For a long time, I’ve been hoping and somewhat expecting to live to the age of 100—which is a lofty goal and depends heavily on a combination of luck and self-care as I grow older. Life expectancy in this part of the world has been increasing broadly for a long time and while I feel like we’re getting close to the limit of what we can do with medicine to prolong life, people do continue to live longer and when I meet someone who’s 98 and still has a personality, I want to be that person some day.
However, more and more, I feel I’ve reached the halfway point approaching 38, and it feels like maybe I only have 38 years to go, give or take. Whether you live to be 76 or 100, life is short and it throws you these paralyzing and confusing challenges that make you question your own identity and whether or not you can really sustain any joy for that length of time. No matter how bad things get, it’s always better to be alive than to close the door on it with the crushing finality of death, so I’ve never been in such a dark place that I had considered ending it all.
But it’s hard to be alive—and I know, there’s millions of people that have it worse off than me, but happiness is relative and it has been really difficult for me to understand why I’ve been unable to meet my own expectations in life. I know I have a great deal of potential, but it seems like the circumstances I’ve encountered in my adult life have been unassailable barriers to fulfilling that potential. I try to be self-aware and own the mistakes I’ve made, rationalizing how my own actions have contributed to my various downfalls. And there’s a lot of those mistakes, especially in my early adult life—I’ve come to terms with them and I’ve learned a lot of lessons from that. However, in trying to apply those lessons going forward, it has ultimately only hurt me and I’m running out of ways to place the blame on myself.
I am very much an introvert and I’m quite content to spend a lot of time by myself. However, there’s a big difference between an introvert and a complete “loner” who doesn’t really want to make any meaningful connection with another person ever. An introvert like me tends to have a small number of close friends and those friendships are cherished because although we don’t say much in public, we usually have quite a lot to say and not many people to say those things to. And it’s important to have those kinds of friendships, because if you spend too much time in your own head, your ideas can be corrupted and poisoned by your own thought process without anyone to check you.
The scary part of that poison is when you begin to reject the feedback of your friends, knowing that they don’t really understand the situation. You lose sight of their good intentions and their inability to understand leaves a bitter emptiness in your stomach that cripples your ability to see what steps you should take next. It’s a nice idea to think that you can get on a progressive track early in life and then things just get better and better as you age, but the reality is that it’s a roller coaster of ups and downs for a long time before you find any sustained period of peace. And some people never find it, and I just refuse to accept that I will be one of those people.
I feel like I’m good at all the things that are supposed to matter in life. I am kind, I am generous, I am smart, I am honest and I have a lot of useful skills that often dwarf the skills of nearly everyone I’ve worked with in almost any job. But I have absolutely no ego about any of these things because they seem to work against me.
As it turns out, being kind and generous typically results in doing a lot more for others and less for yourself with the only return being a solid reputation as a “nice guy.” As for being “smart,” well, it was never an advantage socially throughout school, but I had assumed intelligence would eventually be a coveted trait in people as I became an adult. I was wrong. Intelligence only seems to be valued when someone needs something done that they can’t figure out for themselves. Otherwise, people seem to find it off-putting, as if it’s an attack on their own self-esteem to be interacting with someone who is smarter than they are. I’ve never been able to understand it, because I feel like I’ve matured to the point that I want to be surrounded by people who are smarter than me. I want to have my ideas challenged by other people and if they can convince me of something I hadn’t thought of before in a way that makes sense to me, I consider that growth.
Then there’s honesty. The “best policy,” they say. Well, it’s not. We live in a world that is steeped in lies and half-truths—social interactions between most people are heavily sanitized to meet the unwritten rules of what is and is not “appropriate” civilized conversation. So people are scared to actually be honest, and I get that, because real honesty is buried under these societal norms. But at the same time, people will claim that they don’t want to be lied to and they just want the straight truth. However, if you actually deliver the honest truth, people are not ready for it. They are fragile and have been conditioned to expect the sanitized version of the truth and if you really try and be honest, you run the risk of causing extreme social discomfort and damaging relations with them forever.
Then there’s this matter of having “skills” that are ostensibly valuable but ultimately have worked against me as well. I’ve worked a ton of different jobs and some of them were definitely not suited to my skill set, but most of the time, regardless of whether I’m passionate about it or not, I can out-perform almost anyone in even the simplest lines of work. Nobody in the kitchen made a better Teen Burger than I did at A&W when I was in high school, nobody made better lattes for minimum wage than I did at a coffee shop for several months, nobody could produce the stuff I could produce in a whole host of office jobs over the years and today, working in a hospital transporting patients around, you couldn’t ask for a better employee. I’m pretty much the best in the field. I know this is true.
But in all of these areas in life, I just seem to lose. There is no reward for hard work, there is no reward for intelligence and there is no reward for honesty. Nobody actually values those traits unless it benefits them directly. My reward for being intelligent is other people being intimidated by who I am. My reward for having objectively valuable skills is making enemies with jealous people who have more power and continuously try to push me down. And my reward for being honest, is losing my friends.
So, if I have at least another 38 years to go, it’s not clear to me how I’m supposed to navigate the rest of my life, but it sure seems confusing right now. I know I do have to descend into my own head for awhile and make some music just in order to complete something associated with one of the three pillars of contentment I’ve been struggling to sustain, because the other two pillars are all messed up right now and creativity is all I’ve got left.
I’m a little scared about getting too deep in my own head and losing my sense of identity that way, but the main thing is to keep on going. A beat is pulsating in my head and it won’t stop, and that’s how I know I’m still alive.
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