I’m thirty-three. I’m running out of time. I’m going through puberty.
Lately, just before the new year, I was increasingly feeling anxious, about career, love, and my balding head. Panic attacks ensued on late, dreadful and pitch-black-no-one-can-see-me nights. Every day, I spent just about every minute try not to kill myself. I have to work out a routine.
Is this a mid-life crisis? Constant retrospection of who I am, what I’ve done and what I’m going to do as the end draws near? Is everything I’ve strived for worth the wait and sacrifice, or is it nothing but void? Is everything I’ve despised and resisted for my whole life still subjectively wrong and disgusting, or is it becoming neutral or even attractive after all? By that token, have I wasted all my years chasing a mirage while holding off of the juicy bits of life and human existence that justify being alive. Am I dried up, inside and outside, becoming nothing but the skin of a walking dead? Who sucked the life out of me?
After all, I’m changing careers, losing friends, and deconstructing and reconstructing personal philosophy. And who am I kidding, I’m not going to live into my seventies, so this IS the midpoint of my life, literally. Yet this is also different. There are glaring discrepancies that don’t fit the pattern of a typical male midlife crisis. I know it, from the experience I never had. I know it, a priori.
Men in midlife crisis have families, jobs and possessions. And the responsibilities associated with those. And burdens from those responsibilities. They need to vent. They need an out. They look to escape. Into a space for themselves, if only for just a second. Mistress. Porsche. Autoerotic journeys. Free, private, personal spaces.
I’m different. Responsibilities and burdens don’t apply to me because “I have no job, no money, no women, no prospects, no action, and no conceivable reasons to get up in the morning”. I need responsibilities to chain myself, so I don’t fling out of space. I need burdens to grab hold onto, so I don’t free-fall down the pit of myself. I need an in. I look to enter. Into the space that is society, where men and women live, connect and disconnect.
It’s funny that I’m living in the world every day, among people, yet I spent every second looking for a key to the room that I’m already in, and looking for a way to connect with the persons who I already know. I am in, but I am not WITHIN.
The very realization of familiarity turning into thick, opaque oddity reminds me of puberty, which, the last time I recall, I’ve been through once. So I know. I’m going through puberty once more. Twenty years later.
What is adulthood? Being an adult is to be alone, cynic and stoic. I was never like that. I’m struggling to be that.
I was never alone. Then I was. And I was happy. Then I wasn’t. I seem to have acquaintances, but only to find out that they don’t acquaint me, or worse, they were asked to accompany me. It was a shame. I feel sorry for them and for me. Periodically I say a few things. It was as if blasting noise into the space. Noise is meant to be annoying and ignored. Gradually I stopped talking when it became clear that no one wants to listen.
I learned to listen. Listen to what’s not spoken. Listen to what’s beyond the spoken. Listen to what’s meant not to be spoken. I used to say too much. I still am. And to speak is, sometimes, to blunder. So I don’t say anything. But to be silent is, sometimes, also to blunder. So I stutter.
I was never a cynic. I am morbidly romantic to the point that I’ve been chronically attracted to the wrong women. Provocative. Magnetic. Vivacious. Feisty in a good way. Overbearing at times. There’s always something. I’m intrigued and addicted. I’d give the sun, the moon and the stars.
But above all, or deeply underneath, they’re cynics. Nothing romantic will happen when romanticism meets cynicism. But just like every other contradiction in life, I love it. I love it when they say weird things, have weird taste, and are just out of reach so I’m constantly chasing. But when the problem of the relationship is the very definition and foundation of it, it never lasts. And I hate it. I hate if for myself. They are cynics, so they could never be anyone’s girlfriend but then somebody’s wife. It hurts so much to realize people I adore are simply more compatible with someone else. I guess we’ll just agree to disagree. And walk away.
I was never stoic. I was arrogant. Arrogance crumbles easily. And I’m picking up the pieces and morphing them into someone that’s not me. Or is it a new me? A better me? But at least I’ll be able to withstand the trial of life, without bitterness and self-loathing, or even at times, with humor.
But there’s no time for me. I’m crushed. Everyone else is crushing it. So I need a routine to build mental fortitude. I crave clockwork. Punching in at 9, gym at 12, punching out at 5, dinner at 7, foreplay at 10:30. Date night on Wednesday. Board game on Saturday. Trash day on Monday. I don’t need every person in the world to validate my insecurity. I crave order. I crave the gravity of life. I suck a robot’s cock. I AM a robot. That might just be what adolescence is about —— Coalesce into adulthood.
This is when I painfully realized that I never became an adult. I’ve been a kid trapped in puberty for years and never got out of it. There lies my dichotomy, the uneasiness that I experience every second. Thoughts in my head, shockingly naive; Actions I took, inconceivably primordial. Words out of my mouth, cringingly clumsy; Decisions I made, invariably inconsistent. People around me are confused because of the mismatch between the immature ideas and the non-immature biological presence. I am confused by the schizophrenic self that cannot be torn apart. Believe me, I have tried.
Every time I tried to connect with someone, it was as if shouting into a web of darkness that doesn’t echo or reflect. Now I know why. I wasn’t talking to THEM. I was talking to ME, the adult, through the lens of another person. But the adult me is not there, fully formed and functional, and hence the darkness. It’s a void that I know I have to bridge to be complete, very much like a salmon has to swim back to the river bank that is fateful yet suicidal. I am determined to do it. I’ve been doing it, at the expense of my time and many others’.
Of course, I don’t have to. I’ve been resisting as much as and for as long as I’ve been pushing. Alcohol. Narcotics. Gambling. Rendezvous. What teens are doing, I’ve been doing for longer, harder and sadder. In the end, I’m just an average guy, looking to escape the night, and through connections, looking for self, love, and inner peace. it doesn’t matter I’m 15, 40 or 80. the quest for the constant in an ever-changing body and world stays the same.
Or just pull the plug and call it a day.
— F— Bridget. F— me. —
历史上的今天: 这个夏天你做了什么 6: 局内人; 生日歌; 心脏
