Day 24 - Something that makes you cry, in great detail
You know that feeling you get sometimes when the entire world seems wrong? When you look at your life with a sense of disorientation and wonder how you ended up in this time and place, in these relationships? When it seems like you're in some weird parallel world, where everything looks right, but nothing is right.
Maybe you always pictured living in New York in a flat, and imagined how happy you would be. Then you grow up and live in New York in a flat, and you're lonely and miserable and it's not at all how you imagined it -- but you are actually living your dream, it's just some of the details of it are off. Maybe you always pictured growing up and marrying the love of your life and having beautiful children, and then you grow up and marry a wonderful person who you get along with and have beautiful children -- but your spouse is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease that requires lots of medical attention and money, or maybe you find out your spouse is cheating on you, or maybe you find out your spouse has a dark history but you still love them and have to try and learn to reconcile this horrible truth with the dream you're living.
Maybe you always believed in god, and then one day all these questions you'd been able to push aside start pressing in on you, and you realize with a sickening shock that you don't believe in god and you don't know why you're celebrating Christmas and you don't get Easter. Or maybe you modeled your entire life and marriage after someone you admired, like your parents, and then you find out they were miserable and lied to each other constantly and had strings of affairs.
It's that feeling that makes me cry. I don't get it often, thank god. But sometimes, just sometimes, something devastating and world-wrenching occurs, and everything seems so wrong even though it all looks right. It's the just opposite of what I wanted, what I dreamed, what I hoped for. And it's somehow worse then not achieving the dream at all (say you always wanted to write a book or be a film star, but you just never really tried so it never happened) -- it's achieving the dream, but everything's all wrong (like writing a book that gets horribly panned by critics and doesn't make any money and is in fact used in English classes as an example of How Not To Write A Book). It's that moment when you look at your life and say, "It's like I designed and built my dream house, then some asshole went and built a dump right next to it."
That's what makes me cry.
Maybe you always pictured living in New York in a flat, and imagined how happy you would be. Then you grow up and live in New York in a flat, and you're lonely and miserable and it's not at all how you imagined it -- but you are actually living your dream, it's just some of the details of it are off. Maybe you always pictured growing up and marrying the love of your life and having beautiful children, and then you grow up and marry a wonderful person who you get along with and have beautiful children -- but your spouse is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease that requires lots of medical attention and money, or maybe you find out your spouse is cheating on you, or maybe you find out your spouse has a dark history but you still love them and have to try and learn to reconcile this horrible truth with the dream you're living.
Maybe you always believed in god, and then one day all these questions you'd been able to push aside start pressing in on you, and you realize with a sickening shock that you don't believe in god and you don't know why you're celebrating Christmas and you don't get Easter. Or maybe you modeled your entire life and marriage after someone you admired, like your parents, and then you find out they were miserable and lied to each other constantly and had strings of affairs.
It's that feeling that makes me cry. I don't get it often, thank god. But sometimes, just sometimes, something devastating and world-wrenching occurs, and everything seems so wrong even though it all looks right. It's the just opposite of what I wanted, what I dreamed, what I hoped for. And it's somehow worse then not achieving the dream at all (say you always wanted to write a book or be a film star, but you just never really tried so it never happened) -- it's achieving the dream, but everything's all wrong (like writing a book that gets horribly panned by critics and doesn't make any money and is in fact used in English classes as an example of How Not To Write A Book). It's that moment when you look at your life and say, "It's like I designed and built my dream house, then some asshole went and built a dump right next to it."
That's what makes me cry.