17/08/2011

Most human lives are like unfinished stories; most of us die before we can even make sense of our lives and often way before completing any sort of journey.

It's been over a year now since my uncle came to stay with us. He stayed until early December of last year and then decided to go back home. I barely remember the time he spent with us, to be completely honest, and yet I was spending most of my time at home with him. Granted, the language barrier meant that our conversations were limited to things like: "hi, how are you", "are you hungry" or "would you like to go outside for a walk"... He liked to stay in his room a lot, watching TV or reading newspapers in his own language. The cat liked him, or perhaps he was just 'tolerating' the stranger in his home.

But then the call of the bottle was too strong, I guess. My uncle missed being able to drink till he'd collapse in a torpor on a bench somewhere, drowning his lifetime sorrows away with the help of cheap wine, vodka or cider.

To me, he was always nice and I remember him more as a quiet, elusive man whose face has aged too fast. To his children, however, he's seen as a useless drunk who was never able to look after them, or himself for that matter.

Who's to blame? Is there anyone to blame? Yes. Family.

Parents have an extraordinary power over the lives of their children in the sense that they can really make or break them. Forget the pain and hardship that comes from the outside world as we grow up... if within the family unit things are wrong and destructive then there seems to exist only two ways forward: complete destruction of a person in the bud, or the making of a great strength of character - but the latter is sadly not that common.

The strange thing about my family is that the destruction seems to have only affected the men rather than the women. My two uncles are as lost and wasted as can be. And then they passed that on to their own sons...

My grand-father was mostly listless most of his life. He spent his life working hard and drinking away his meagre wage while having 5 kids to look after and a housewife who only loved her sons and psychologically tortured her daughters, especially my mother.

I've only ever met 3 of my cousins, yet I have more than 10 in total. The two girls are sorting themselves out and making something of their lives at least, the boy is just as lost as the uncles. I hear that one cousin I never met is now in prison over some drunken fight in a bar.

Of course all I can write about is based on what I gather for myself, limited to my own perception. I never lived with them. I did spend a few summers at one of my aunts' place, but that's it. I met my grand-parents perhaps 5 times in total.

I'm pretty sure we're all born with a certain bundle of traits, characteristics and innate qualities or flaws, but it is ultimately the environment that dictates who we are and what we'll become.

The biggest illusion is to think we're here for a reason. We're the ones giving and shaping reasons for being here every day we get to live. And that's why most human lives are often just like unfinished stories.

Twenty seven, twenty eight

Sites like Facebook are a good way to gather some sort of personal statistics based on the number of people you actually know on there. You can also keep track of predictions, such as the one made by my philosophy teacher when I was 18 and about to leave high school.

After spending a year teaching us the basics of thinking in depth using the logical side of our brains, the philosophy teacher ended his last lesson with a gloomy, dismissive outlook. He claimed we'd all have forgotten what we'd learned by the time we hit 25. By then, he claimed, all of us would be married with babies or careers to obsess over. That was the fate that awaited us all, he said. No escape. Every student in the class protested loudly at that point, accusing him of stereotyping people without knowing any better. I was petrified that his outlook could be right, somehow, but by then my life had turned upside down so abruptly that I also knew there had to be some exceptions to that rule of conformity.

"There are exceptions," I told my teacher, who sneered back at me dismissively. "No, really," I insisted, "There are always exceptions to rules, come on." He looked at me again and shrugged unwillingly. "Yes, there can be one or two, but no more than that," he said. He was the only teacher who knew me a bit better than anyone else in that school, which I'd joined for my last year of high school out of the blue a few weeks after the first term had already started.

