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Selfish Ramblings No. 2: Jealousy, Dormancy, and Regret

Something about a phrase being observably and self-applicably correct makes me uncomfortable. I know I think far too highly of myself for someone whose self-loathing runs about as deep as the challenger, but I have always thought myself to be above or excluded from the societal rhetorics that apply to the vast majority.

Comparison is the theif of all joy.

I often refuse to seriously consider widely known sayings and their meanings, and I usually do so unconciously. Then, one day, I'll be thinking myself in circles and land at the exact same conclusion someone already has and has already condensed into something concise and understandable.

I am a horrifically jealous person, and I hate myself for it.

Realistically, I know my own journey is worth something. It has to be; there is no greater mystery nor glory than the combined effort of living singular lives. I know what I have done and what I do will likely never be original, yet it still stings when I am proven correct. The jealousy I store for things that were never even an opportunity for me, that I never set out to attempt to get, is somehow worse than the jealousy gathered from things I did try for and did not get.

Whenever I enter a period of seeping jealousy, after lies a period of dormancy. The E in envy stands for fucking exhausting. Post drowning in that sea of green (envy), my body lies stuck at the bottom, gasping at any small bubbles I can to fill my lungs and try to float back to the surface. In the time I spend down there I do nothing but attempt to gather the courage to start again. If nothing I do is ever worth anything and will pale in comparison to everyone else's acheivements, what's the point of doing anything? (Again, interplay of my knowing that that does not matter and effort is truly the only thing one can be jealous of, but I circle back to my previous point in that case).

Post dormancy, once I've filled my lungs of enough air and limbs with enough fight to meagerly kick my head back above the waves, comes regret. Regret of how long I spent drowning myself further, not getting back above the waves sooner, all the time I lost being envious of things that do not matter. An attempt can be made to brush it all off with a "whatever, my life is my own journey and it doesn't need to be influenced by anyone else's in any self-inflicted way that will affect me negatively," but it lingers. Then, slowly but surely, I grow jealous of everyone who has kept their head above the water this whole time (regardless of whether or not I saw them sink too), and the cycle starts again.

In short, Limp Bizkit had it down, "jealousy filling up my fucked up mind" (Durst, 2000).

Repentance for the poem before this.

Selfish Ramblings No. 1: Normalcy

I fear being "normal." Over the years it's been hinted at, insinuated, that there is something mentally off with me, though I've never been diagnosed or evaluated in any formal sense.

Everything I do is for the audience. The cameras, the directors, the costumers, consumers. The way I cry—how I speak aloud when my head is in my hands, when and with what rapidity I wipe my tears, how hard I thunk my head on the cabinet behind me and to what degree do I roll it to the side x number of seconds after impact. How long I stand outside in the cold, alone, and how many (or how few) layers I wear to do so. Aestheticizing my suffering, for the sake of suffering. I'm sure I wouldn't be half as miserable if not for my flair for the dramatics. But is a play still a play with no audience, no director, no co-stars, no witnessing or recording of it at all? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, yada yada.

I fear being "normal," in whatever sense, as that means I am in fact, like everyone else, and everyone else must have some secret way to deal with things far better than I have ever learned, or will ever know. Perhaps I'm too in love with the humanity in hurt to be open to learning how to exist without it.

As frigtened as I am of normalcy, maybe that is proof of my exclusion. And if that is true, soon comes the switch to yearning for what I don't have.