Thursday, July 19, 2012

All day

All day long I read about people who are good at things. They just find what they are good at and pursue it and life just opens up its arms and allows them.

I am not good at anything. Just okay at some things. But none of those things is anything anyone wants.

All day long I read about people who are rewarded by life. It just showers its fruits on them. I read Jim Carrey saying "people think fame and money will resolve everything but they don't", and I think, try me. It's easy to say that success doesn't resolve anything when you're successful. I'd rather be failing to resolve anything with a million in the bank than be stuck on welfare, being punished for someone else's theory of how the economy works, humiliated, broke and broken.

I know my life has some rewards but in many ways it is so poor. I don't just mean I lack money. I am always lonely, and the lonelier I get the more I shun people. I start believing it's all me, no one wants to know me and why should they? I am not worth anything.

Some days I just want to close the world out, to close my eyes and pretend I am back home, that all I have to do is open my eyes and walk out of the door and this will not be real.

But I am in hell. I am responsible. I sent myself here. I believed love and a desire to do the right thing were enough. But I was wrong. I wasn't worth loving and no one else in my life has any interest in doing the right thing.

It is hard to live when no one in it, bar perhaps your children, cares whether you are happy, or if they do, they only care about how your feelings affect them.

Some Christians say that God does not send you to hell; you send yourself. I believe that too. I don't believe it is the absence of God; it is the absence of hope. I try to remind myself of the Myth of Sisyphus, that you can accept a horrible fate and defy it with a smile.

Then I think, yeah, that's okay for Camus to say from his study in Bordeaux. Try living it.

Some days I think why am I bothering? Why am I pushing a stone up a hill when I know I will be crushed? Why bother with a life that thinks you have no value? Yet again, the only answer I have is that the right thing for my children is to try to live and live cheerfully. Yet again I cannot make a choice for myself. That, right there, that is hell.

3 Comments:

At 8:30 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"All day long I read about people who are good at things. They just find what they are good at and pursue it and life just opens up its arms and allows them."

1) It doesn't happen overnight. It's like you said..."they pursue it." Sometimes for years and years. It's a lucky few who have things showered on them.

2) You know what you're good at. You do. Just because one person in this whole world wasn't moved "enough" by what you're good at...well, you know my thoughts on that.

3) PURSUE IT.

A

 
At 8:33 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

P.S. It's not as though you don't have the time for the pursuit at the moment...

A (who can't decide whether to hug or shake the life out of you)

 
At 12:39 am, Anonymous Chris.tine said...

People love me, but not, perhaps, in the way I want to be loved, in the as much as your mother did only with sexual desire way.

I'm not convinced that's such a great thing for a grown-up, having or even aspiring to that kind of love, but what do I know?

We see what we look for. I look for the surprising and excellent small things ordinary people do around me, and by George, I see them often. So that feeds me. And it's enough for me.

But then, my expectations were always low.

My fate seems to be to be alone. Almost everyone I know is lonely, including the firmly coupled. I'm pretty sure it's not the best fate--I work best by bouncing things off of and building on and connecting things in the company of others. Without that, I don't exactly thrive.

But neither is it a terrible fate. I endure and find some delight every day, refusing hell.

I hope your heart lifts.

 

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