Do you
ever wake up happy?
Every morning, you struggle to
muster the motivation to lift your head from the pillow. You sigh and you drag
your feet around your cold, lonely little flat with no purpose or desire to
seize the day. You dread work not because your job is stressful or you hate
your colleagues, but because you feel like spending ten hours outside of the
house every day is somehow holding you back from devoting necessary time to following
your dream. What is that dream, you wonder? Who the fuck knows anymore? Fame,
money, love… something like that.
You feel like maybe there’s
potential for greatness within you, but you don’t quite know whether it will ever
reveal itself. There’s a talent for something lying in wait within you, a real
uniqueness that could one day propel you into the world you’ve always dreamed
of inhabiting, but what it is is a mystery to you. You try to create, to be creative, but you hate all the
stories you write and you don’t have the confidence to act anymore. Long ago,
you slipped into a pattern of spending most of your day at work and coming home
to watch pornography and write mediocre, unentertaining stories about yourself
in the third – or worse, the second –
person, and you can’t get out of it now. Everything you write sounds like
something your heroes would scoff at when you read it back to yourself. If they
ever wasted their time reading it.
You’re not sure anymore whether you
hate yourself or you’re just being eaten alive by self-pity. You’re certain you
don’t hate everyone else as much as you try to convince yourself you do, or
else you wouldn’t be so desperate all the time to impress them, or to take back
the bad things you’ve done. You wouldn’t cringe thrice daily, each time
remembering some long-passed story about a teenage sexual encounter or a
relationship regret. So often, you ask yourself if the world would be a better
place if you weren’t in it; then you wonder if anyone gives enough of a shit
about the things you’ve done to wish you’d never existed. Probably not. So why
are you pondering it?
More times than you can remember,
you’ve promised yourself that you’ll change. You’ll somehow become overnight
that guy that everyone turns to for a good, honest laugh or a wise, insightful
byte of advice, and you’ll stop pushing everyone away with your lack of empathy
or your mixed emotional messages. You’ll become the type of man you only see in
films or in books and never in real life – a real hero. But you never have
become that man, and until you do, you plan just to continue to make mistakes
and then let regret eat away at you after each one.
Too often, you wish you were back
with that one girlfriend who you ruined it with all that time ago. You’ve had
girlfriends since her and you have options now, you’re sure you do, but all you
want is her. But then, if you really think about it, you can’t even stand the
idea of ever seeing her again. If you hated her then, can you imagine how much
you’d hate her now? Fuck. She must be a nightmare these days. You need to get a
new girlfriend – someone sweet, and kind, and beautiful, and caring. The
problem being, of course, that sweet, kind, beautiful, caring girls have better
options than a miserable old man trapped in a twenty-odd-year-old’s body. And
besides, where do you expect to meet these women when all your time is spent at
work, commuting or on the Internet? Twitter isn’t going to help you, it’s full
of angry feminists and retarded pro-lifers. The Internet is a swamp that the
scum of the earth fly around and all the losers like you sink into.
At least the paranoia is dying down.
You can console yourself with the revelation that you can make it all the way
to work these days without thinking some stranger is going to kill you. Most
days. You wonder, is this how everyone feels? Is this how we were built? Were
we designed to be permanently punishing ourselves in our heads? Forever
self-loathing? So many of us seem to do it. It’s an epidemic. Maybe, you often
think, it’s the case that mental illness has such stigma attached to it because
it’s everyone’s best kept secret, and we’re all terrified that it will get out.
It’s certain that on this one aspect of your life, you don’t feel alone.
Everyone is at least a little fucked up, you know it; because without it, we’re
just not human.
But
still, you feel alone. Like everyone else, you are lonely. It wouldn’t surprise
you to find that the whole world was a creation of your mind to stop you going
insane, and nor would it surprise you to find that you were a creation of
someone else’s mind. You feel like everyone is together in being completely
separate. You long for the touch of someone whose love is unconditional and
everlasting, but you’re not even sure that exists. Who has time for romance,
these days? Who has the energy to kid themselves so?
Above
all this, in so many spare moments, the deepest of all your thoughts, is a
voice that repeats itself over and over and over. It’s a voice that you know
chants its mantra in everybody’s heads, and only a brave few have fully
embraced. It’s a voice whose philosophy you preach, but don’t practice. But you
have always wished you could. It whispers, again and again:
Get the fuck over it. Live your fucking
life.
