Week 2 of the blog and I already feel a little worse for wear. Already feel behind. Already lost faith. I’m not being entirely honest when I say that; I just haven’t had a coffee yet. All these millennial proverbs are starting to ring true and it’s totally shitting me.
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I’ve slept on the same bed, in the same room, for almost three years. And it’s only just now that I’ve realised there’s too many fucking mirrors in this place. It’s only got the one, but it’s big. Huge, even. Full-sized, attached to a sliding door so it can track you pace back and forth as you stress over money troubles and having a girlfriend allergic to planet Earth. It’s the first thing I look at when I wake up. I can slide it the other way, but that means it’s waiting for when I go to my desk.
My alarm’s set before the sun’s. I flick the kitchen light on and boil the kettle, scrape some Vegemite onto two pieces of charred bread before I make it back to my room. Sometimes there’s a second or two in-between the toast being done and jug bubbling away. If I’m not face down in my phone, I can make out a distorted patch of skin through the translucent plastic of the kettle’s water gauge.
After I eat, I shower, put on work pants that never come clean, and open my laptop.
How do you see me, dear reader? Don’t answer that – you’ll look like a total cock talking at your phone. I just keep getting distracted, is all.
I can’t concentrate properly because I can catch this wanker just out the corner of my eye. They’re fucking deadpan, let me tell you, taking whatever they’re doing way too seriously. It’s six in the a.m. now and this dickhead’s got their running shoes on with nowhere to go. Greasy hair, raccoon eyes, all slouchy and shit. Fucking pathetic.
Their writing is vapid, just half-assed passages about the human condition pelted with vulgar language that hits like hailstones when you read it. It ain’t pretty. Now they’re looking at a friend’s blog to simultaneously find a bout of inspiration, steal some of their good bits, and dig the proverbial knife in a little deeper. I think they’ve somehow managed to do all three:
Crazy or broken or mentally ill or whatever the fuck you want to call it are all just different ways to say different. Sometimes being different is a good thing and sometimes it isn’t. Depends on the situation. Being the one to speak out and say ‘fuck off’ to the Man sounds like a good thing. If the Man in question is your mother telling you not to move to the Gold Coast for a girl you’ve known for less than sixty days, you were probably acting like a bit of a shit – and that’s a bad thing. I’ve always wanted to be different, but then whenever I got there through rash decisions or harsh opinions or general fuckery, I felt I went too far and wanted to backtrack. Be normal again, which would bore me sooner rather than later and kickstart the process all over again. This ebb and flow state throughout life has led me to saying things I don’t mean and doing things that aren’t “me”, so what’s the solution to this psychological tug-of-war?
Well, it’s to just be yourself. Do whatever you want to do and don’t let anyone else tell you any different. Sacrifice good things to become something great. It means listening to yourself, following your heart.
But if you’re spittzed out your mind and even the mirror is telling you piss off, what then? I tell myself that the mirror doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know who I am, they’re just a replica, a facsimile without all the good bits that wouldn’t even exist were I not there. They’re just something I created and something I could just as easily take out of this world if I really wanted to. Could I?
I often think about who I “really” am, in the eyes of my family, my friends, the beholder, as well as myself. All the myriad ways in which people have perceived me. For years, I used those thoughts to Frankenstein myself into something I thought would be socially acceptable. But that’s just like putting a hat on a hat. It’s redundant, because we’re all just taking from the same communal whirlpool of indiscriminate thoughts and applying our own meaning to it. The solution isn’t to apply your own interpretation onto someone else’s idea, it’s to figure out which ideas are truly yours and which are merely reflections.
Bea's Soapbox 