Girl, Interrupted.

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

-     - Marcus Aurelius

I was watching some daft "news" programme the other day. It was very dull, but a certain segment caught my attention; it was about the 'entitled' attitude people now possess. Apparently we are living in a time where manners are considered a thing of the past. We're permanently stressed, rushed and want things NOW, NOW, NOW! We want to lose weight instantly, we want to be served in a cafe instantly, and we obviously have no time to wait. Who can be bothered with 'old-fashioned' pleasantries anymore?

While I did find myself blinking lazily at what passes for journalism nowadays, I did agree with this ‘report’ to a certain extent. However, I also believe it is a tad unfair to claim the majority of us are no longer courteous or polite. Based on my own behaviour and what I've seen from my friend's interactions with other life forms, we do still have manners and are willing to chat (not with creepy taxi drivers, for good reason) with others, but this particular social commentary caused my thoughts to stray a bit (as television usually does) to something I had been pondering for a while now.

Entitlement. What we expect from people, from life in general and what we believe we deserve. I have been very unhappy recently, for numerous reasons, some old and some new. This idea of entitlement though has given me a new perspective; it has interrupted my self-pity and loathing, and twisted those thoughts into something new.

When I am at my worst, when bad things happen (within and outside of my control), I tend to fall back on that childish question ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’ Not that I would be so arrogant as to call myself a good person, but in some cases where I cannot find a reason for the circumstances or the treatment I have received, I can be the ‘good’ person in the equation.

When bad things happen, that I do not understand, I give up on trying for some time. Trying to fit in, trying to be social (I’m an introvert, it’s a struggle), trying to be happy or to make others happy. The cynical side comes forth to protect me and asks, ‘why bother with everything and everyone, when all you get in return is pain and suffering?’ I have used that as an excuse, so many times during my life, to not interact with people and the rest of the world. During those times I believe I am merely protecting myself from everything outside. I cannot control what goes on out there, but I can certainly control my emotions and myself if there are no external forces acting upon my person.

There is of course, a great flaw in this plan of mine. Those sorts of questions and that attitude completely close you off from everything and everyone around you. Yes, you may limit pain and suffering through self-imposed isolation, but you are also blocking out all sources of happiness too. It's like closing your curtains or blinds during the nighttime to rest and not opening them in the morning, not experiencing the sunlight of a new day.

I would never simply say depression is an attitude problem (like so many do), that’s misinformed, condescending and hurtful for those who struggle with such an illness. I can say though, from my own experience, that it is very easy to be self-pitying, hating the world for causing you pain or for being unfair, but it's much harder and more rewarding, to look past that and focus on what makes you happy. The world has never truly been unkind to you; it's a neutral party in the politics of living. It is people who are unfair or unkind. It’s people, you and those you choose to surround yourself with, that are the greatest sources of unhappiness.

We all feel entitled to an extent, to receive kindness and love unconditionally, not taking into account that at times, we may not deserve such treatment. When you feel that way, that people owe you something, that life owes you something better than what you have, you can never be truly happy. Why should life reward you when you have not tried or when you have not made the effort to be happy? Don’t expect nothing though, have standards and boundaries (those are good things), but you cannot expect happiness to be given to you on a silver platter.

Happiness in my opinion, is not something that is ready-made, it’s something that is created; it’s born from many things. For me, it’s mostly my friendships with others that make me happy. Learning one of my best friends Vicky got a new job made me happy, seeing my eldest sister and hearing about her dreams for the future made me happy and talking to my friend Tim always makes me happy. All of that joy that I have received from those interactions, wasn’t because I was ‘entitled’ to it, but because I participated in life, and with people who make me truly happy.

I have no doubt that I will probably lose this perspective at some point and wallow in unhappiness again for a while, but it is my hope in writing this (while the thoughts are still fresh), that maybe, just maybe, I’ll look back on this and remember that my cure is to be alongside the people who mean the world to me. We’re not entitled to anything, we have to be living, to be a participant, to receive and experience the true beauty of life.

It’s like the Professor Jagger once said, ‘you can’t always get what you want, but if you try some times, you get what you need’.

P.S Thank you to Channel 7 for being so lousy. I had to go out into the world and be happy to escape the sheer amount of stupidity being broadcasted.

That which has quelled me, lives with me, but I'm still happy.

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.” 
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

I woke up this morning and felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. I was devoid of sadness, happiness, hunger, thirst, I wasn't even content or worried about feeling nothing. When I was a kid and this happened, I would stay in bed and try to concentrate very hard, staring at the ceiling, until something came to me. I don't do that anymore, I just get out of bed and get on with living.

You make breakfast, shower, ask yourself "do I feel anything yet?...Nope, not yet, just keep going."

By the time I was out and about I did feel something though, it amazed me. It was like waking up and opening your eyes to everything around you. Most people go through their routines everyday, most of us never stop and look around because we've seen it, we appreciated it once upon a time, why bother doing that everyday? But I did this morning, I did stop with my coffee and soak up the feeling of the sunshine on my back, the breeze ruining my hair and the comings and goings of other people in the coffee shop and I realised I was actually alive.

