A peripatetic list of words I've looked up #8.

dissemble — hide one’s true motives, feelings, or beliefs

I believe I looked this up because I found it in a book of short stories called The Coast of Good Intentions, which I read when doing research for my first (failed) round of MFA applications. After putting in apps to some twelve places, I went about trying to read a book by a teacher at each of the schools to which I had applied, and this was by Michael Byers, who taught at the University of Michigan. The Coast of Good Intentions was a book that got a lot of worshipful reviews, and while I admired its technique when I read it, it seemed to fall into a category of books that I am liable to label, broadly, boring: humorless, essentially plotless “literary” fiction.

Dissemblance has come to comprise a larger and larger portion of my life since that time. As I said, I failed on that first round of MFA applications, which is how I ended up on the academic track from which I fled, as detailed in previous posts. At the same time, I was experiencing a soul-crushing breakup, and the whole thing left me feeling a little evaporated — like I’d once been a pond, but was now something more on the order of a puddle. I’m afraid that my depression about one thing contributed to the dissolution of the other, when then led to the broader depression about everything.

Ever since, I have found it necessary to keep my obsessions a little more to myself, or at least to try to keep them coded. To go about telling everybody about how unhappy and pissed off you are only increases your isolation, because people don’t like to be around unhappy and pissed off people. It’s not so much dishonesty as a survival tactic, and one I think most people understood more instinctually than I did.

The one real problem with it is that you end up living in a bizarre, through-the-looking-glass world of your own emotions and unbreakable thought cycles, and it can be easy to lose touch with reality. Existing so entirely under the surface of yourself can lead to you believe that there is almost nothing but under-the-surface to the world, and that nothing anybody ever says is quite what they actually mean, and that can throw a person into a panic of uncertainty and fear. I’ve been doing that again lately, after a couple years of being fairly happy and unworried about things, and it’s beginning to take its toll. One can live in a hermetically sealed world of self-destruction, if one isn’t careful.

Well, that got out of hand, didn’t it?