1

I am a hikkikomori.

I know that there are cultural implications of that that don’t exactly fit me. I am not obsessed with anime. I play video games a lot, but not to the extent that hikkikomori would imply. But I am like a cenobite, in that I have not left the house in months. It might have even been a year. I despise going out of the house. I feel trapped. I feel like I am very far from safety, and if I have to suffer, then there is nowhere to go.

And there are many varieties of things that bother me and make me want to retreat. A big one is boring, stupid, or inane conversation. Whenever such a conversation takes place around me, and especially when I am a part of such conversation, I feel anxious and doomed. That is what it feels like to me: I feel an overwhelming sense of not only death or suffering or pain. Doom. Catastrophic, fateful doom. Total metaphysical collapse.

I don’t like noise. I don’t like the loud, boisterous conversation of other people. It makes me feel like they are talking about me. I was bullied in high school, and I was never able to get over that. Occasionally, I can get over this, but if I could avoid it, I would prefer it.

I use a 10,000 Lux lamp to simulate the sun and take Vitamin D supplements. A monk-like life would be perfect for me, if it weren’t for the prohibitions against lascivious behavior and thoughts, against frivolous entertainment. Against touching myself.

“Augustus? Brother Augustus, what are you doing in there? We have formed a queue out here. Brother Joshua needs to take a holy dump. You better not be abusing yourself!”

That’s what the rector at my own Benedictine school called it. During confession, we had to tell him if we abused ourselves. The idea is God made our bodies for a certain purpose, and we were not “using it correctly” if we were using our reproductive parts to amuse ourselves.

God is not only the epitome but the very fons et origo of Order. Thus, it makes no sense that He in His Wisdom would ever design the human body in such a disordered way that masturbation is possible, pleasurable, and harmless (in some cases beneficial) while also being a sin. I reject that. And I’m not necessarily a Christian, and much less Catholic, but my spirituality is definitely rooted in that Abrahamic tradition. If only because that’s what I’ve been surrounded by all my life.

Ten years ago, a few years after graduating college, I certainly had ambitions (delusions?) of becoming something of a monk. My idea was to study from home through an Internet-based research university and spend my time writing papers on philosophy and social science. During this time I did not know that I was suffering from the delusions of grandeur typical of bipolar disorder. My life had not yet gone long enough or me to discover that there was a very insidious pattern.

2

It became clearer when, later, I met a psychiatrist. I was put under observation for ADHD as well as bipolar disorder. And it took a few years but it turned out that these things were the case. The thing about not detecting these things until later in life is, at that point, my habits, my life, my decisions have already been affected by the conditions for much of my life. I cannot expect to take medications, wait a bit until they take effect, and have my life be fixed. Sadly, it simply does not work that way. The medication and the therapy allow a new start, but it is a start from behind. That doesn’t mean the challenge is insurmountable, but there will be times where it seems so.

Around this time I learned how to drive and exercised my freedom. I went to parties, gallery openings, all sorts of events. I met all kinds of people. We spoke about all sorts of things. And I realized that none of that was for me. I was only barely, barely entertained most of the time. And forget about being enlightened. Forget having any sort of insight about anything. I had no contempt for them. But there was nothing. I felt nothing. Except for very, very few times.

I remember this one time: I met the girlfriend of the poet boy I had always loved. I speak about him often, so we should have a name for him: Rex. Yes, while yearning for him, he did have a girlfriend. I didn’t do anything that would constitute a betrayal of their trust, so that didn’t bother me and don’t think it was wrong. At some point, they broke up, and that girl—let’s call her Tilly—and I met at a gallery opening one night.

It is in the nature of these sorts of things for me to think that she was a vicious bitch. Not because that’s how she actually was. I actually didn’t know anything about her, apart from what she looked like, her general attitude, and a few stories that I’ve heard about her. At that point, I knew that she dressed very well, she spoke French, and that she was into the arts & letters, just like most of the people around me. And of course I also knew that Rex loved her. He referred to her sometimes as his wife. Above all, of course, this is what I hated most about her.

