense of optimism and hope filled the air. Then there was this sad wretch walking around. Terror shades his face and he bows his head in misery and guilt. Was I going to be the person that ruins the semester for everyone around? Was I going to be the person who attracts looks of concern and pity? Was I going to be the person who sits alone, studies alone, and suffers alone for the whole semester? This is not what life was meant to be.

My mind twisted itself into a mess and I couldn’t pay attention in any of my classes. I went a second day but there was no use, I had passed the metaphorical event horizon and was prepared to jettison my entire existence rather than commit this aesthetic sin. I went home that day in tears. My body lurched with an effort even though I felt a sickly lightness about me. I talked to no one but my brother, whom I told I would drop out and go to New York. I walked into the nearby cemetery and wandered, screaming at God to kill me or do something for me.

The next day I woke up early and walked to the cemetery intending to kill myself. The location I had picked had a car parked nearby, which caused me to stop and think. That car left, then a little later two more cars showed up. Why here of all places? The rock face I sat on had flies and wasps buzzing about. They distracted me from my thoughts. There was broken glass all over which I picked up and threw to break into smaller pieces. As I tired and lay down, the hot sun baked my soul to a crisp. Everything was perfectly orchestrated to stop me from killing myself. Then the thought came to me that the method I chose might not even work. I might permanently damage myself and then there was truly no hope of ever living a good life. Then I would have no choice but to suffer.

And so I stepped back and went home. My father was waiting for me while speaking with my concerned mother. That day, September 4th, 2025, I resolved to take back my life from the clutches of that pain-body. I set before myself the goal that I would become the best person I could possibly become over the next five months. I vowed never to act selfishly again. Now the pain-body that possessed me for so long was fully in my sight. It no longer had a grip on my mental state. It was now nothing more than a dull physical pain, always present though fading even as I type this.

Nietzsche tells us that we ought to make every moment of our lives worthy of the infinite. Depending on the person and their desires, this idea may seem difficult to wrestle into the stoic framework that we ought to be happy without externals, but I think it is only deceptively difficult. If I were to say that my time in college would be far more worthy of the infinite if I had a girlfriend at my side, with all the emotional drama and social intrigue that it would entail, and I failed to find one, then I would have failed to live up to Nietzsche’s maxim. Perhaps I would be sad if one girl or another rejected me, but only for the moment.

I would look back at the past year of my life, at all the suffering and all the work that I endured, and I would see that I had finally earned my humanity, and I would remember that there’s a whole world outside of this school, and a whole life that has yet to be lived, and now I was finally ready to live it.