I chew my fingernails. I drink too much. I eat too much. I take too many drugs. Even as I write this I am intermittently chewing my fingernails and sipping on a glass of wine. I have dozens of detrimental behaviors which I cannot stop doing. I used to never watch television, but now I have a 30-item queue on Netflix and I surf HBO and EPIX on demand just so that I don’t have to listen to the thoughts in my own head. I have ventured into a banal valley of my life, but I can’t seem to do anything about it but watch movies to distract myself, mutilate my hands, and drink myself to sleep at night.
It’s a First World Problem; I get it. People across the world starving to death and struggling to make ends meet while I have a cushy job teaching school in America. I should just shut up and be happy, but … whatever. Every time I look at my husband I want to scream. He makes me sick to my stomach, because he reflects all the reasons that I am disgusted with my life. None of that is his fault, but that hardly matters. Our relationships with others are just weird projections of our own personal junk. While I may make a difference with students at school sometimes, I never seem to make a difference in my own life. I have been walking into the same wall over and over like a child’s animatronic robot for years, and it’s just getting old. Somehow my life became a self-constructed prison. I want to just roam about for a while and extract myself from the tethers that bind me to this stifling place. I hate it here. Or maybe I just hate who I am becoming here.
I think I could hate it less here if I could occasionally get away, but I can’t. When I read the stupid, vapid People Magazine about the “tragedy” of Heidi Klum & Seal’s (or Johnny Depp and Vanessa’s) separation, I am nothing but jealous. Tell me again how Jennifer Lopez divorced Mark Antony and is now running around a man half her age. I don’t feel bad for these people - I envy their ability to change their lives and live in the moment! Separation and divorce is not necessarily a bad thing! I understand that it is hurtful and causes scars, but who would we be without those scars? We’d be boring, if nothing else. Maybe people aren’t meant to live their whole lives with one other person. Maybe THAT is the crux of the issue. Maybe people SHOULDN’T try to stay together no matter what (or even worse, “for the children”). Maybe our children deserve more than a compromise as an example of how to live and love. Maybe if our children saw us actually living the way we want to, they would be more inclined to take risks and make something more of themselves (and be less likely to settle in their own lives).
I might still drink too much and chew my fingernails if I moved somewhere else, but at least I would know that I tried to live out loud rather than moping into oblivion. Every day older is another reason to stop being mediocre and start off on a new path. It’s not fair of me to turn all my negativity and distain for my own life choices on to my husband just because he happens to be there and will take it like a slug. Everything that is wrong with my life is wrong because I have allowed it to happen. It’s all on me. Knowing that my life is a collection of my own decisions doesn’t make it suck any less to look in the mirror and wish I could step through to the other side, but I am heartbeats away from profound change. For better or worse.
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