Sometimes I feel a little sh*tty. A little sh*tty isn’t fun because it isn’t full-blown sh*tty. If this were full-blown sh*tty, I wouldn’t use an asterisk. I wouldn’t care about being polite for reasons no one can ascertain. I mean what does the asterisk really accomplish? We all know what the intended word is. Also a little sh*tty isn’t that exciting to hear about because it’s not trendy nor does it leave much room for deep provoking analysis (if that’s your thing). It’s not even worth gossiping about. It is what it is: listless, vague and searching for a higher cause to attach itself to. When was the last time you heard something like: “Friend, you need to watch this movie, it doesn’t even know what it’s about. The plot is like this non-plot of people doing things and saying things but double-guessing themselves and wondering what’s going on…”
But yet a little sh*tty happens because we are people. People who are too confused and tired to be in a constant state of evolution — it’s hard enough existing sometimes let alone encumbering our weary minds with further growth. People who would rather just figure out that sweet spot between overly-buttered and well-buttered microwave popcorn yet end up with a bag of toasty kernel corpses time and time again. Once we get that right maybe then we can learn how to be zippy well-oiled machines executing each #goal with flair. Can life really be a consistent series of transformational moments? If so, please tell me your secrets.
What about the gray days? Where nothing feels or is quite right? Days when your sense of motivation is more RIP than anything else. Days when your feet are leaden roots that hold you hostage to a ceaseless reel of self-defeatist thoughts. I want to hear about them. How people I admire and respect are capable of doubt and mad things like getting insanely agitated with a washing machine and then proceeding to take out frustrations by whacking half-damp laundry against the bathtub while cursing the washing machine’s ancestors. You know it makes no sense but it feels good until it doesn’t. The sun will usually set at this point and in your current state, it will be feel like a death shroud over your dreams, ambitions and everything around it.
You’ll then call your sister and the congealed despair will start to dissipate. She just finished eating crackers in the dark. You’ll laugh. What a bleak picture. She doesn’t even like crackers and there she was pecking away in the dark. Ha ha ha! You were eating a can of tuna yourself but at least you had the foresight to eat by the lamp. She tells you a stronger dose of Prozac might be a worthy investment one of these days. It’s now very dark and even though your life felt like a full stop just ten minutes ago, you feel slightly better.
I think I – like many – can get lost in a picture of how passion should appear, about what momentum should look like, how we should be, what station of life we should be at, how others are suffering and it should ‘provide a perspective’ (believe me it does at times but that perspective doesn’t change the fact I still feel kind of pathetically sh*tty about my own sh*t when I feel sh*tty) and so forth. A discord between where I should be and where I am can make me wonder: what’s wrong with me that I’m not where I should be? It can get rather incoherent and isolating. As though everyone is dancing in a train to the sound of clear-cut purpose/selfless motivation, while you stand there alone at the station (forgotten and bloated with selfish desires) with your sad goat because it’s diseased (and that’s the only reason it didn’t get on board). It’s a dramatic picture but sometimes I feel that way. Kind of aimless, redundant and colourless. I can’t even take the goat as a pet because it’s sick and needs to be put down.
Times when I feel this way, I think of all the other people who also feel a little sh*t and aren’t looking for a pep talk or God forbid to be ‘awakened’ but more so just want a commiserating nod. A friendly nod that says it’s okay if your milestones don’t have a musical soundtrack or a riveting va-voom philosophy entrenched within. It’s not necessary to be firing on all cylinders. I mean who even coined that phrase and is it too late to assassinate the culprit? Also, that it’s rather endearing when you call your milestones, sporadic little ‘millimeter-pebbles’.
Of course I long to have the kind of conviction that’s relentless in its pursuit but sometimes that’s hard because I get too busy with my non-worries which are worries even if they sound ridiculous. But is it really so bad to also be occasionally henpecked by the mundane? Aren’t we all to a degree? Must everything about life be so gloriously meaningful? Or rather is it possible to have a gloriously meaningful life while still getting bogged down by sh*tty little worries, insecurities and saying all the wrong things to the wrong people and OMG what must they think now?!
Can’t we be great (or potentially where we hope to be) yet prone to downfalls all at the same time?
Sometimes you can be tumbling your way down something you really want but don’t know how to keep that momentum going and that’s hard to put that into words. Sometimes you use anecdotes of ‘friends’ as a way to get answers. Sometimes you know what you are doing but then you suddenly don’t and your inability to make sense of your new-found ignorance isn’t a fun place to be. Sometimes you feel like you pay far too much attention to the things that seem to inspire others but you can’t understand why a dead man’s words don’t conjure the same kind of fire in your heart (even though it just did three weeks ago). Sometimes you have a thought and it becomes twenty different thoughts and you forgot what you meant to say to begin with. And sometimes you walk into a grocery shop and you see a potato and it’s all sad, lumpy and goal-less and you feel bad for it and think: look at you all sad, lumpy and goal-less and you realize you are talking about yourself.
And so you go home with your sh*tty-esque mood swinging lethargically over your head. You reach for a book you were reading and it’s nowhere to be found. Clearly life is barren of options and so you sit there in your funk. The phone rings but even that is far away and it dies mid ring because you’re not even capable of charging your phone like a normal person. Your throat constricts and it’s all stupid because there is no reason and maybe you should get a glass of water and once you drink it, you will suddenly have all the motivation/passion in the world to just keep doing what you thought you were doing before you forgot or cared about what it was. And as you walk blinded by mini-grievances, you slip on a plastic Carrefour grocery bag. BAM you go. You lie there like a comatose seal. You vow to make the transition to paper bags even though they are really annoying and crinkly. You’ll get used to it. You think it’s sad that a near death experience with a plastic bag is the only reason you’re embracing an environmentally conscious step. Whatever. Actions are actions, no? Twenty seconds later you flip your face and wonder how the scene would look if it were being watched by spectators? A slight paranoia niggles and just as you haul yourself up, you find a bracelet you thought you lost several weeks ago. It feels like an achievement even though it really isn’t but why not? Why rob yourself of a tiny good thing that came out of a plastic bag and chronic incoordination?
We focus a lot on the ‘big’ things but what about the little things that may propel the big things along? Things like wearing a faded muumuu and questioning the very audacity that you, YOU, of all people deserve what you think you deserve but right now feel too small for. The fears, the unknowns and the doubts. Sometimes it’s easy to linger in that sense of self-defeatism but then one day as you are sad-person web googling, you come across a random image of a skinny pigeon standing in the midst of beautiful peacocks and you think to yourself: look at it, it’s so wretched and God, I mean just look at the tragic mess but then you look closer and see the pigeon is entirely nonchalant. It literally does not care that it’s surrounded by nature’s equivalent of supermodels. It’s a pigeon, it’s owning its space and planting its twig-like appendages on the earth because why the hell not?
Suddenly it hits you. It doesn’t matter who you say you are, it matters who you think you are.
The pigeon becomes a pixelated personification representing the kind of outlook you want. And that day, you vow that every single time you feel kind of sh*tty and fraud-like within your own existence, you will think of the pigeon. You will ask yourself, what would the pigeon do? The answer will be clear.