I used to believe that there would come a time in life when I would look back at the collection of days I’ve stayed alive in this world and I’d think, “Ok, finally - this is all now worthwhile. The juice is officially worth the squeeze.”
I kept waiting for that ‘rubicon’ moment when it would finally feel like the great payoff for continuing the banal business of living would begin paying dividends.
I kept waiting for graduation from Cruel School. I envisioned waking up one day, doing the math on my good days cancelled out by my bad, and finally realizing that there’s more good here. In the pool of my lived days, the creme had finally surfaced.
It always seemed just barely out of reach. With enough faith, maybe, I could snag it though, and at last I’d arrive at a place where it was an incontrovertible fact: being alive has totally been ‘worth it’. This is, after all, the promise of the seasoned trope, ‘it gets better’.
The rhetoric goes something like, “How will you know how good tomorrow might be if you aren’t here to experience it?”
However…the somber realization is now hitting me: maybe the day may never come when there is a majority of good days in this life.
I’m 46 now. It’s pretty clear now that there are more sunsets behind me than there are in front of me. And when I take stock of how much of my life has been lived in joy…in gratitude…in appreciation, love, opportunity, abundance…the figure is pathetically small in comparison to the interminable sea of despair I’ve been navigating with only infrequent, happenstance buoys of relief dotting the landscape. Admittedly, and not proudly, I swallow hard the fact that my lived experience has been a majority spate of despondence, psycheache, and melancholy.
It’s infuriating. And just when the fog lifts (and it does), I’m reminded by some faceless source of certainty that my respite from suffering is transient, so I had better not get used to it.
You see, the problem with feeling better is that feeling like shit again is always around the corner. Not only does this acknowledgement rob you of any present joy you might have during those flashes of positivity, but there’s also no good argument against it.
…because no one stays up forever. Especially not one of ‘us’ - the maligned depressives blighted by persistent malaise and misfortune.
What an embarrassing curse. How crushingly perverse this burden has been, and is, and how painful the misunderstanding that assaults us every day of our lives.
Fuck this endless war.
For us, our default state is the agonizing, contemptuous one - irreconcilably so. For us, feeling out of place, sad, unloved, ashamed, displaced, abandoned, forgotten, purposeless, and listless is emotional home. This is where we return from our occasional jaunts into faraway lands where there’s sunshine and levity. Our centers are dark, bleak, and unforgiving, despite any attempts we might have made to rearrange the furniture or replace the peeling, outdated wallpaper.
The rats still gnaw at the baseboards. The joists and rafters still heave under the weight of the skewed, sagging structure. We are trapped in ‘fixer uppers’ with no one even half-interested in picking up a hammer and going to work (least of all ourselves).
Lord knows we’ve tried.
It’s not that we like it here. Don’t you dare accuse us of that. We don’t want this. But we’ve tried so hard so many times to ‘just feel better’ and failed that the return to our museums of morosity are the only choice we have.
At least…at the very least…they’re familiar. There is that.
And so, when given the choice between trying again to be happy, this being perhaps the 500th time (who knows), we should be forgiven for not expecting much in the way of sustainable results.
I cry inside for all of us who live here. If you are one of us, know that your suffering is just, even if the circumstances that put you here are not.
Amidst the unfairness of this experience, there is a kernel of understanding that we hurt for a reason we are never privileged enough to know.
When that kernel dies, the last vestiges of our spirits die, too. And when that happens, all hope is truly lost.
I wish it were not the case that we are cursed to die slow deaths that no one understands and everyone wants to be as far, far away from as possible.
But please.
Go on thinking ‘life is good’ and that we just need Jesus.
