I find people, their creations, and any extension thereof, positively and inherently disgusting and ugly. This admission is very important, as I have yet to find any admission of mine so worthy of hate and belittlement as that, and in admitting so, I have asserted myself and made myself known to the world.
I, also, have an inherent drive to find beauty, and create beauty in areas without it. This takes inhuman effort, to look at such disgusting world and try to find a reason why it is beautiful. This drive, I find over the years, is “me”, and it gets a little bit easier, but not simpler, to do so over time.
My life can be summarized then as this: I wake up in tragedy, find the world abhorable, feel that small voice that says, “you’re here for a reason, maybe there is something beautiful beyond this, you just have to stay at it a little while longer.” I stay, and indeed find small moments worth taking into account: smiles of children, public transport drivers laughing, my mother’s own cooking not because it’s tasty but because she tries. A trivial work done right, the smell of coffee, the soft echoes of afternoon rain, and a random moment of spacing out and remembering, “oh, I am here. I am doing this thing called ‘living’”. In this I find humility, and on most days, that’s enough to forget that I ever wished I didn't exist.
On some days, the world is unforgiving, and no amount of pretty words can unmake it so. On those days, the drive is still there, still clinging to the hope that there is something beautiful. I find pleasure in proving the voice wrong, as the reality is unpleasant as it always has been.
But the voice is right, even on those days that the world is disgusting. Because the beauty, I find, lies in my own inherent drive to find it. Why is this fragile little soul who had been hurt beyond measure still trying? I then found myself living, not to prove her wrong or right, but because I had found no other force powerful enough to stop her. So on those days I surrender, and find myself creating beauty despite, or because of, the tragedy, if it means making her right one more time.
The recognition of this dichotomy is important, because being called kind and beautiful and good has never sat well with me. I am a bad person trying to do good things. It is in my trying that I find the world beautiful, that I find people kind, and that I find myself worthy. Forgetting or gaslighting myself that the world isn’t disgusting only puts me in unspeakable unease. This also allows me to forgive myself on the days I can’t find anything of value in this world, as that only means that I’m just seeing the real picture of it without any reason to be upset, because it is what it is.
So as long as I live, I shall find the truth in its ugliness. As long as I live, I shall find the beauty despite it. And in this trying, is “me” living.
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