I've just started reading The Sickness Unto Death for the second time. Surpisingly I find my old markings in the text somewhat helpful . . . but that's not what I want to write about. No, reading Kierkegaard again--especially this book, which I just happened to pick blindly out of the boxes of book in my trunk--has made me face myself. This is something I have been avoiding for quite some time. Kiekegaard talks about the self being a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, and this is what lends to the possibility of despair. The language seems a little anasthetic, but the way he writes makes one personalize the concepts and ideas. Despair is the misrelation to oneself--what I take as the attempt to deny or run from the infinite portion of oneself, which I guess is both running from oneself and running from God. I can point a finger to a number of choices in my life that I continue to make (or not make) that lead to my despair--a very real tension that I am unable (although I try my damndest) to push away out of my consciousness. Many excuses come to mind, but Kiekegaard is quick to say that despair is always something that one brings upon oneself. And I find myself in my own freedom, choosing despair, wallowing in it even. Not as if I'm a depressed person, because I'm not. No, Despair is something more eternal (I was meaning to write internal, but my finger went to the e--perhaps a holy mistake). Huuuuuuuh (big sigh) I don't know. I don't fucking know.