Sometimes I feel this outrage that everything I was told growing up was a lie. And maybe I don't really believe it, like deep down, but maybe I do, even deeper down. I was led to believe that if I worked hard and was a good person, holding doors open and paying my taxes and what not, I'd be happy. I don't know if I really believed it. I've always been a bit of a skeptic, but I've also always felt this longing. An emptiness that I just don't know how to fill that is always there, somewhere just below the surface. But I've always held out hope that if I did all the right things, checked all the right boxes, I'd fill that hole with something warmer and fuzzier.
The older I get, the more I realize there isn't a point where a switch goes on and shit finally makes sense. There's just life. It turns out success doesn't magically solve your problems and love doesn't conquer all. Sometimes they just make the ache worse, because they take away my excuses. I can't even blame the details of my life which I am helpless to control. The only place left to look is inward. The only conclusion left is that it isn't the world that's broken...
So often I feel like a visitor in this life. Watching it go by, touching the lives that pass mine like a hand reached down from a boat cutting through the water. I don't know how to explain to people that I've just never felt like I belong here. There's no good way to tell the people that love you, and who you love back, how lonely you always feel. There are roles and expectations and masks that we wear. I can't bring myself to hang my sadness around their necks, because talking about it doesn't bring me happiness, it just spreads more sadness. It's a gift that is given by being kept and carried instead.
And maybe my parents kept theirs, like their parents before them. We hand this sadness down, like silverware, generation after generation with this hope that if we give them the right circumstances and love and everything we think we never had that this generation will break free and find happiness. Maybe we know it's folly. An empty hope built more on desperation than belief.
Until one day you wake up and you're turning 35 and you realize that hope has ever been the greatest carrier for sadness. It makes promises in the dark and forgets them in the light. I feel it slipping away sometimes and I'm terrified by the thought that maybe it was the only thing holding me together in that darkness.
But morning always comes. It just never brings salvation.