That sounds ridiculous, how can anyone forget they're alive right? I don't mean it like that, I know I'm breathing, but being alive and actually living are two separate things. I mean I realised I was in fact living my life, just like all those other people around me. I wanted to pull out my notebook and write things down that I noticed, until I remembered I gave up the habit of carrying my notebook when I gave up the goal of becoming a writer. Still, the memory is a like a digital camera, if a bit faulty at times.

I'm rambling slightly, but what I am trying to get at is the fact that yes, I am alive and living today. I just needed to stop and look around. People like myself spend so much time with their heads in the past, avoiding the present and never daring to look into the future, that's no-man's land, that we let life pass us by most of the time.

It came as a shock to me to realise today, that when I felt the sunshine, tasted my coffee, listened to other people grumbling with morning grogginess, that I was happy to be there. Doing something so completely normal that we don't stop and think about it for a second, but it made me happy. For the first time in months, I felt every part of me was functioning. Not like days of staying in bed and thinking your heart is beating too slowly or not at all, or being so anxious your heart beat can be heard in your ears or threatens to explode out of your chest, this was the normal thump-thump of every day living.

Despite what a lot of people think about me, I am capable of happiness. Lots of things bring me joy like walking into a store and hearing an old song I used to play over and over and then I forgot about it, learning new random facts and passing them on, running into someone I haven't seen in a long time or simply talking about ridiculous things with friends into the early hours of the morning. All of those things make me joyful. I just forgot about them or simply wasn't paying attention.

This is as much a reminder to myself as it is to people who know me. Today I am happy, I am living and I am fully aware of everything around me. It's a great endorphin rush. I've spent months wondering what it was that I had lost, what it was that I had done to lose my grip on my own happiness. It's not from a lack of trying to be happy or trying to think "positive thoughts." A lot of people think others who are depressed or appear to be sulking are apparently not thinking enough about their lives or their problems. People couldn't be more wrong. It's the exact opposite, I spend too much time thinking and then over thinking every single little thing, until thinking begins to drive me crazy. We're not lazy thinkers, but we focus on the wrong sorts of things.

I think today I realised something important. I didn't lose my happiness or the ability to feel (which I thought many times), I buried it, along with the notions of living, too caught up in everything going wrong, in other people's disasters and too focused on pain. I also have a terrible habit of letting unkind words or other people's actions ruin my days. I remember once a friend asked me what I thought my worst trait was and I didn't hesitate, obsessiveness. When obsessiveness is one of your most dominating personality traits, conditions like depression, eating disorders and anxiety are even worse because you become so focused on them that you forget everything else, usually the good things.

I still have my problems, but I can sort them out. I still worry about the future, but that is going to always happen regardless of how much I stress and sulk.  I'm still an insanely obsessive person and that's never going to change, I'm always going to fuss over my weight, but at least it gives me focus. I do get depressed very easily, but at least I know I also have times of great happiness. There's a quote by someone I can't remember the name of and I'm too lazy to google it, but to paraphrase it said that you can't know happiness until you know sorrow and I believe that wholeheartedly.  If I am sad tomorrow, at least I can assure myself that I was happy today. Maybe I just have to stop every so often and remind myself that I am doing the best that I can, that I'm being and just enjoy the day for what it is, not what it could be.

You have to remember that life is sort of like running a marathon, if all you do is focus on the physical effort, on the distance left to cover, everything seems much harder and longer and you have a lesser chance of ever making the finish line.

“What should I be
but just what I am?” 
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“A lot of you cared, just not enough.”

