I don’t know how to be okay with existing.
Everything is too intense. The highs fill me with a ridiculous amount of hope and happiness that I am sure I’ll never feel anything else and the lows hit me so hard and leave me so shattered that I’m left sobbing on the bathroom floor certain that the sadness will never completely leave.
Apparently, that’s what life is. A series of highs and lows. You win some and you lose some and some win more than they lose and others lose more than they win and you’re just supposed to be glad you didn’t get more losses than you did.
Some people say that the losses make you appreciate the wins more. There have to be lows for there to be highs. The bad is necessary so you can really be thankful for the good. All that.
What nonsense.
The bad isn’t necessary and if I needed it so bad before I could appreciate the good, maybe it’s not all that good.
I understand why people say this, I want to believe that there’s a reason for everything too. That all the senseless misery has some iota of sense in it. But the starving children in whatever war-torn country are not starving just so I can be more appreciative of the meal in front of me that I don’t want to finish, they are starving because someone somewhere is making a profit from the war and from their suffering. Besides, what's there to be thankful for? That I am not them? What if I was? I could very easily have been. I can still very easily be. Even if I’m never them, they still exist. Their suffering may not be mine, but it’s still there.
There is so much ready to ruin the good. It is so easy for everything to turn bad and infinitely harder for things to turn good. I don’t know how to be happy anymore without thinking of all the ways it could end. Which of the endings is the most likely? Which is the most painful? Why are they so often the same? All good things end, but not all bad things do. The dead stay dead and that doesn’t change, at least not yet, but everyone will die. The broken stay broken most times, they just learn how to function broken. How do I be happy knowing this? How can I stop thinking about it?
Mother says to focus on the things I can control every time I tell her I don’t know how to control my thoughts. I can’t not focus on my own thoughts and I can’t control them so what do I do now? Is it just me? Am I just inviting the misery so I can wallow in it? Can one control their thoughts? Can you? Can you think a thought before you’ve thought it? If you can, please tell me how. I would like to be okay too.
I want someone to tell me how to be okay with existing but everyone exists differently. Everyone is a whole universe in themselves and so we’re all alone. I will never be you. I will never understand the universe that is you, I’m not even sure I understand the universe that is me. I can love you, I can be in awe of your universe, I could even dedicate my life to you to some healthy or unhealthy extent and you could even do the same but we would never completely understand each other. We will be the only inhabitants of our own universes. No relationship, no affection, no love will ever change that.
Love is such a strange thing? What is it? What’s it for? Why bother? It doesn’t stop us from hurting each other. I will hurt those I love, as will you, and those we love will hurt us too. Maybe it’d be unintentionally, maybe we’d regret it, maybe we won’t even know we did, but we will hurt those we love. We have hurt those we love before and we will again. Is there nothing we can do to spare ourselves the pain? Is there nothing we can do to spare others? Are we just doomed to hurt and be hurt? Is that it?
I didn’t ask to exist and now that I do the terms on which I do suck. Maybe I sound like I’m complaining and I should be more grateful. Maybe I should. Besides, technically I could always end things but I’m not brave enough or hopeless enough for that. To be fair, that’s not necessarily existence’s fault, I just don’t want the commitment and permanence of death. I’m scared of the possible pain that may come with it and what comes after (or what doesn't come after) but I don’t want to be alive either. Not like this.
I should have been consulted before being brought into existence. I would have simply politely declined and this whole dilemma could have been avoided.
I don’t know if hope makes it worse or better. I guess the reason I do anything and for everything I do boils down to hope. I hope it gets better so I keep going, but maybe it’s really just fear pretending to be hope. A trojan horse. I hope today will be a good day so I get out of bed but maybe it's those damn trojans teaching feelings their tricks. I’m writing this in hopes that my yelling into the void gets across to some extent to someone else's universe. But if it does, so what? I don’t have the answers and I don’t think you do (but if you do I’d be eternally grateful if you’d give them to me). Maybe I just want to feel less alone, even though at the end of the day we all are. But if I can't have the real thing, can I at least have the illusion? Can I pretend it’s not just an illusion?
I want to be okay with existing. I don’t know how to yet but I want to.
