This Is It
This is it. This is who you are going to be. You’re done. You’re not changing. You’re not getting any better. You’re you. This is it.
You’re going to be alone forever. This past weekend proves that. You spent the entirety of last weekend alone and that’s not going to change. Last weekend is going to be the rest of your life and you’re a fucking idiot if you think anything else. And don’t be a fucking idiot.
It’s useless to try things. It’s pointless to meet people. Because you’re always going to come back to this place because, like I said before, you’re not going to change. You can’t be around people and you are much more comfortable being on your own and although this loneliness gets to a level that is physically uncomfortable, it’s the way that it is. You are who you are. Stop trying to fight it. Stop trying to become what you are not. You’re you. You’re miserable.
You can see stories unfold before you and they look like those trails that were in Donnie Darko. (Don’t worry if you haven’t seen Donnie Darko. That’s not important.) You see the trails of the happy people around you and they have one thing in common: they were happy as children, too. You weren’t a happy child. You weren’t a sad child. You were. You still are.
Seeing happy people makes you realize how very not happy you are. And for the briefest of moments you audition the idea of becoming a happy person. “What would that be like?” But that’s a fools errand because the only people who are happy were happy as children, and you were not happy as a child, so you certainly wouldn’t be happy right now. Because that’s not how the world works.
Because you know how the world works. It runs on a certain type of math not taught in classrooms. This math says that there is only a certain amount of everything. Food. Water. Oxygen. Meaning.
A while back you made peace with the idea that you might not ever be happy. All the happiness had already been sucked up, and you weren’t quick enough to grab the few morsels that got dropped every once in a while. You told yourself that that was okay as long as you could find this thing called meaning. And so you went looking for it. But it too had all been snatched up. You were so frustrated that you stopped looking. You settled on nothing. Because nothing is the one thing that is infinite in the great math equation of the universe. Or so you believed for a while. Until you discovered the other thing in infinite supply: comfort.
And so you lived in comfortable nothingness. And that was okay because there were plenty of people around you living the exact same way. Going to the grocery store. Picking the kids up from soccer. Dying of bladder cancer.
You don’t know if they thought about changing at one point in their lives. And there’s no way that you could ask all of them. You imagine that some of them probably felt like you did way back in the day when you thought change was possible. And then their hopes were dashed. Hopefully those hopes were dashed sooner than later.
You look around in your old age and you see young people. And you wish them well in their quest for change and personal growth. But you’re not holding your breath for them either. Most of them won’t make it so it’s not worth even hoping. Most of them will end up like you. And that’s okay.
“I’m going to change. I’m going to be happy,” they say. You want to scream at them.
“You’re you! This is it! And that’s okay!” But you don’t. You just smile and nod.
Nobody likes difficult conversations.
