I love my life.I love being alive. That occurred to me yesterday as I was drinking coffee. It was startling: i don't remember loving my life or living too often. tbh my life is not that great or remarkable and i think lots of people would hate to wake up in this life. i built it up this way haphazardly, its like that crooked house from the storybooks ramshackle and tacked together and may fall apart at any minute but I love it still and the the thing is - it is not that this thought startled me bc I used to HATE my life. it wasn't that. i actually just hated being alive. i didn't want to BE. and i don't know if that is depression or just the ongoing existential crisis that started when i was about 6 or 8 when i became hyper aware that we all die. i think it was like - if we die what is the point of doing this and it just grew bigger and bigger and i tried lots of ways to kill that awareness or even embrace it but idk nothing worked. it was like when my stomach was about bleeding and the doctor says you should cut back on coffee and i just quit coffee bc if i could not have as many pots as i wanted i didnt want any. that's the thing with life... i am supposed to walk through admiring, loving, experiencing, every fragment every moment slices and scraps and then just LET THEM GO? no i wanted to hang on to everything to everyone one shove it all inside filling every cell and joint and space....hold on forever to my childhood bedroom paneling, my rock collection, the one teacher i liked, the paint chips from the old house i lived in in college, Jacob's hair in a ceramic owl, anthonys skin in a bottle, the letters, the dried paint. my grandmother's house.
But then what? take all the things that matter and put them together into some sort of acceptable-to -society-framework that will allow you to move toward a bank account and a home ownership? nothing i cared about was going to lead to that. And i didn't want to own anything except a dog and some dirt. not even very much dirt. somewhere to see the sunrise and not have to hear anyone else. I very quickly learned that this is not what most of the people around me, my peers, wanted to do so I could not even find a pattern to follow to survive the nightmare that the exterior world presented. that's the thing, i had demons maybe in my head and maybe i drank too much at some point and the nightmares and the series of nervous breakdowns where maybe your head would split open but all that seemed preferable to me than rows of McDonalds and Walmarts and tall financial buildings and meaningless chatter and sports and everyone naming their kid some combination of the same names and going to church a lot. the boring gray mundane irritating energy that radiated off these very typical tasks- that many people loved and called a life- shook and sickened me to my core. I didn't despise this culture really - or the people in it - i just knew i did not belong to it and i had to figure out how to exist adjacent to it and not die. clearly. bc i may have wanted to die a lot. but i knew i wouldn't. there was something i had to do even if i had to live through boring big box store terror and and an apocalypse.
So to look around at the culture i was in, that looked like a giant meat grinder to everything i loved, to the soul, with a conformity code that stamped you inside your bones - i had to hold on to everything that had any meaning to me, meaning that couldn't be commodified. things that spoke to my identity or soul or spirit or whatever it is in you that you know is you. that may actually not be you - it may just be the thing you have to let go of to know what you really are but whatever it is -from a very early age i knew it was SOMETHING that was greater than all the human constructed systems and physically built stuff around me. And i needed to feed it books or stars or sticks or the experience of watching a spider for 45 minutes.I fed it tears and screams and miles of running. I fed it sugar. i fed it a fast. I fed it working for hours to exhaustion and i fed it laying in bed for an entire day. It took forty years to realize that instead of feeding it maybe i needed to just let it go.
the thing is. i slowly somehow began to understand that just bc you let go, does not mean that it is gone. and that moving through it all with awareness is literally the best case scenario. we could sleepwalk ..always looking at some distant place or time like the proverbial carrot dangling....that seems more horrible to me that being curled up in a ball missing it all bc you have fallen into a dark hole inside yourself. but neither is going to change anything or open up the door to the sky.
Despite all the existential dread and obsessive compulsive behavior and anxiety i mean, i still had good time. that's the other thing. you can live deep in a state of not wanting to be alive and still do big hard things and fun things and love things and move to a new house and switch jobs and paint and volunteer and learn to identify snakes and stars and make a new friend and enjoy being alive while simultaneously NOT. this type of complexity is what makes me convinced that when physics people say how much we don't know about how the universe and stuff works i shudder. bc the complexity and literal contradiction of a single human beings mind observed in 2 minutes is staggering....and that mind was produced by all this space and carbon and whatever. a star exploded. my mind imploded. and here we are.
