If you’re about my age, (which is around thirty) there’s a heavy chance The Perks of being a Wallflower smacked you hard right in your baby teen heart. There’s a line on page two or(I think, maybe totally wrong )three that says …
“So this is my life. I want you to know that I am both happy and sad at the same time and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”
It’s taken me years, but I think I’ve begun to stop trying to dissect the fact that I’m both profoundly sad and lonely and happy all at once. My heart is home to an ever-expanding universe of love and compassion. I don’t know where all the love I hold originated.
Did I manifest this on my own because I am trying to make my world worth living in, or is it synapses firing without regard to their actual jobs in my brain, changing my thought process? Is it a lie I’m being told by my own brain?
I’ve holed up inside my head so long, digging myself apart and desperate to understand my brain. I pour dozens of scholarly articles and research papers into into it, week after week. I when I was younger, I consumed Timothy Leary, I read Aldous Huxley . I expand my mind and walk down rabbit holes of wonder. I’ve seen shrinks, been through CBT(it’s a wonder) and I’ve gone to see people who claim to be able to see into the universe.I can see myself as an old person, seeking until the end forever.
The ability to love the world profoundly is my superpower, and has likely saved my life . That huge love I have for the world enables me to escape and (sometimes) over-ride that shitty, symbiotic blackness of profound sadness and physical pain of heartbreak I feel daily with no logical reason. I made a personal choice in my very early twenties to not become a part of that blackness that runs though my being; to not let it consume me, but I fight back against it every day. Sometimes, I fight it even to get out of bed or the house or to speak to anyone but my spouse and the one other person I know who gets what this is like, living with that blackness.
Because I know I love the way I do, because I know how deep my sadness runs, I love everyone on the surface, from cat on the street to the lady who owns Veros in Sj. On the other hand, I only allow myself to people I can trust, and despite years of trying to de-program myself, those people are very few.
I don’t know why I’m writing about this right now when I feel like I should be writing about politics, but I don’t want to spend that mental energy when there’s a riot going on inside me. I’ll do that later, when I feel like I’ve composed my opinions solidly, and I don’t sound like some of the rage I’m feeling about the current state of my own country and the world.
I don’t think Americans are very good about talking about love. I think we’re very good at talking about sex and thinking we’re very good at talking about our feelings. But people from the generation underneath us, they’re starting to talk about love in a healthier way, and I personally believe that love and physical touch can be completely separate from sex and I hate the way our culture has mushed them together. Hug someone out there today. Tell someone you don’t fuck you love them. Hug someone.
please.
So this is my life. I want you to know that I am both happy and sad at the same time and…
