I am 33 and most mornings I wake up feeling at least twice as old. It feels as though I have lived and died multiple times and yet I still manage to wake to a bleak reality every day.
Like an unfunny, less ironic version of the movie Groundhogs Day but without Bill Murray. There’s just me, my past I seem stuck in and a future I don’t quite believe in.
Every day is the same. One is as torturously bland as the next and the thought of hurling myself off the nearest highway overpass just in order to feel something has crossed my mind more than once. Or maybe to feel nothing ever again.
I know, you’re not supposed to say things like that out loud. It’s impolite. Especially this close to the holidays. It makes other people feel weird.
And God forbid the depression that has haunted me most of my life was to make someone else uncomfortable for a few seconds.
The truth is, as little as I enjoy life, I’m not suicidal. But more out of bullheaded stubbornness, than being optimistic things will change.
What I mean is, it would be letting life, the world, and the people in it win. It’s throwing the towel in. I can take a loss, I’ve taken plenty. What I can’t do though, is forfeit or surrender. I’ve come too far and trudged through too much shit.
More than anything else in the entire world, what I’d want is for all the people who have judged, misunderstood, or criticized me to wake up and feel how I do. It’s the only way anyone could ever understand all of my mistakes, missteps, and bad choices I’ve made.
I’m not out for pity and I’m certainly not claiming my struggle is greater or of any more significance than anyone else’s — only that it’s different than yours and you couldn’t possibly comprehend mine and vice versa. This is why I don’t judge the decisions or mistakes another makes. Who am I to even say it was a mistake?
To have more friends dead than you do alive is a surreal feeling. Especially at my age. Because they didn’t pass peacefully in their sleep.
No, whether intentional or not — they were murdered or killed themselves. Some were taken out by freak accidents, a woman I once thought I loved died of a mysterious yet incurable disease last year.
I’ve accepted their deaths because there isn’t an alternative option. What I haven’t been able to do, however, is accept truly living life without them.
I haven’t figured out how. Sometimes I feel like a piece of me died with each of them and now all the best parts of me are now gone and buried.
All I know how to do is to wake up and keep fighting. To keep moving forward, even if I’m unsure of where I’m headed.
And as you may have guessed, I don’t. I don’t even have it in me to pretend I do anymore. Though I don’t ever seem to have much of it, I have to preserve every ounce of energy within me for just getting out of bed and doing my best impression of a human being.
I believe in the light at the end of the tunnel even though I can’t see it — and a man much wiser than me once told me that was called faith.
I just wish the tunnel wasn’t so long, dark, cold and lonely.😘