I’m having a hard day. I realise it’s kind of dramatic to say that forty two minutes after I woke up but I am. So maybe the more accurate thing to say is the hardness of the last few days have spilled into today, congealing while I slept. There’s a part of me that is hesitant to say that because maybe if I declare today a hard day then it will become a hard day. And maybe this post is just me going out of my way to manufacture evidence for a story I’ve told myself. You know, if you blog about having a bad day then you must be having a bad day. And that feels self-indulgent in an almost immoral kind of way. Like I’m seeking attention. I don’t know. My brain does that sometimes. It takes things that I draw comfort from and turns them into harmful, immoral things. So on top of having a bad day, I’m also worried that talking about, or just recognising it, is a character flaw, a nuisance. I’m endlessly worried that I’m a terrible person. But that’s neither here nor there.

I’m having a hard day. It’s nothing specific though there are tangible things I could point out that are making me sad but I think I’ll survive them. It’s the slow drip of existence. It’s the surviving. Yesterday I had this moment where I tried to imagine my future, tried to balance the potential happiness, fulfilment, etc. against the cost of survival and it just didn’t seem worth it. I’m aware that that is a foolish thing to do. For one, I have no way of knowing how anything will feel in the future. I can only draw from the experiences I’ve had so far. So really, I wasn’t even imagining my future, if anything, I was just projecting my past. Which would mean that the scales of my life are at a deficit, it would mean that I don’t think my life so far has been worth it. And really if you think about it, isn’t that a more terrifying thought? To know that for sure? To look at the heaps of your life and think it mostly garbage? Like I said, my brain does that: it takes my life and turns it to shit.

So I’m trying to move away from thinking of life as worth it or not. Trying to move away from feeling like I’m owed more joy than pain. Because I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know that that is the point of existence. I read something about reincarnation: someone was wondering how many people must be experiencing art they made in a different lifetime, oblivious to that former existence. It made me so sad. Because most of my life, and especially lately, my writing has been the only pro I could consistently balance against the cons of existence. Most days I’m just trying to live long enough to write something that matters. So to do it and then to die and have to live another life, striving for some other source of meaning is so heartbreaking to me. I don’t know that I can handle more than a lifetime. I don’t know that I can do this over and and over again. God, I’m so tired.

Maybe that is all it comes down to. I’m thinking of all the life left to be lived and I’m just so tired. I’m annoyed that I can’t take a break. That I can’t take a nap for two years and pick up where I left off. I’m annoyed that there’s always a price to be paid. I’m annoyed that life just keeps happening to me, at me. I’m mad that my health needs so much attending to, so much shepherding. I’m mad that relationships require so much work and even when you do it, they still break. I’m sad that my writing constitutes so much rejection and even though I’ve learnt to take them well, I still have days where I’m sobbing in front of a laptop screen terrified that writing this freaking blog is all I’m good at. I’m mad that I have to be conscious through today. I’m annoyed that I have to keep washing dishes, keep learning new things, keep meeting new people, keep breathing in and out for the rest of my life. I’m thinking about the rest of my life and for the life of me, I don’t know that I can keep doing it, pissed as fuck that I have to.

So I’m trying to remember that I’ve had days like this before. That I survived and I’ll keep surviving and even though that makes me incredibly angry and exhausted at the moment, it is good news.

In other news, my short story got published in Shenandoah. Please read it when you can. I am excited and proud that I wrote it.

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Photo by 8machine _ on Unsplash

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