Mind-bogglingly Alive

It's something you are taught to understand is the way things should and must be.

Because things carry on as they do.

And adults are meant to work, not dream.

And children are meant to study hard enough that they can work hard enough that they can have enough money to feel... Enough.

Dreaming is for when you're asleep.

Some subconscious fluke.

A thing your brain does to keep you occupied.

And real life is... Real life.

Why risk it?

Dreams are fake, adulting is real, you have to be enough to make it.

You have to work hard enough.

You have to say the right things.

Make friends with the right people for connections.

Be polite to your family no matter how shitbaggy they are.

And you have to suppress yourself.

Oh darling, you know you do.

Don't be ridiculous...

I mean, look at your grandmother.

She was married to your grandfather when she was a teenager...

Fourteen, fifteen or so.

She fit, though.

Did as she was told.

Had his kids, had your father who had you!

Look how brilliantly things turned out!

And your mother?

She could've studied French.

She could've met some foreign romantic who swept her off her feet or lived in France or sipped white wine next to the Eiffel Tower on the weekends.

But her father told her to study law.

And she did.

And now... There's you.

A child born of people who tried not to bridge out too hard.

And look where it got them.

They... Fit, don't they?

Don't they seem happy enough?

Not fully because what is joy but a candle flickering in the wind but

Something.

Something.

I agreed for a while.

I thought that life was something you ought to live for other people.

No one ever told me otherwise.

Because you tell yourself it will eventually be okay.

You say it again and again and before you know it, you're older.

And you're tired of it all.

But you are alive because you are alive and every other little reason you've picked up along the way.

And you remind yourself why you did things the way you did.

So you could get a steady, proper job.

For your husband.

For your children.

For anybody but yourself.

And for a while, you think, you are happy.

I've seen so many versions of this tale.

Over and over and over, performed on a stage covered in rock and air on a ball spinning through an endless void of pretty balls of light.

And I really did think I could pull it all off when I was younger.

But I grew up.

And I found I wasn't exactly the wife and mother and lawyer type.

The home cooking, perfectly neat and tidy, constantly smiling, sociable, Christian daughter.

The more I knew myself, the more I drifted from what I'd been taught to be.

The more terrifying it became to exist.

How dare I, right?

And yet.

There were many moments leading up to it, I suppose.

But one day, it finally did dawn on me.

It wasn't because of the day I - oops! - split my head against concrete, thought myself near-death and pondered the emptiness of my existence.

It wasn't because of the years of soul-breaking depression tugging me towards the end.

Not even the embarrassing, uncontrollable spasms I began to get from all the suppression I'd done.

They helped, though.

But it was death that finally reminded me

Of what it truly meant to be alive.

Momento mori.

My mother would tell you that one shouldn't think about something so dark and morbid and painful.

It seemed more release than sadness to me.

But perhaps the worst part about human suffering is it's the pain and numb we want death go cure.

The pain and the numb.

The pain...

It was a shitty time to be alive for me.

I guess a lot of my life has been that way.

But I figured...

If I'm going to keep myself here on this random spinny ball, shuffling about in my short antlike existence

I might as well...

Not hate it as much?

And now.

Well.

The proof is everywhere.

A lot more self-compassion.

Self-reflection that I try not to shame myself for.

Healed arms, my beloved.

Food in my stomach, a clean body, a desire to stick around longer

If only for the chance to hear the next albums of my favourite musicians and look at the art that is the sky as it shifts day by day for only me.

Something to do, I guess, while I patiently await the end.

There will always be things to do.

And as terrifying as it might be

To be the thing my family would fear so much in the world,

To exist or feel love in a way that they'd see as eternal damnation..

As difficult as it's been to pull some Lucifers here and there?

I'm freer than I ever was.

And that's...

And here I am still.

Mind-bogglingly alive.