Coming to terms with a landslide of unfortunate events that have transpired over the past two years, it feels like an existential crisis has been slowly unraveling itself in chapters. To be frank, I think I'm mildly depressed and hurt from all of life's events.
I've never felt simultaneously more light and heavy. I work a well-paying 9-5 remote job that allows me the flexibility to go anywhere in the world. I have no attachments to my city other than the few friends who haven't moved away and still manage to make time for me. At the same time, my parents are older and in declining health, and my brother has estranged himself at a time when my mom has cancer. My relationship with my parents has always been complicated but it feels like I have an obligation to help carry the increasing weight of filial piety. However, I know I can't live my life for them and by their parameters. In many ways I feel like I hang on to them (despite our troubled history and despite not understanding them and vice versa) because I know that they are the only truly unconditional and reciprocal love I'll ever encounter in this world - art, music, prose, and nature will never love me back as much as I throw myself at them.
This unbounded feeling has left me questioning what I'm living for. It's not my job, not my family, not for friends or for people in general. I don't have children or dependents. It feels like every day I wake up and autopilot my way through the same bullshit with little variation other than engrossing myself in new music or pieces of writing that serve as a distraction or excitement to combat the monotony of everyday life.
I don't understand this city, why people line up for an hour to go to the newest restaurant, to pay for overpriced food to put on their Instagram for an invisible audience to convince themselves that their life is notable (maybe a bit like what I'm doing right now, so perhaps I'm no better). I don't understand why people feel the need to project their importance through their latest luxury purchase or their gleaming title at their stifling corporate job. I don't understand the obsession with sports and sports cars and rolexes. I don't understand the appeal with rosters and providers and trophy wives nor do I understand what anyone is looking for anymore (myself included). I don't understand why employers and government want to force everyone back in office full time just because they can, as the cars line up on the highway every morning like a death march into a gulag that sells $8 coffees. I feel like I'm screaming into the void when reading the news or conducting research, when the government really truly does not give a fuck about making things better for us. It feels like I'm losing my mind.
I want to run away. I've been looking up rural oceanside properties, that is my dream. I can probably find the money for it, I can adopt a dog and multiple cats and remove myself from all of this. It's almost too easy to be alone and secluded at times but I also know that's not the solution to life's problems.
My reasons for living have become so lofty and grand almost by design, so that I'd never achieve them and in turn that keeps me waking up and pushing forward every day in the hopes of eventually accomplishing them. To learn an endless amount of my favourite songs on piano or guitar, to listen to every song ever made and in existence, to see every country on the planet (16 and counting now). But suddenly my rateyourmusic profile is filling up and I'm listening to at least two new albums a day, Google just released street view coverage in Cyprus and Bosnia, and I've memorized the first page to the Yellow River Concerto Movement 2. Suddenly there's less and less to keep me around.
Is there someone out there to give me a reason to stay? Who can love me the way that I love, in all my flaws and imperfections? Who tries as hard as I try and is truly an equal in the partnership in every way? Someone who can deeply share in the love of all that I love, and give me new reasons and things to love? Who can laugh and dance and badly sing away the pain with me? To bask in the glow of a beautiful sunset together in a land at the edge of the earth and impart inconsequence upon our worries? I'm honestly not sure there is anything like this for anyone let alone for myself. But I keep dreaming of love and life and of living, perhaps because the pursuit of this ridiculous unachievable vision will keep me going.
