Another dull summer day. My friends and I will be going to one of our favorite restaurants, ABC Country Kitchen, later on this evening. But for now, everything is quiet.
Well, on the outside, anyhow. On the inside, I am increasingly bored, restless, and dissatisfied with my life. It is a feeling that has been building in me for a long time, but only recently have I stopped suppressing it and treating it like it is the enemy, the monster inside me, the terrible thing which makes me miserable from time to time.
Because it is not a terrible thing at all. It is simply life trying to happen. Being tired of doing nothing with your life is not a terrible thing, it is a good thing, a natural thing, a normal thing.
Sure, it makes things less comfortable for me and the way I live right now.
But one of the truths I am struggling to bear is that sometimes, in order to get to a place of greater happiness, you have to go through the desert of unhappiness. There may not be (in fact, there probably is not) a smooth upward path which is easy, safe, and fun.
You may have to surrender your current safe, comfortable position with no guarantee that you will get it back should you fail, and set out for the higher ground anyhow.
That is my spiritual challenge right now. I am conservative by nature, used to avoiding risk and using my clever mind to keep things the same all the time rather than upset the applecart with change, especially the kind of change that cannot be quantified or predicted. I have held to a very intense and strict policy of never starting on a road unless I know exactly how long it is and where it will end, which sounds smart in a way, but only superficially.
Think about it at any depth, and you realize that this sets an impossibly high bar of predictability for life, and the only way to meet that standard is to do practically nothing.
And that is precisely what I have been doing for almost twenty years, my entire adult life. I eat, I sleep, I play video games, I chat online, I write 1000 words of nonsense a day, and I go out with friends a few times a week. That is my entire life, and it is, frankly, pathetic.
It is, at best, a fragment of a life, the outline of a life, a life without the actual life part. A life, technically, of unlimited leisure, but that only sounds good if you a) are working right now and do not exactly love your job and b) you take the issue of resources off the table.
When you take into the fact that I have $8K/year to live on, unlimited leisure begins to seem like what it really is, more like a very low security prison, where you can go wherever you like but you cannot really do anything. Like you are slightly out of phase with reality, and can see and hear what normal people do, and even walk among them, but you cannot truly touch anything.
You are not really there.
And for what crime do you suffer this fate? Being broken. Unworthy. Disabled.
It is hard for even minimum wage workers to understand what it is like in this kind of lifestyle limbo. We human beings are born to find out place in society, to find a job and do it and from that, we derive our sense of worthiness, our sense of being good in society’s eyes. Even if you hate your job with the white hot passion of a thousand suns, you are still getting that feeling from having a job and doing it.
You just don’t know it, because it is the water you swim in, a constant, a background noise.
And to be blocked from all of that by an invisible disability like mental illness is particularly harsh. The wall between you and the rest of the world is made of clear, invisible glass that nobody can see but that you can feel all the time, making you forever the outsider.
You meet a person, and what is the first thing they want to know?
“So what do you do?”
And what do I say? “Nothing, because I am a crazy person. Wait, where are you going?”
At least these days, I can say I am a writer, and that I am as yet unpublished. As long as they do not think to ask how hard I am trying to get published, I am covered,
Because that is just the thing. I have not written anything publishable in ages. It has been even longer since I actually sent something out to someone. I just lead this stupid life and wait to die.
It is just so much easier to let the days go by than to stand up, straighten up, and actually do things. I am just so damn limp. I live a flaccid life, all brain and no spine, just flapping in the current and yet, stuck to my rock like a barnacle, doing nothing, going nowhere.
At least a leaf caught in the wind ends up someplace new. I just flail about and go nowhere.
That is why I am letting this discomfort with my current position grow and spread. I have to allow myself to become uncomfortable before I will get the strength to pull my roots from this rock and open myself to the flower of the river and see where I end up.
I just get so god damned tired of watching my life pass like I am not even here. Months go by like a dream. Am I really here? Or do I just imagine that I am? Is this all just some dream, and one day I will wake up and find out I am someone totally different?
Bring it on.