“It’s going to be okay”, “calm down it will be fine”, “chill out the worst is over”. These comforting sentences are the ones that usually feel like a buttload of crap when people throw them at you. The only reason for that is that in those times you are unimaginably down, you’re in the deepest pits of your little world. So, they naturally seem useless and loads of crap. However, if you give yourself enough time to heal and digest, you’ll get them in time.
I am generally not the most positive person in the world. I tend to fall hard. I experience a wide range of emotions every minute of every day. Someone once told me that I’m a bit like an autistic person. Which sounds super creepy and to be honest profoundly mean. But he meant well. He tried to explain to me why do I fall so hard and why do I fly so high. It’s like this, when life is good, I am slashing through the sky and when life is moderately medium I wanna jump off a cliff. It’s been like this all my life. I have never been the type who makes lemonade out of lemons. I have used them to drink tequila several times, but that never turned out even remotely well.
This year, the year of 2020, the new decade started off as a fresh start, a clean slate, as a new beginning. I was psyched, and in a few months it all shot to shit. Everything that could’ve gone wrong…went worng. I was devastated, I wanted to disappear from the face of the earth. It all just seemed so unfair. I have been trying to make the best out of awful situations my whole entire life. Thinking that I will deserve a fighting chance, that way, to be happy. Sometimes it did work and sometimes it just made everything worse.
My fight or flight response was never something I’ve listened to. It might have been ignorance or childish naivety, but it never turned out to be spectacular. It didn’t even turn out to be mediocre. It turned out, yeah, you’ve guessed, ridiculously poorly.
Now it’s October, one of the most challenging years of my adult life has almost come to an end. I still have a major degree of work in front of me and I should be agitated and anxious, but I am not. I do fear some bleak outcomes, but I have managed to learn from the past something very important; it will be okay maybe not today or tomorrow…but eventually life will be good again.
Everybody had and has mean streaks and gets lemons and goes off the rail. It isn’t about that. Being a decent or a lucky person isn’t defined by that. You can’t cheat life, you can’t always have all the cheat codes and the plus fours. You gotta go and fight the dragons, kill that wolf and yeah you will and you have to give yourself over to the lust from time to time. You need these to not just be alive but to feel alive.
I have been a lucky person and I’m not saying this as someone who never had to jump through hoops and overcome obstacles. Believe me, I had my fair share of that. Nevertheless, I still believe. I believe in myself and in the good and the fairness of life. You’ll get back what you have dished out and you gotta be ready for that. When people say this, they usually refer to the unpleasant stuff. Still, it also applies to the good. As Gandhi said “Be the change you wanna see in the world.” You want people to be nice to you, be nice to them, you wanna be respected for your hard work, work hard and most importantly, if you wanna be loved, be ready to love them back.
Awful things happen, people and loved ones die, viruses devour nations and economies, earthquakes destroy homes and deranged, vapid rapists shatter lives. The world is a scary place. But if that is all that you can focus on, be ready to lock yourself in your apartment, get cooked up in your little ignorant bubble and miss the joy because you are so frightened of reality. Nobody said it’s gonna be easy, but can you even feel the greatness without having to work for it a little?
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