Do as I say, even if I don't know why I do
Even though I always had a constant nagging feelings the world was kinda fake, having it confirmed in my guts after begging to know “the truth” has still been difficult. Not because I was wrong, because the scope of how right and wrong I was keeps getting bigger.
The part of the world that I thought was imaginary wasn’t the trees or the sunsets, or the love of being with someone and sharing moments that make your whole body remember you are alive, and how good it can be.
It was always more like, what’s the story with the expectations that we must immediately conform into absolute systems of belief and conduct? This doesn’t seem free, it feels pretty confined, am I just lazy, anti-social?
My answer for a long time was, Surely the more educated people in charge know better. I’m probably not smart enough to understand the satisfaction of the struggle, or overcome the boredom I feel around numbers and fighting.
One day tho, unprovoked yet undeniable, I felt something to a degree I could no longer ignore, like a lobotomy: Nothing is what I thought it was.
This didn’t happen in a way that made me want to abandon life or reject responsibility. In fact, the very opposite. It made me want to finally take full accountability for my own life in a way I never understood how to before. In a way I never thought I was entitled to do before. I felt really free for the first time in my life. I don’t have to do anything. I do have choices.
Once I started seeing how much our existence is crafted by a careful script of The Pursuit of Happiness competing for precious time against Pressure, Fear, Exploitation, Scarcity, Uniformity, Violence, and Shame I could not stop seeing it everywhere. It made everything beautiful about being alive dingy.
I observed in casual conversations how the narrative is strictly upheld without question thru inherited family beliefs, and will not be challenged. I asked a couple simple questions like, Hey, what if life was not supposed to feel this disconnected, that we’re not supposed to be working this way? It never felt strange to you that the bulk of our waking lives are spent away from our families?
I was told to stop living in Lala Land, “there’s no free ride." Funny, cause I never said there was.
When you start waking up to your true authentic self, you start questioning the whole arrangement, the people around you may not always celebrate that, even those you love and respect the most are the first to call you crazy and urge you to “get real.” This is where you have to stay strong in your convictions that for the first time, you actually are.
I believe a lot of people feel the quiet ache of living a life that does not fully fit. I think they feel the exhaustion, the dissatisfaction, the sacrifice, the irritation of something missing they can’t ever place. Instead of confronting that pang of lack, they are determined to normalize it, "everyone is going thru something, it is what it is." If that’s where their story is to end, I respect that.
Mine tho? Mine’s just getting started knowing I was never crazy for feeling like something was off. Not lazy for wanting life to feel more meaningful. And definitely not unrealistic for believing we were meant for more than exhaustion, performance, and survival.