29 June 2022

It's been a while. Long time, no see.

I have been thinking a lot and guilty-chilling a lot these days. But, in the last week, I applied for a job and researched a postgraduate program that I can force myself to be interested in. I am nervous, anxious, scared, and excited as my college graduation approaches. I have no safety net or concrete plan whatsoever. No lucid dreams about my future. Even if I get a job, how am I going to work? Or, if I apply to a postgraduate program, what will I do there besides hog seats and money and deprive a true scholar of a real opportunity? Everyone keeps asking, "What do you want? What is your dream? What is your goal? What are your aspirations?" The thing is... I do not know. People will say all sorts of things if you confess that, it's okay, you are young, and you have time to figure things out. But, the same people, five years later, will look down on you and tell you that you haven't made it yet.

As for the questions, what the heck do I want? I am just so devoid of sentience toward reality. So empty of the practicality of living a life. Who, if exposed, will be reduced to a dumb person with no real knowledge. How do you do things? How do you empathize and relate with people to build connections? How do you figure out what house you want to rent? How do you know what vegetables you want to buy and what food to make out of them? How do you decide what mobile phone to buy? How do you know what you want to study? How do you know if this university or this course is appropriate for you? Or, is this the job in which you want to build your career? Or, is this the profession that will be tagged as a formal identity? How do you break down and allocate your finances? How do you know whom to live with? How do you know who is good or who doesn't want to murder the gut out of you? Are people born with this? Do they receive information regarding all this from someone? Do they sit down and discuss it? If they do, what do they say? What do they talk about? How do they talk? I can never understand what to say. I hear words and listen to conversations, but I have the impression that all of this is ingress into a part of my brain that is a mix of apathy and ignorance.

Sometimes, I am tired of it. I am exhausted from worrying so much about all of this. Some days, I am so scared that I want to run away into non-existence, take off my skin, and get rid of this actuality. I do not want this. I have figured out what I do not want. This… is what I do not want. It is mentally taxing, and for what? For this world? For families, who talk over you and disregard you because you are not earning enough yet? For siblings, who sweet-talk and extract vulnerable feelings and emotions and then use them as ammunition when they fight? For friends, who fight the urge to not delete your number or exit the group because you are the only person they remember when they need something and you are the only person they can shamelessly ask for anything, even if you have just beat a deadly disease and they haven't bothered to ask how you are doing? For love,... well, it has never happened to me, so I cannot comment on that.

Then you look around. People are doing it. Someone has a reliable bunch. Someone is blessed with a family that built a home with bricks of love and safety. Someone is tying a thread of common law with a partner to spend a life together for the rest of their lives until something goes wrong. You think, how? Do you think, does every freaking feels this way or you are just completely freaking alone out here? You sit there, staring at your laptop screen. Bunch of tabs open. Juggling through applications, trying to squeeze out a statement of purpose, fake-build a research proposal, sugarcoating why you want a job just so, you get a tag of professional life and earn a bit of coin to pay the fine for non-con-sensually coming to this world, pay the tax for unwillingly existing in this society. Amidst all this, a tab of this webpage is open for a fortnight. Followers unsubscribe each day after waiting for long nights for an update from your side, messages lying unread from beautiful people. And, is a stark reminder that you cannot even remain consistent with an e-diary, and cannot even commit to two to five unknown yet indulgent and understanding accounts here.

Are you worthy of this food you eat? That your mother cooks with sweat? That your father buys with hard work? How are you even opening your mouth to swallow this fruit that so many people strive for but die because they cannot get it? But, you cannot even leave? Since you will be bombarded with questions to which you do not have any answers and why is that? Of course, because you do not know. They criticize you by pointing out how ungrateful you are, maugre having everything served on a platter accompanied with a glass of clean water. Because let’s accept it. It is so difficult to explain or open up about being sad for no reason. A mixture of guilt and heaviness. The floor crumbles under your feet, the world falls over your shoulders, and the baggage is milling your spine but your brain is unable to comprehend why? It takes a quick scan around and sees people with real struggles and bloody knuckles from a chain of unfeigned battles and it asks you why the heck are you sad?

- Oizys.