Impaled By Icy Rain
This is an old post I wrote with a previous account on the site (back in 2024). I am posting it because I think it has stood the test of time, especially as I still feel melancholic at times.
I leave my place, and am immediately greeted by rain.
Unlike the droplets in a tropical climate that seem to blow off steam, rain here seems to be like cold needles grazing the skin, never really piercing it.
I try to exhale through my mouth and see if my breath will come out as fog. My hands are in my coat, the thick sleeves of which—along with two layers of clothing—insulate my arm from the pinpricks. My face’s numbness is betrayed by my awareness of warmth—within the pockets of my coat, within the breath turning into fog, within my shoes.
It’s an increasingly common situation when I walk to my class. I also dislike the fact that daylight savings time has ended, especially since now is the time that one would appreciate an extra hour of sunlight. It’s cold and dark too early. Yet, as much as I have the tendency to complain about clouds or sun or whatever, last week I found myself—numb face and all—exclaiming aloud in a pretentious and sarcastic manner,
“It’s so good to be alive!”
November 22nd marks the first day I’ve seen specks of snow. It looked like two or three bits of paper strewn across the sky.
I know that my jeans aren’t adequate against the cold1, but there’s something that tempts me to goad the weather anyways. My blood’s still warm, so it doesn’t matter if my face seems to approach numbness.
After all, if I was cold, I wouldn’t feel cold.
Indeed, when someone’s core temperature drops to a critical level, such as in the case of severe hypothermia, they begin to feel warmer. The phenomenon is known as paradoxical undressing, where someone whose core temperature is dropping will remove their clothing due to feeling warm. Blood vessels dilate to bring the life-saving liquid to the extremities, and one stops shivering as their temperature-regulating mechanisms shut down.
It’s a similar phenomenon when someone drinks alcohol; they feel warmer because of vasodilation, but there’s heat loss occurring as a result—hence why this is not a good survival strategy.
Conversely, people feel cold when they have a fever. I’ve always enjoyed sleeping when I had a fever (especially when the thermometer read 101ºF!), but my mother wasn’t enthusiastic about that at all. Even as I felt cold, my mother would be adamant about cooling down the fever.
Why?
“There was a case a few years ago, where a girl went to sleep while she had a 118ºF fever, and her brain effectively melted2.”
Yet, I felt so cold.
Well, there I was in the rain, feeling cold again. The air around me was, but I wasn’t. After all, my beating heart and the warm blood it pumped were my talismans.
Much like coldness is the negative image of warmth, melancholy is the negative image of sanguinity, and I’ve found myself experiencing the former state of mind on numerous occasions—it’s always in these moments that everyone appears to be the happiest they could ever be.
As Eddie Vedder put it in Pearl Jam’s most overrated song3, “Black”:
I take a walk outside I’m surrounded by Some kids at play I can feel their laughter So why do I sear
In May, I spent the last day of classes in a familiar corner, wondering if I really was a burden to my friends (one of them was a bit peeved at me because I couldn’t assertively ask a teacher to let us borrow a practice room; never mind that we weren’t allowed). Perhaps they weren’t really friends at all, but people I let into my life so as to distract myself from solitude. In turn, perhaps they tolerated me due to my anodyne affability.
Right outside the railing, I could see people celebrating the last day of senior year. There were stalls and pop music, and it was a reminder of how happy the world around me was. If I wasn’t downhearted, the exuberance would’ve stood out to me a lot less.
The corner was as isolated as I felt, with there being a branch that seemed like it wanted me to hold its hand. There were birds chirping, and although I didn’t understand them, there was a burgeoning realization that I wasn’t completely alone. Later, I started talking to myself out loud to act as if I was in a real conversation, which likely made a lot of peers think I was insane.
With most people, I’d initiate every conversation with a timid “are you busy?”, and then frantically stab the air with my inchoate words, a “sorry” punctuating almost every sentence. Yet, much like punching the moon’s reflection on the water doesn’t get rid of it, I couldn’t eradicate my awareness of all my shortcomings, no matter how many times I was trying to kill the silence. I was an ineffectual midwit with some vaguely contrarian leanings who could be described as “nice”.
