PASSING FOR NORMAL

Ephemeral soul bouts

There are times when I am excited about my hair, my job, the people around me, when I cook, I read, I write, I dance and there are times when I just cease to .. live … I just collapse onto myself and I start obsessing about all the mistakes I had done in my life, all the people I wronged, all the opportunities lost … It is not consolation enough anymore to think that other people go through the same periods of inexistence. It is certainly not relevant to my daily life to think of all the madness and misery in the world and I certainly do not feel blessed by comparison. People who do, in my opinion, are self-absorbed disillusioned small-minded pricks. If anything the collective despair in the world nowadays adds to my little circle of hopelessness and the guilt adds to my self-loathing and helplessness.
I never have the tolerance for bringing the metaphysical into my life in order to reconcile with the universe, never believe in self-help life styles, and I make fun of people who insert an abstract vocabulary in their sentences as a way to find excuses or reasons for their unhappiness or lack of purpose or lack of .. well.. living. My friend brought me ‘the secret’ on DVD to make me sit down and listen, having dismissed all of his attempts to quote to me from the book over the phone. He knows that I tend to worry a lot and tend to be negative even to the point of being deeply suspicious of what other people might perceive as happiness or even success, it is my curse .. I keep items in the fridge that normally are perfectly fine at room temperature because I would be anxious otherwise. I procrastinate because I am afraid of facing failure, because I am afraid of facing success … and I live in guilt.
‘The secret’ just pissed me off. It basically goes back to tell you that any misfortune in your life is your fault because you have summoned the negative thoughts that, according to the concept, materialize into your actual life. What a load of crap. It made me mad. One of the main exercises to live by the rules of ‘the secret’ is to make a visual board, where you have pictures that represent goals you want to achieve and things you want to acquire, and according to ‘the secret’ you should be able to obtain those things if you put them ‘out there’ in ‘the universe’.
I’m so sick and tired of people trying to find reasons for why we are not happy. I’m sick and tired of the exploitation of the self-help and the self-improvement business, the affirmative attitude, the books , the seminars, the people on tv whining because they’re single or broke or because they’re sloppy or lazy … Doesn’t it always go back to the same thing, the same question, the same reason for feeling lost and unfulfilled? The same disappointment faced with shackles that anchor our soul, shackles and responsibilities and commitments we willingly fell into in order to feel more relevant in this world. We are trapped when we think we’re not and we are sad when we think we’re not and we are not living when we think we are, and we need ‘the secret’ to explain that? We are trapped. We are slaves to the everyday rhythm, to the acceptable weight, the acceptable shade, the respectable bank account or title or power. We cannot but remain ‘connected’ on virtual venues and 3D virtual venues and venues about virtual venues fearing to fall out of ‘life’ or the life that someone had convinced us we should have. We look at photos of current friends and previous friends and feel inferior and not nearly happy enough. We feel lonely. We run to achieve a crust, a crust of glamour, a layer of shine. Stuck in half-finished projects, half-finished relationships, in the quest for the most intimidating look, the most prestigious hobby and sadly the most empowering charity case. Stuck in a shape for life, a grammar for a society, a calendar.
Our calendar has become our ‘visual board’. Our calendar includes no more dreams, no more aspirations but appointments and commitments and steps on the quest towards social acceptance. We need to feel relevant and the best forms we have come up with yet are organized traditions and religions and fanaticism and conformity. In societies where individualism became the structure of societies, we lost track of what should drive us and so we became collective consumers of similar foods and similar thoughts and similar ideas, albeit behind closed doors and in a more lonely fashion. The self-help crap is just another form of organized thought.
The human soul that suffers. I have decided to call soul that thing that keeps us hoping. That extra thing, the extra twinkle in our eyes when we cease to just be, when we get to live. We suffer even more intensely because we have known a time when we were not suffering. Because we miss the bouts of our ephemeral souls. We live in nostalgia to moments where we felt our soul awakening. Same in love. Same in every human emotion. When we love and lose, we grab onto those memories and we suffer because we miss the bouts of our soul. We live on the memory of loving ourselves and of simply living when allowed for a soul awakening. We hold on and not let go and try to cram the memory into our present life, faced with the possibility of another stretch of empty soul.
There’s really no answer and people who do not relate to any of that also piss me off. The people who live just blissfully on the surface of life, perfectly content with their small achievements and small thoughts .. you know .. the lucky ones!
I miss my soul these days.
I’ll just wait for a stimulus to bring it back. In the meantime, I go on automatically, I cease to live, I cease to celebrate the days … it’s ok .. it only makes the next adventure more interesting …
So I put up a ‘visual board’, on it is my picture smiling …