I hear them say it sometimes, the ones with the stress-free smiles and the freshly whitened teeth. They levitate towards you at parties, smelling of expensive soap and self-satisfaction, the ones who think they’ve got life all figured out because they read it in a book or heard it on daytime television. They lean in, their eyes full of a phony, placid wisdom, and they whisper the gospel of the numb:
“Life was never meant to be understood,” they say. “It was meant to be felt.”
What a load of horseshit.
That’s the kind of line they sell you to keep you quiet, to keep you chained to your own misery. It’s the philosophy of the sheep, whispered by all the Oprahs and the self-help gurus and the pop-star prophets. They’re the dealers of the matrix, all of them, and their product is a cheap, sweet-tasting morphine drip designed to make you feel good about lying down and dying quietly in the cage society built for you.
They say you shouldn’t try to fix life, to solve it, to control it. That it’s a “wave” you’re meant to let move through you. A wave? Christ. Life isn’t a wave. It’s a goddamn meat grinder. It’s a boot to the teeth. It’s a brick wall you run into at full speed, over and over again. And the things that move through you? Yeah, there’s joy, maybe, for a minute, before it gets snatched away. But mostly it’s fear. It’s heartbreak. It’s the quiet, gnawing dread that this is all there is.
This is the part that really gets me, the part that makes me want to puke up my guts. They say, “You were never broken. You were becoming.”
Don’t you ever let them sell you that lie. Of course you were broken. You were born broken. We all are. “Becoming” is just a pretty word for learning how to walk with a limp, for finding a new way to carry the same old goddamn weight.
They’re the same sonsabitches who will stand over your bed in some goddamn hospice, pat your hand while the cancer is eating you alive, and tell you to “fight the good fight.” Tell you that it’s the “honorable thing to do” to endure the pain, to be brave, to accept your fate.
Fuck that.
You want to know what a real man does when he knows the game is almost over? He doesn’t just “feel” the end coming. He doesn’t fight a battle he can’t win. He looks at the handful of days he has left, and he decides to live. He decides to get out of that sterile, piss-stinking room and go fuck every last ladyboy in Thailand if that’s what his dying heart desires. He doesn’t just take the shitty hand society deals him. He throws the goddamn cards back in the dealer’s face and says, “Redeal.”
This whole idea of just “feeling” life is a philosophy for the prey. It’s for the zebras who stand there, eyes wide with blind acceptance, while the lion’s teeth are sinking into their neck. They want you to just accept it, to feel it. No. I want to be the goddamn lion.
And you can be. Any time in this life, you can stop, look at the bad hand you’ve been dealt, and walk away from the table. There’s a bus leaving town every single day. You don’t have to be the zebra if you don’t want to. And if you’re making up excuses—the kids, the family, the mortgage—do you really believe the world will stop spinning because of your grand, important existence? No. Within two weeks of you dying, your spouse will have a new Tinder account, your children will be back at their jobs chasing their own version of the American dream, and the bank will have a “For Sale” sign from Zillow hammered into your goddamn lawn.
They say the sadness comes when we try to hold on to things. No. The sadness comes from the cold, hard, sober realization that there was never anything to hold onto in the first place. Everything you ever loved wasn’t “borrowed.” It was just on a short-term lease, and the landlord was a sonofabitch who always came to collect. The beauty was never in the “being.” It was in the brief, stupid, beautiful moment before you realized it was all going to end badly.
So when they tell you, “If you’re hurting, don’t rush to escape it. Feel it all. It’s part of the dance…”
You tell them to go to hell.
Escaping the hurt is the whole goddamn point. It’s the only game worth playing. You drink to escape it. You fuck to escape it. You gamble to escape it. You write to escape it. And life isn’t a “dance.” It’s a goddamn drowning. You don’t “feel it all.” You kick and you scratch and you claw for any piece of floating wreckage you can find to keep your head above water for one more goddamn second.
I look at the stars, and I don’t just “feel” them. I know that I can change them. I know that I am not happy being where I am, and I refuse to compromise. I refuse to be the man they want me to be. This isn’t about being broken. It’s about being awake. The people who tell you to “embrace the journey” are the same ones who will sell you the ticket on a train that’s headed straight for a cliff.
You don’t just accept the life you’re given. You take it by the throat. You wrestle it to the ground. You make it your own. And if you don’t like the rules, you burn the whole goddamn rulebook and write your own.
That’s the only truth that matters. And if you’re lucky, you get a few good, hard, ugly, beautiful moments before you finally go under for good. That’s it. That’s the whole show.