Well, it’s a kind of angst that I’m now more adept at facing and articulating.
Much like the icy rain made me realize that I felt cold due to being warm, it was epiphanic in understanding that I felt lonely due to being inclined towards meaningful human relationships, and I felt stupid due to being inclined towards intelligence and erudition—I still have a working compass, albeit one that I can work towards attuning to the appreciable.
We traverse, chained to ourselves, but I suspect that home lies somewhere else.
In its own way, perhaps life is about finding or creating talismans to remain tethered to oneself amidst pain4—something which unmoors us from the chains, enabling one to find a home in the form of the first principles or meaning that they’ve ascribed. There is something immediate about negative emotion that strips away the obsolete ways through which one relates themselves to themselves or the world, drawing one to themselves.
I’m not religious per se, but I think true self-actualization has an under-appreciated semblance of divinity. While I’m not completely sure how to articulate it, I think we spend most of our time remaining dormant in thought patterns that keep us in autopilot. That’s why it’s so easy to blithely support a side in a war and LARP as geopolitical pragmatists, and why it’s typically when someone sees a dead child and are overcome with emotion that they can truly consider the ramifications of a war. Negative emotion demands attention, while positive emotion incentivizes the status quo.
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society … Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”
—Ted Kacyznski, “Industrial Society and its Future”
Tolerate. Take the Soma drug in Brave New World, for instance—the result was hedonic bliss. Unhappiness forces the individual to reckon with something, and why would a society that relies on an uncritical populace want that?
I won’t pretend to be completely above to the ever-present somnambulist society, as it’s difficult to be completely cognizant of one’s place in the world at all times. I try, though, and to that end, the icy rain isn’t pleasant, but it forces me to pay attention to the simple fact of being alive. The high school corner saw me improve my guitar skills as well as weep silently, but it forced me to pay attention to the simple fact of being an individual. It’s true that some are better at individuating themselves in this manner, without the pain of isolation; to share a somewhat air-brushed initial draft on terraria-like people:
The people I’ve always envied and failed to emulate are like terraria; they have self-contained worlds, requiring little interaction with whatever is outside, as they comprise the ingredients for their growth and self-actualisation—sure, at times, all plants need to photosynthesize, but that process can occur behind glass walls. The windows to the soul remain closed.
The most compelling people around me were like this. That’s why, even when I was well aware of the subpar and unequal nature of my friendships, I’d still think of them with much longing.
I was mistaken at the time of writing that. How was I to know whether shunning away any prospect of vulnerability made it likely that they closed themselves off from genuine first principles to live by? Self-actualization requires a compass as well, so how much of it can occur if it’s calibrated by Lady Macbeth, rendering it a faulty talisman amidst a rarely-encountered kind of pain?
I didn’t. In fact, I hadn’t seen their moments of weakness, because everyone carves out a corner for themselves. After trial and error, they’ll remember to carry umbrellas in the rain, and you find yourself wondering why they have one and you don’t. Well, it’s always there. You just need to find it in your house, and that might require you to organize it a bit in the process, throw out the trash or anything that’s unnecessary.
Till then, the rain’s just something to live with. Whatever the case, I find myself believing that it’s worth letting the rain impale comfort, to let the soul be built again. Let the sadness come again.
Of course, anyone living in Seattle might disagree and tell me to shut up.
I understand that painting myself as some David against Goliath-like cold is a bit disingenuous when the weather’s only gotten down to 4ºC, but there’s some kind of joy within the juxtaposition between the external landscape and the homeostasis going on.
From my layman’s knowledge, extremely high temperatures are well beyond the comfortable range for a lot of important enzymes to function.
Why Go and Jeremy are likely the best songs off of Ten.
Obviously, there are examples of pain that are objectively awful. Search it up at your own discretion, the case of Junko Furuta is filled with some of the most harrowing details possible.
What I’m referring to is personal sentiments. Most of my melancholy isn’t due to objectively terrible tragedy, so the solution really is to just tough it out.
Beautiful writing!