The reason he knew a bit more about me was down to the fact that he was also my headteacher. When I started bunking off school and not attending certain classes (Latin and History) he was made aware of my repeated absences and confronted me one day after his lesson to threaten me with disciplinary action. That day wasn't a good day for me mood-wise, I'd tried calling my mother, but she wasn't answering, so all sorts of fatalistic scenarios were dancing inside my head by then (I lived alone in a foreign city where my new school happened to be but no one knew that apart from me and one girl I'd made friends with by then). As he threatened me, I got angry and words began to flood out of my mouth - how much I didn't care, because it was hard enough to find the motivation to go to school at all when you were accountable to virtually nobody. It's not that I didn't want to go to history class, it's just that the lessons were always so late in the afternoon that by then the temptation to just leave was too great to resist. As for Latin, I couldn't stand the teacher, so why I should I force myself to endure it when I can simply not attend the class? All I had to do is keep walking past the classroom and leave school grounds. It was too simple and easy not to do it. And once you've done it once, it gets easier and easier because you realise no one is doing anything about it. Nobody is actually stopping you, because nobody can ever stop you in anything except yourself.

The teacher stopped threatening me and sort of blinked in surprise, saying he had no idea I was alone here. "How come you're alone in this city?" he asked, puzzled. What was I supposed to say that would be short enough to prevent the meeting from lasting a whole afternoon? I embellished my story, that's what I did, making it simpler for anyone to grasp, because even I couldn't make sense of what my life was at that point. I said: "My mother and I can't stand each other, so she sent me away to get to know some of my family over here. Unfortunately none of the family members in question live in this city, and we can't speak to one another because I don't know the language. So they dropped me off in the city with my luggage and drove off. Now I'm here."

The story seemed to have the effect expected and the teacher suddenly turned more sympathetic, no longer threatening that I 'had to attend classes, or else...", but instead urging me to 'try and attend classes' as much as I could. He also said something about how he'd assumed I was just another spoilt brat.

Anyway, to revert back to the last comments the teacher made on our last day of school with him...

Ten years have now passed, more or less, and his outlook turns out to be rather accurate, except his timing was off. Most people didn't conform completely by the time they reached 25, oh no. Modern times mean that 'clever' people now take longer to 'settle down'. They'll have spent the greater part of their 20s studying for pieces of paper that will then get them a steady foot on the ladder. Apart from a wrong timing, everything predicted seems to have materialised. And how could it not be the case? I guess it all comes down to whether you end up settling down with a career to keep you busy if that's a choice you derived for yourself. More often than not, though, people end up trapped in such settings not by choice, but according to social expectations because that's what you're expected to do. You're expected to get a good job, get married, have kids, do like everyone else is doing, basically. So you do it. Not by choice, but blindly according to what others expect and the pressure from seeing everyone else do it.

I wonder... Is it realistic to even think it's possible to lead a life derived from personal choice, or is it more likely that most will just lead a life derived from expectations? In other words, is it possible to lead a life for ourselves, or are we doomed to lead it according to others because others have ultimately become the symbol needed for our own validation?

06/08/2011

Last night, something strange happened - inside my head, I suppose. I was sitting in someone else's kitchen, reading an old newspaper going on about Amy Winehouse's death. And then someone started talking about something trivial that everyone is 'supposed' to do, and words escaped my mouth before I could even stop myself. I wanted to say how bullshit it all is, how much none of it should even EXIST, and as I started rambling about just that, I was greeted by mere silence and raised eyebrows.

At that precise moment, I never felt more alone in my own ability to see how fake this society is, and how much I am trapped in some dystopia of a world where everyone else will look at you as though you're the crazy one.

It was a mounting process, I guess. I now spend my days surrounded by people, having to bite my tongue constantly every time someone says something stupid or brainwashed... One of my greatest fears was always to lose the ability to monitor like a dictator what comes out of my mouth in front of these people... and now... now it's slipping away from me. Like a volcano, the magma is just coming out of my mouth in bursts beyond my control.

Last night, I retreated swiftly away from people before more of my desperation could be spotted. I wished so much I could close my eyes and when I'd open them again, everything would be different - this whole fucked up reality would be gone and I would finally be able to live as a real human being.

God I hate this world.

I can't cope with being among people so much. By people, I mean all the sheep. I just... I can't. It drives me nuts beyond words.

My social mask is melting down. More and more, I lose the ability to bite my tongue, but what I have to say... No one likes it. I'm an extreme-sounding person who wouldn't hurt a fly - but my words are true, perhaps not always accurate, but REAL - from a THINKING human being, not a mere shell that looks human and parrots what others say.

I hate this world SO fucking much. This asylum.

And everything is FAKE.