It takes pain, sometimes, to remind us who we are. It takes a shock, or maybe just the realization that whatever’s coming this time can’t be handled half-asleep.
It’s a painful reckoning, awakening. It always leaves you wondering where the time went, with strange memories acted out by a person not unlike you - but not wholly you.
Sometimes it hurts worse, because the last time was too much. Because you wanted to believe it was over, that your real life had begun, that things were getting good, that things were getting better.
One day, maybe that’ll even be true. Maybe your life will slip away in a soft murmur of gentle memories, of days without terrible strain or grief or heartache. Maybe that’s even your life right now.
I still can’t trace back exactly where it was when I decided I didn’t want that. If I’m honest, I still don’t know exactly why it’s true. I think maybe somewhere deep down I’m just stubborn and contrary. Lots of other people are going to have lives like that. Lots of other people are going to chase lives like that and have hardship forced on them anyway.
I think maybe when I was young, reading Nietzsche or Marcus Aurelius or some other asshole, I got it into my head that the only interesting choice was to be difficult.
And so my life has been defined by sacrifices, by moral stances taken without thought to the consequences and my struggle to survive those very consequences. It’s certainly been interesting, and ultimately I wouldn’t have kept going if it wasn’t rewarding.
I found comfort in strange places, I found lights out in the darkness. I found that I could live my life with different sets of rules, that we have a lot more choices than we think we do. That a lot - maybe too much - of our lives are defined by our fear of challenging those rules.
But I was young. I still am, in many ways. Some that I’ve had to fight to preserve past their ordinary time, but nevermind.
And whatever it was I wanted, who knows if I achieved it, or to what extent it’s possible to fully achieve - wisdom, strength, knowledge, power. But the one thing that I did achieve, undeniably, is that I made myself different.
I’ve made choices many people can’t relate to, I’ve lived my life in a way that is in so many ways the same but still fundamentally different from the experience of my peers.
I’ve made myself difficult to relate to, I’ve placed myself outside the circle of the tribe’s metaphorical fire’s light.
I’ve spent a long time alone, and while it takes effort that is something that can be rectified. Rejoining the group when you’ve been away… at first you stand out, at first you’re a stranger. But ultimately people want to welcome in willing others, want to widen the circle of their recognizable, familiar world.
But I’m not just alone, I’m strange. Fundamentally, in a way I chose and have continued to choose. Not, as I might joke, for only the sake of being different, but because that strangeness is where I feel at home.
And it’s hard. It’s always, I think, going to be hard, and I’m only just starting to realize what that means.
It’s easy, sometimes. When I’m distracted. It was easy for quite a while, I think I’d started to believe that I’d finally figured it all out.
But I don’t.
The hardest thing, the one I think has always haunted me, the root, the source, the cause…
Sometimes, you need something from outside yourself. Not something physical. Something emotional, and personal. People talk about it all the time, it’s not like it’s some big secret. It’s hard to say, exactly what the thing is; maybe it changes, maybe it’s just different for everyone, maybe it’s the same but we all see different sides of it.
And I know it’s not easy to get, even if you aren’t alone. I know that in some terrible, fundamental way, everyone’s got some permutation of the same problem I do. That no matter how close you are to the rest of the tribe, some piece of you is still so far away. I don’t really know how far away. I don’t know if it’s easier or harder or the same. That’s kind of the tragedy. The human condition, etcetra.
Sometimes I think the worst thing about being alone is really just how bad everyone thinks it is. How miserable you expect to be, or are expected to be. How when you start hurting, you think it’s because you’re alone, because you fucked up and they told you it would be like this. Truth is I have no idea if things would be any easier if I’d gone the other way. It’s a comforting thought, I think.
Doesn’t really change the nature of the problem, though. Doesn’t really change the fact that I’m missing something, that every now and then I’m struck with the feeling that something’s wrong, that my life is not supposed to be this way, that I can’t go on like this forever.
And that it’s something that isn’t inside me, it’s not something I can provide for myself. It’s something beyond and outside me. I am not enough, alone. I do not suffice. I am not complete.
The metaphor for the feeling, for the system of emotions, in physical terms would be that I am wounded. That something inside of me is not working, that my body is failing in some intrinsic, systematic way. And I can treat the symptoms, I can make adjustments to minimize the pain, it seems like I can keep limping along for the foreseeable future. But something is wrong, and I don’t know how to fix it.
And I’m saying this not in an attempt to be dramatic. I’m not depressed, I am vital and alive and active in the world. I am happy in many facets of my life.
But I’m afraid something’s wrong, and it’s not enough.
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