2008-02-23 8:23 p.m.
Sometimes I Get Really Morbid
What would you do if you thought that, for whatever reason, you wouldn't live to see your 25th birthday?
Don't get me wrong, I know I will, barring catastrophe. I'm not planning on going anywhere, and I don't have a terminal illness. Life is good. Mostly. I've been a bit sad lately because I miss my friends, but that's per the usual, and I'm a bit disappointed in my midterm grades, but those can be brought up.
Aside from those things, life couldn't be better for me. I went for coffee with a friend this afternoon and we chatted about our novels as the sky flooded the streets with rain and then threw icy hailstones shaped like diamonds to the ground, and then I went shopping for new clothes since I've lost enough weight that I no longer have to unbutton my old jeans to get them off - and all I've changed in my diet and exercise patterns is I've started eating more salads with olive oil and vinegar as dressing (apparently olives and olive oil, avocadoes, and certain nuts are the miracle workers for losing weight without making serious lifestyle changes). Life is fabulous.
But I started thinking (always a bad move) once I got home.
A student at my university died recently. I didn't know the person, but the Student Affairs Office sends out notices whenever a student or alum dies. The deaths are usually horrific accidents. Car crashes, athletic accidents, things that can only be "acts of God" - totally unpredictable. These were people who sincerely believed - and were right to believe - that their lives would be long and happy.
Until they weren't.
I mean...that's tragic. Being vibrantly alive and having hope for the future is no time to die. Even having no hope, nobody should die young.
I've been suicidal, and, yeah, in that state, Death is like a friend, a crush, your Shadow Lover. You flirt with death like you would a good looking boy, thinking that - somehow - Death will make things better. Death is comforting, almost, in a terrifying and miserable way. You know it's always there to turn to, like a drug or abusive relationship, and it's almost impossible to get away from. But it doesn't make you happier, and you still know that you *shouldn't* die young, that it's some sort of breach of the natural order of things.
Thank God I'm not there anymore.
Sometimes the thoughts come back...not because I want them to, but because life is so scary sometimes. And whenever life gets scary, it's natural to look for 'reassurance' where you've found it before. Except now my former 'reassurance' is a terrifying prospect.
I'm scared of the future. I don't know where I'm going, really. I barely even know who I am. Asked to tell someone about myself, I describe my hobbies, music taste, crazy adventures with my friends. I never talk about my childhood abuse, my teenage suicidalism, my fears that I'm really nobody and am going nowhere fast, and that people don't really care.
My major has few practical applications outside of teaching and working in technology. I don't want to do either. Asked to talk about what I want from the future, I tell about wanting to have a small, well-decorated-in-crazy-bohemian-fashion house to myself and an illegal, ill-advised number of cats, living in a big city where I can take public transportation everywhere and go to art museums, plays, and concerts every weekend. I never talk about the fears that I'll end up the lonely old crazy cat lady, that I'll never get married and have kids, or worse, that I will but that I'll abuse them like my mother abused me, that at the end of my life I'll look back on my career and relationships and have nothing but regrets because I didn't know what I wanted, and therefore chose the wrong thing.
And sometimes, for no good reason, I fear that I won't even be here long enough to become a crazy cat lady and look back on my life with regrets. A whole variety of things have been known to bring this on. Those emails from the Student Affairs people, for one. Deaths in the families of people around me (nobody in my own family has died during my lifetime yet). Things I read in the news about escalating tensions all around the world.
There's so much rage in the world, so much hate and fear and loathing of people for no reason other than that we're all really a bunch of xenophobic idiots when you break us down into our component parts, that I wonder sometimes how it is that we haven't managed to bring down our own doom on ourselves. God knows we certainly have the tools to do it, what with the US's huge weapons arsenal - to say nothing of the fact that our government wants to make MORE weapons against some unseen and ill-defined threat somewhere "out there" in the world, or the fact that we aren't the only nation armed to the teeth. Toss in our fear of each other, and it's a recipe for disaster almost waiting to happen.
