This is You

I found my pen again.

It's been seven months or something, but whatever, right? Sometimes you fall off the horse, you lose your pen, you get distracted by the things that don't even matter to you, you find yourself with head and body aches like you've never felt before, staring at the pillow next to you when your dog (your best friend and the only constant in your life outside yourself) dies; you find yourself staring at that same pillow before you go into work and when you get back from work. You watch your tears sink into the grey pillowcase and into the cotton stuffing beneath it and after you're done crying, you start to wonder what happens to all of that moisture--does it turn to mold if you let it sit for too long? You go and play tennis when someone asks you to because you're tired of being suffocated by your own thoughts and sometimes they pay you for it. You start to go for runs in the morning. You workout. You're starting to get pretty damn good at pull-ups. You start to read self-help books--books that tell you about how you're awesome, you create your own reality, and how the universe reflects the frequency of the energy you put out, whether that be high or low. You resolve to put out high frequency energy. You start a project and are determined to finish it, knowing it will take months, maybe even years until you're done. It makes you feel nice. It's when you start taking care of yourself like this that you start to think that maybe you really don't need the love and acceptance of all of those around you. That in reality, they do love you. They love you and they don't realize it. And even if you lost all of those dearest to you, you know that you would still love yourself and feel at home in this all-connected world.

Things are going to be great. You're on the up and up now.

You're standing up straight and you're shaving daily and you uninstall Tinder.

You have important things to do now. You're building something you're really into. You're building yourself.

But then something happens.

The same way you edged out of a self-loathing hole that focused on a past filled with mistakes, you edge back into it. You wake up and you want nothing to do with anything outside of your bed. You don't even necessarily want to be in bed, but you don't want to be anywhere at all and sleep is a retreat, so you stay.

You sputter. Your brain is slow. No amount of coffee can help you wake up because you've gotten used to drinking pots at a time in your super productive phase.

And all of this time, I haven't meant you. I've meant me obviously. Sometimes it is nice to hide behind the second-person narrative because it means I do not have to take accountability.

There's a Kendrick Lamar song called "Real" and in each verse he talks about different people and the things that they love (e.g. material objects, conflict-filled lifestyles) to fill the holes in their hearts. He finishes each verse with "But what's love got to do with it when you don't love yourself?" I think about that a lot. How can anything else matter when you don't love yourself?

More recently, I was learning about the history of advertising. A common advertising method is inventing a need or a problem and then providing a solution with the advertised product. The most well-known example of this would be Listerine inventing halitosis (bad breath) and putting info about the new disease on their bottles. The symptoms of bad breath, aside from the smell, were namely that you would not be accepted socially, professionally or romantically. The product itself is never what the consumer wants. It is the cure, the answer to their problems, the success that they think will bring them happiness. Remember, "ignorance is bliss." Had the ad campaign not stretched so far, most people would not have cared about bad breath, or at least would not have associated it with an unseemly, unprofessional, unattractive person. Happiness and self-love are sacrificed when we believe that there is something wrong with us simply for being ourselves as humans (who have breath that smells because the mouth is a dark, wet orifice that gets filled with food that decays).

And I have been loving myself as best I can. It's such a tough thing to do sometimes. You can't walk down the street or get on social media without being put to shame for something. Maybe it's being skinny, maybe it's being fat, maybe it's looking like a meathead, maybe it's looking like you're too feminine or too masculine, maybe it's looking white in a non-white neighborhood, or vice versa. Sometimes it's people knowing your story before they know you and it's you buying into that story. More often it is you creating the stories and, like a talented ventriloquist having a conversation with a puppet, having your own fictional voices spewed back onto you. Whatever the case, most of your guilt, anxiety, depression is self-created.  You apologize. You feel like you're not good enough. You feel like you've done something wrong. You find the proof in that someone you like does not like you back. You find the proof in that one time you said something mean to someone. You find the proof in whatever you want, just to believe that you actually are something far less than what a money-hungry society, and now you, thinks you should be.

You trap yourself in a tiny prison. You say, "This is you. You are in this cell. Do not move. I want to know who/what/where/why/how you are, always. If I do not know this about you, then I don't know how you fit into the world around me, I do not know what you should want, I do not know how other people should view you, and I do not know who you are." Even though it's yourself! Why do you do this? Why do you have these pages-long dialogues with yourself on blog posts? Why do you sit in your room killing your free time, thinking about all of the ways you have messed up in the past and turning the prison in your head into a reality?

Why do you keep switching back to second person? It's in your hands.

It's in my hands.

When I die, I'll just be an idea in someone else's head. Hopefully my loved ones won't have too much pain but by then I won't have hopes or pains and I won't feel sympathy. It will be impossible for me to feel sympathy. All of our lives are relatively short; length of time is of no consequence. I am essentially just a (somewhat) unique assembly of corporeal energy and matter that could just as well take the form of a rock until I figure out that 

whatever I am doing or feeling is EXACTLY what I should be doing or feeling. 

Never mind what others might be doing or feeling. That's for them. I'm only one person and my life is short. If I figure that out, then it will be a life well-lived for me. Self-love is the purest form of love and the energy it radiates is palpable and I must hold onto that instead of the bars of my self-created prison. It is in my hands to free myself.


I love them, I love when I love her,
I love so much, I love when love hurts
...
But what love got to do with it when I don't love myself?