"I've always been after the trappings of great luxury. But all I've got hold of are trappings of great poverty. I've got hold of the wrong load of trappings, and a rotten load they are too, ones I could have very well done without." Peter Cook.  There is this peculiar feeling I've been carrying around the past few days (months more likely), it's not despair and it's not quite apathy. Apathy is a lack of interest or concern and I am still concerned about certain things and people, but it seems to me that it's more out of habit than the actual feeling of worry or concern. It's like getting up in the morning and making breakfast, you're not actually physically hungry but it's what you usually do when you wake up. What else is there to do at 5a.m. apart from putting coffee and a slice of toast on? That's not to say the people I do actively choose to talk to (a select and dwindling few) and check up on aren't important to me, of course they are, if anything it shows how important and dear they are to me. I care about them, what they have to say, their "critiques" of my actions, thoughts and life. I listen and respond to all of that. All of that is important, but it's without the recent tendency to be overly emotional, to express all my greatest fears and my heart's desires. I've ended all that, if people don't understand after only a few months of it, how can they possibly understand years of wanting something so badly?  I spent the greater part of my teenage years wandering around, feeling completely isolated, "I was swallowing my pain" as John Lennon put it. I always felt darker than everybody else, too frightened to express my thoughts because I didn't want people to think I was completely crazy. It's just this inner monologue I have everyday with my own conscience, "Should I just say what I think? Oh no, no, don't do that! It's not acceptable! Trouble, trouble, trouble!" Story of my life. I think recently, since December, I got sick of having to constantly censor my thoughts and actions to "fit in" or to spare people from the brunt of them. I have been told by psychiatrists that it's better not to repress these things, that it is healthier to express things before they overwhelm you. I disagree. Maybe some people think it's healthier to express thoughts and feelings, but in my world and the people in it, my thoughts and feelings just seem to hurt people, especially years of pent up emotion.  An example of this was a dear friend of mine getting very cross with me a couple of weeks ago, not only for things I had done, but for things I chose not to do. That hurt a lot. It's extremely hard to keep so many people happy. I remember I was upset and turned to music (as always) to provide some form of comfort. I was on my floor and Jealous Guy by John Lennon started playing and that was bitter sweet. It always seems to play when I'm at my lowest, or I only notice it during those times, either way the lyrics resonated with me, especially that one line "I didn't mean to hurt you, I'm sorry that I made you cry." I thought on one hand, I've tried to spare people and that drove me crazy and on the other hand, I've just caused people pain by trying to release it. They may say that I haven't caused any damage to them, but they're quite wrong.  Things change when you're completely honest with a person, when you spill everything and leave yourself completely at their mercy, unprotected from their opinions. As someone who doesn't deal well with criticism, it took a lot for me to do that and I'm not sure it was worth it. Now every time I talk to those people I'm always wondering what they think of me compared to how I was before. The worst part of it is that I know most people would prefer the former version of myself, it may have been mostly a facade with genuine happiness at times, but I was a better model of a person. The present me isn't very likeable, isn't very loveable and doesn't even have the energy to pretend anymore. Conversations I have now with people I still talk to have shifted. There is this delicacy that wasn't there before and I can't help but wish it that it wasn't like that now. My fault, I changed everything, it's really no wonder I've ended up alone. The one greatest fear I had, the one thing that always kept me from being honest with people, was the fear that I would end up shunned and unloved. I knew I wasn't normal and the fact that my fear has come to pass only proves to me that I should have kept my mouth shut.  The only way to explain this present state of coldness and regret is to look backwards I think, with some help from a particular novel. There is a book I read last year, entitled "Thirteen Reasons Why" by Jay Asher. If I could quote the whole book to you reader, I would, but to do so would infringe copyright laws and I can't afford a lawsuit at the moment (or ever). The novel is basically about a girl named Hannah, who commits suicide and tells thirteen people why she took her life (hence the title). All of these people were involved in her death to some degree, even though they all thought they made absolutely no impact at all, that they were completely insignificant in this girl's life. This isn't supposed to depress you, I know suicide has that label attached to it, but the reason that I'm mentioning this particular novel is because I think it seems so similar to my own actions, obviously with a different ending. I didn't record tapes or a chain letter for thirteen different people, but I did want to touch certain people just once more before I tried. Now those people may have thought they were generally insignificant, but they weren't. I didn't leave a letter to my family, I didn't know what to say, but to my dearest friends....how could I not want to remind them how much I loved them? That was selfish of me, that upset quite a few people and I regret that hurt, but I don't regret my actions. If it was the last time I got to ever "speak" to these people, I wanted it to count and I wanted to be felt. Saying something aloud to someone can only be captured and stored by a "faulty camera in our minds," (Death Cab For Cutie) but written words can last a lifetime. I suppose, in retrospect, I want something to last.  There are two great lines from this novel that I loved and I read over and over again. One of them is more of a paragraph than a "line," but you understand me. The first is what happened before.  "I sat. And I thought. And the more I thought, connecting the events of my life, the more my heart collapsed." The second is how you try to explain yourself.  "If you hear a song that makes you cry and you don't want to cry anymore, you don't listen to that song anymore. But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head." In the novel, Hannah dies, she doesn't have to answer any questions. Life is a bit more complicated than the plot of a best-seller. When you wake up unexpectedly you have to face reality, answer questions people have and try to ease the pain you have caused by wanting to be selfish, by wanting to just write things that you couldn't say in person. There isn't a good response to someone telling you "I'm glad you're not dead, because I would have missed you everyday of my life and wondered why I couldn't help you." What could I have possibly said to that? How do you reassure someone that there was nothing they could have ever done, that they were always there and it just wasn't enough anymore? I know firsthand, as much as you want people to forget about it, there is nothing you can do or say to take that memory away from them or that time of fear. People will be angry, people will be upset and some people won't know how to feel. I can understand that. I regret that, but I can understand it. My life has just reached a point where people aren't enough to take away my pain and I'm not good enough to overcome it. So is it any wonder that I can't summon up the energy or emotion to be passionate about life? That I go through the motions of living day in and day out, without any actual feeling? That I'm a borderline apathetic/depressive person? That I can't even be bothered to fix my physical health? I don't think so. Even if people doubt me, or want me to be happier, I think the least they could do for me would be to understand me. Not all of me, that's a bit of an ask, but be as accepting of me as I am of them. That's all I want right now. In return, I'll spare them any further pain and keep it to myself.