But that evening I met her, we greeted each other, and she was so pleasant that I invited her to have dinner with me and the friend I had there with me. We ate one of the best restaurants in Metro Manila that happened to be beside that particular gallery.

Over the course of that dinner I realized why Rex loved her. She was an amazing woman. Very well humored, not at all arrogant. She was intelligent, funny, well-spoken, and knowledgeable. I was so wrong and sorry for being so willingly cruel. That was a pivotal moment in my life. I truly felt so stupid to think that someone was a bad person simply because I was envious.

If anything, it seemed like I was the piece of shit all along.

3

In the house I am mostly on my computer. I work at home, and when I am done working I play. For many months my friends have been trying to get me out of the house, especially on my birthday. My parents have given up on this. They mostly leave me alone, although my mother was very upset that on my birthday all I wanted was to stay in the house.

In the Philippines there is no stigma associated to staying with your parents. In fact, the American stigma regarding that confused me a lot as a kid. In the Philippines you were expected to stay at home, even while married, if you were the youngest, so that you could stay with your parents. Putting an elderly person in a home is a grave moral failure in Filipino society. They are only ever put in homes if all their immediately family has somehow died.

So, there is not much pressure that makes me want to move out, although my parents have told me that, if I wanted, they could relocate me to some apartment somewhere. We have a family business where I do my fair share of the work (and own a part of that company), so they could simply cut my rent out of share of the profits every quarter. And I truly wouldn’t mind living alone. The problem is I do not want to leave my elderly parents alone in this house. Although they are still very strong, I also know that the digital age is becoming very confusing for older people, especially older people like them who had to work very early in their lives, and so never got much of an education. My parents are not exceptionally smart people. And many times I have had to personally intervene because they were in the middle of getting scammed—my mother frequently tries to buy things she finds on Facebook, many sellers from which are scammers, and my father is the frequent target of crypto scams, especially during the pandemic.

I want to stay put. I want to stay here. I still want the company of other people, but online I could speak to them and hang out with them while doing something else. And if they are boring, I leave, and I can move on. But in a restaurant or something I am trapped. And I have to pretend that I am interested, and I have to contribute somehow, and when I leave I have to sit in the car until I arrive home.

4

During the Medieval Times monks were warned about a very specific cardinal sin called acedia. We translate these nowadays as sloth, and we interpret it as laziness. But that’s not really what acedia is. That’s not what it was originally, and that’s not what the core of what that designated sin is supposed to be.

Acedia is not sloth of the body, physical laziness, but a kind of lethargy of the soul and the faith. It is a spiritual laziness. It is a deep sorrow that turns one away from the light of the truth. It is more akin to boredom than indolence. Monks were especially susceptible to this because they remained in their cloisters all day, mostly, and lived repetitive lives.

Today, I think we would recognize acedia as anxiety and depression. They were supposed to cure this with prayer, with virtue, with faith. I don’t know how effective that was. It probably did not work. But it was considered a sin because it was seen as the result of a moral failure and was capable of destroying a person’s soul. It didn’t make much sense, of course, because it wasn’t a person’s fault that they felt a certain kind of way about their situation, but that’s how premodern people saw things. Which is also why they thought information obtained through torture was viable evidence (although it might shock people to discover how infrequent this was actually done).

I am guilty of this cardinal sin. Very guilty. And while they were obviously wrong about whose fault it was, Medieval people were definitely right about how destructive it is.

The cure is love. Love that recognizes the immense beauty of Creation. That invigorates the soul to realize that there is purpose, there is meaning to be found out there, if one only seeks it, and that this seeking is a worthwhile endeavor. When I am in love I do feel the acedia lifting. And it can be difficult for me, with my limitations, but I look towards the future with a measure of hope. And this hope disperses just enough of the darkness for me to not be totally consumed by it.

For now.