My loop breaking experiment will solely focus on to stop reading books on my i-pad until 3 AM. or 4 AM in the morning. I have been stuck in this loop for past four years where I am so addicted to reading which resulted in sleep deprivation, procrastination, high dose of caffeine consumption and lastly stress.
I have stopped reading 7 to 8 books in a week to now reading 2 to 3 books in a week. I have taken upon doing yoga and Zumba to take my mind of reading excessively. I have committed more hours on my internship for Autism and volunteering to campaign for John Liu in the general election this past couple of weeks.
“The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace
The character in this story is a nameless depressed person and the tone of the story is introduced in the introduction: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” The character finds herself buried so profoundly under her own pity and anxiety that nothing that happens to her can have any significance aside from with regards to her illness. She is stuck to this social loops of depression where she understands that she has fundamentally lost the ability to feel for or even have any sort of companionship with other people because she drowning in her own misery. After her own therapist died from suicide, she becomes an emotional mess of her own, She has anguishing sentiments galore since the death of her therapist. These emotions had all the earmarks of being all and just for herself is portrayed throughout the story. She is Hollow inside and she understands it.
‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin
This short story revolves around a young man named Sonny who was a drug addict and has been arrested for selling and using heroin. He has been introduced by the nameless narrator, also the estranged brother of sonny. The Older brother finds himself in this social loops of where he disapproves his brother Sonny’s drug use and dream to be a jazz musician. Rather than helping sonny during critical times, by accepting the reality and attempting to help, he pushed him away and turned his back on him. He constantly denied himself of a relationship with his brother by being away but reconciled after his daughter died. Furthermore, The narrator in some ways has gotten away from the haziness of his youth by landing a respectable position as a teacher and beginning a family, he understands that his kids and the kids in the neighborhood are confronting all similar difficulties he and his brother confronted. The narrator was able to break away from this loop when he started to feel something unique with Sonny and he detects the feeling in his brother’s music He is at long last prepared to acknowledge Sonny for the jazz musician that he is.
