Recently I’ve realized that the behavioral habits and mental thought processes I developed during my most formative years were formed out of depression. My basic disposition is despair. The posture of my personality is self-loathe. And it has all been nicely concealed beneath layers of pretend positivity and self-love adages reminiscent of the posters I used to stare at for hours during detention in Middle School.
If all this sounds like the angst of a 14-year old, it’s because that is probably where my emotional age has stopped progressing. I thought I’d outgrown the angst. I thought the scars of the past were long healed and irrelevant. I thought I had the courage to live with passion and vigor.
But there is no passion and vigor. Maybe it’s all symptomatic of living as a 20-something year old in the age of postmodern cynicism. Maybe the ideals of lively, goal-oriented, driven living are meant for the select few of society that have the genetic make-up for success.
Stories of rags to riches, beating all odds to come out on top, those victorious triumphs of escaping the streets to become awe-striking, self-made, ~successful people~ fascinate me because they have me constantly wondering if these people are just like me, except with the willpower and self-discipline to manifest their potential.
Life as it has been for probably all of humanity is cyclical. There is nothing new under the sun. Vanity is a concept too familiar to us all, and the advent of the digital age has only quickened the pace of the realization of absurdity for people of all generations.
Children these days carry much on their backs. Their eyes have the type of depth that speaks to deep-set anxiety and imminent despair. Dreams seem utterly irrelevant. Passion is a luxury granted to few. And I am among them. I often have an intense desire to run and play without care as a child would. But I am among them.
Reined in by some unseen force of society that idolizes the ideal of uniqueness and individuality wherein the unique is a label I must conform to, and the individual a flaccid vague concept devoid of identity, everyone is searching for themselves in a cesspool of toxic positivity under a loudspeaker that booms every five minutes to “~be yourself~!”
I’m supposed to just “do me.” Whatever that means. “You do you”, might as well be “go f**k yourself!” In any case, I have probably successfully done that, but give it another five years and I might’ve failed at that too — which unironically is the most positivity I can muster of late.
I want to feel alive. Is that too much to ask for? I want to say shit without thinking about what others will think, I want to do things I’ve always wanted to do and I want to stop bitching and moaning about everything and just live life with the type of energy that Disney characters have.
And what’s stopping me? Who’s to say that my neurons firing off countlessly in the same path to create deep ridges of development which became habits of thought and frameworks of experiential appraisal, can’t fire off into new directions? It will take significant effort but I daresay it is not impossible to will the mind to bend. The brain is a moldable thing.
I want to feel alive. And not the kind of alive that looks like Joel Osteen and Barney had a baby, but the kind of alive that acknowledges the depth of human pain and understands deeply the fear of death and other things — the kind of alive that arises not out of compulsion, but out of compassion.
It is an uncanny privilege that I may have the emotional age of a 14-year old, because it allows me to be among them. In all the existential chaos and emotional turmoil of these future people of society, I find in myself compassion. I have no passion to begin with, and lack willpower for accomplishment. But I have a compassion that wonders how I might’ve processed things differently if just one person was a little more honest.
If instead of the deafening commands of superiors to “be the best version of myself,” I had the defeated tears of a fully grown adult that just needed someone to talk to, and who was willing not only to be heard but even to listen to a child— I wonder. How would I have turned out?