choosing hope
I have to believe in the goodness of mankind because if I don’t then I will explode into a million pieces. If I don’t, then what is there to believe in? In this world of exploitation and misery and isolation, it’s actually kind of hot to be like… hopeful. It’s actually a little… rebellious and dirty😏. This is something I’ve been wrestling with over the past few years, and I have reached a point where I have come to some sort of conclusion (not an answer or solution for anything) and I would like to share that with you.
It feels good to choose joy, to choose contentment and reflection over succumbing to the depraved. I can’t remember where I read this for the life of me, but I recently read a passage in some book about how suffering and choosing to live in despair is actually the easy way out and is the easier choice than just experiencing life through a joyous and appreciative lens. I believe this idea came from a book that may have been religious in nature? I quite literally can’t remember but it doesn’t matter anyway.
This fucked me up for some time because it felt as though I was skinned alive lowkey. It just exposed parts of me I had tied up with a pretty bow and declared as “solved”.
There was a point in my life, a few years ago, when I almost took some perverse pleasure in how miserable I was. How tortured and contemplative I was.
I had a hard time accepting that anyone could view me as “smart” or worth listening to if I wasn’t living, breathing, emulating the misery translated and narrated by some of my favorite authors. And trust, this is a super weird and fine line I am attempting to explain and walk and to be honest you shouldn’t even listen to me because I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I have to believe SOMEONE out there has gone through a similar experience to what I am attempting to articulate.
I had this idea stuck in my head that in order to be seen as intelligent, to have something to present to the world, to be great, you have to wallow in hopelessness and tread the ever-flowing current of dread. But the key word here is seen. It has been almost mournful to let go of the misery I once shrouded myself in. It was a cocoon for me. Simultaneously a place of quietly deafening safety and an existence where everything hurt all the time.
My routine became one of self-harm, if you’d like to use that terminology. All I would do is read devastatingly contemplative, heavy philosophical texts. Taking really poor care of my body, my spirit, my mind, my relationships with family and friends. Neglecting any pursuit of joy or rest. A vicious oscillating cycle had completely gripped me, yet I was able to justify it in such a manner that I believed that what I was doing was good for me.
Perhaps what bothers me the most about this period of my life is that neglect of joy. Choosing misery was not a choice made of strength, it was not a choice of sincerity. Call this next take cope, idgaf. Choosing joy despite all the bullshit going on in the world is a choice made out of aspiration. I am finally learning to let go of the notion that to be taken seriously, respected, heard has to be born of an existence of self-inflicted misery.
“But,” you retort, “all the great authors/creators/artists are crazy/depressed/sad/insane/mad, and that’s why they were so great and we remember them!”
How about not giving a GAF? I am trying to free myself from your (probably also my) conception of what it means to be a successful person, a successful woman.
This whole world profits off of us being lonely and isolated and also probably fat. So why would I give them the satisfaction of seeing me miserable?
And when I say I am choosing joy, I don’t mean a type of happiness derived from capitalistic, consumer-oriented thing-buying. But I do think, in some backwards, roundabout way, I was indirectly engaging in the type of spectacular (Debord reference🥀) existence I was actively trying to avoid and denounce. Crazy how that works. In other words I am a retarded fraud.
By trying so hard to distance myself from the addictive, consumption focused design of society, I found myself in the exact position they like us to be in anyway: miserable. To *the powers that be* misery is a tool, a profitable resting point. And I ended up there anyway by different means. I still horseshoed myself around to that undesirable place. In my pursuit of intellect, knowing, feeling, I found myself devoid of all aspiration. And I refuse to believe that is the goal.
Part of the reason this has been such an enlightening (and rude, tbh) moment of insight for me is because it exposes how ridiculously stupid I am. That it’s not the books you read, it’s not the scholarly media you consume, but the choices you make with the knowledge you gain.
I know this isn’t the most profound, reality shattering reflection, but I still think it’s important to get all this out, because it is important to who I am as a person and hopefully someone can #relate. How fucking cray is it that in my vigorous attempts to learn all the intricacies of the way our world works, how these systems whose sole purpose is to generate mass-misery as a tool of power and profit… and I still landed right where they wanted me to be: with a Spirit on life support.
Humbling, to say the least. Thanks for reading 🙂
turning the paige 