Midway through a “Vice News Tonight” episode talking about kids born with deficiencies due to Zika, I had a thought. Well, there were several.
Initially, I thought about winning the genetic lottery. I've alluded to my general good health, size, looks, brain etc. that I enjoy or have used well-enough in life. I don't really struggle to learn or remember things, at least when I care about them. I don't have some deformity to hide or that I'm particularly insecure about. I'm not bleeding money on hospital bills. And despite my capacity to describe an ongoing crisis that is the set of my various neuroses, there's hardly a day I'm not laughing, lounging, or otherwise throwing things into my life that I enjoy.
The point is that I have it good. I have it really good. I suspect many people don't believe they have it as good as I do. And I think this lack of belief in themselves is why I find myself relatively alone in what I choose to worry about or try to fix. If you're not “the problem,” something external needs to be. That isn't to say you aren't a problem or won't become one, but it does mean your perspective on how those problems are nested and where your attention can go are different.
I don't need to be entertained, for example. I'm not craving vacation or my next day off. As I've gotten to know more “regular” people, each moment off seems like a craving and clawing. They're consumed by what they think they should be worried about, and then nothing else gets in. By the time there's room to look up or breath, they're literally desperate for air. If all of your brainpower is spent fretting over shitty software, corruption in the system, and the inescapable hole modernity has born you into, every new issue makes the flashing lights and noises all the more chaotic.
That's how you get selfish. Each escape has to trump the last period of desperation. Say you're worried about being single or dying alone. Say you hold that worry for years. Then here comes a chance to get married! Is marriage right for you? Who cares! Fantasy time. Well-wishing and professional pictures abound. The driver of your decision can get ignored, or worse, celebrated as of course I was afraid, but no more! That is to say, were you healthy, good looking, and smart before you got married? Your mind can zero in on some glaring presumed hole and block out what else you've been doing or what you might instead.
I see many different futures for myself. I believe they're as attainable as anything because I've done the math or prepared the floor to allow me to fuck up in forward motion as often as it will take. But that's sort of like my dream wedding. I read stories of Elon Musk sleeping on the shop floor and get jealous. He gets to work himself to death on something important and what's genuinely the best there is to offer. I want that. If I didn't, I never would have ran up and down theater aisles like cleaning up popcorn was the most important thing in the world. I wouldn't be able to have zero guilt about starting the coffee shop because every second of it was exactly me and what I wanted to do. I keep tasting appetizers of my ideal meal.
The problem I have is being unable to know what to do with myself with all this “belief.” Maybe it's like being an earnest disciple on a planet where everyone's already been converted, just not to believe in what you do. One of the things I think made me so angry about my friend group in college was that we all seemed to have the same “problem.” All were as smart or smarter. All looked good. All could figure out one thing or another to keep floating on by or achieve some goal. So I didn't understand why that goal wouldn't be the world.
I don't know why I'm not comfortable living out of a van traveling between national parks. I don't know why it seemed the exact opposite thing to do to lean into ideas of monogamous relationships and middle-class comforts. I don't know why I couldn't maintain the idea of a “real job” after getting an advanced degree and paying back debts for years. I don't know why it always feels like there's more to sacrifice, and it's worthwhile to do so, in order to achieve otherwise dreamlike ends. I can watch so many lives running in parallel that feel familiar or safe. How could a set of my equals not feel like it's all a little too easy? Where's the guilt?
With my non-physically-presenting brain conditions, I do my exhaustive pursuing of things, adopt “your” shitty real-world jobs, fight for every inch of progress on some big dream, write, watch, read, and think incredibly hard about working out regularly. I've got a month and a half to blame youthful indiscretions on my 20's. I don't have a lot of money, but I also never planned to have a lot of money, because nothing I ever read suggested I should expect to find said money. And I still feel there's so much to do moving forward. I still think tomorrow could be the day some friend of a friend here's about me or some random Craigslist person turns out not to be shit and we work together to build something real.
That's a word that gets shot to hell when you're in the fog of day to day existence. Real? Well, I'm here, aren't I? I showed up. I answered your email. I feel the weight of busywork and the humidity. But what about the dark matter? What about the indefinite future your particles could arrive in, or indeed are already inhabiting, just less and less so with each new concession? Real means something. Like we all do when we break statistics and trends and create the conditions to capitalize on luck. We don't live in an environment where we can take anything for granted. But every day, all I see is people who do. Plans and meetings months in advance. Dream partners one day or exes coming back. The party neatly scheduled between 8:30pm and 11:00pm, because you don't want to get home too late before work the next morning.
I haven't felt real in a very long time. I'm not excited to meet each day. I don't know quite if I'll be able to persuade myself against doing something stupid “because” and “why not.” I don't have much focus beyond the haze of failed attempts to get things done I've trained myself to never expect will happen anymore. They won't without a hundred more phone calls, dozens of online posts, hundreds or thousands of wasted dollars, and a hundred more blogs decrying the same problem in slightly different ways. No one wants to help. No one believes. They're comfortable doing whatever it is they do. They don't even want to TALK about it because, well, you'll rub off on them in guilt-inducing and embarrassing ways, and haven't you made enough people resent you already?
It's still right now is the point. You're still young enough. You've got time to fail. You've got as many hats to wear as you can reach for. I may have squandered my shot at ever getting a six pack before I turned 30, but you don't have to say you were too afraid or lazy to indulge your idealism. You don't have a brain deficiency. You're not hungry. You've got more money than you'd like to admit, and you might not appreciate the nature of the sacrifices you'd have to make. But there's worse things. You could be old and have the same problems. You could die an old cliché. You could be hungry and alone or have your own sick kid. Think those will feel like the times to do something more or different?