I mean, we're all taught from day 1 not to trust strangers, when we all know that the only way to ever make friends is to learn to trust certain strangers. And how do we decide which strangers to trust? Oh, yeah: they're the ones who look like us, think like us, behave like us, and believe like us, among other things. It's hardwired into the human brain.
I resent that.
I hate that sometimes, when around people I don't know, I feel uncomfortable because they're not part of my "group", however that happens to be defined at the moment. And most of it is the hardwired fear of "the other". I hate that I sometimes catch myself writing people off because they're homeless, or ill, or unattractive, or addicted to something, or who-knows-what. Fortunately, I don't play the racial or religious bias games, but I've been steeped in other ones, just because of the place, culture, and time in which I live. And it's sad.
It's is really fucking tragic, really.
None of us can really look at other people and truly see what's there. We're predisposed, it seems, to focus on negatives rather than positives. The evidence is all around us on that note: how often do you hear people saying "I had a wonderful day today!" and meaning it? And when you do hear it, how often is it qualified with "...except for ____"? Now how many times do you hear "My day sucked"? And how often is that qualified with "...but ____ was really great"?
We don't notice positives - we take them for granted, assume that they're supposed to be there. But negatives, well, clearly SOMETHING's wrong if our lives aren't running perfectly.
And isn't this a similar argument to one of the ones atheists use to discount faith in God? "How can so much bad stuff happen if God is really so powerful and loves us so much?" Well, yeah, bad shit happens - but look how much GOOD happens, too. My friend is an atheist, and I've recently "converted" to Christianity (although, I don't know how I can be converting since it's what I started my life believing, and I'm merely returning to it), and I bring this up because we were having this talk because she can't believe that I've decided to "Stupidify [my]self and throw [my] mind and life away to a bunch of superstitious nonsense."
But I don't think it is. Not entirely. Some of it is pretty stupid, superstitious nonsense - and don't get me wrong about that. I personally will never really believe that Mary was a virgin when she had Jesus, but then I don't think that sex is evil or "sinning" or else it wouldn't be the mechanism by which we make more people. I will also never believe that the world was created in 6 literal days by God the Father, or that evolution is somehow bogus. And all the Old Testament Bible law - well, to me, that seems to be cultural. After all, Leviticus, the book that forbids homosexual relationships, also forbids wearing clothing made of two different materials. Now when was the last time you heard a preacher railing against wearing cotton/polyester blends? People are picking and choosing verses, twisting them out of the historical context (and human authorship) that they come from, and using them to suit their own ends. Hell isn't Biblical, either, so the literalists and fundie idiots have put their own asses up the proverbial creek without a paddle. And I will always believe in reincarnation and the truth that is inherent in faiths other than my own...And as I told her, choosing a name to call God by does not instantly assume that I'm throwing my mind away. I'm not joining a cult, I'm following the teachings and traditions that I find are worth following based off of my own rational processes, and no God can ask for any more than that.
As for how bad things can be allowed to happen, well, I don't know. But having been suicidal...I certainly appreciate life much more now. Bad things are bad, yes, but they make the good so much more beautiful and amazing.
My friendships wouldn't mean so much to me if I hadn't seen and experienced how much it hurts and how easy it is for people to break trust with each other. I wouldn't value kindness as much if it hadn't been so lacking when I was growing up. And I wouldn't know that I can always keep on surviving and even thriving if I hadn't almost given up and thrown everything away.
To be perfectly honest with myself, even though I hate certain things about my life (the "bad" things), I wouldn't change them. They've made me who I am. I wouldn't be me otherwise.
That doesn't make me any less frightened of the future, though. And let's face it - the future's pretty damn scary. There's no way of knowing what's coming, no matter how hard you try.
I guess I just have to learn to not let things frighten me so much. After all, my beliefs allow for much more positives than negatives, so why should I focus on the negatives?
Sometimes being human is difficult. But I wouldn't trade it for the world.
Usually.
