WHATEVER!?

Life is funny. You are on top of the world then suddenly and, often, without much warning, you are on the bottom of the pile.

Lately, I think I have been suffering a different kind of crisis, not unusually one of my own making...I have kind of just decided that I just don’t care about either position anymore. I do not give two shits about being on the top or the bottom. Mostly, I think, I just feel like I want to be left alone.

So much of what has happened in the world recently, has just zapped my interest in human beings. So much fluff and puffery, I find myself bored and disinterested. I do not want to hear all the bad news either. In general, my opinion of us as a species has fallen into a rather large hole of despair.

I used to believe in myself. In what I could accomplish and I was sure, for most of my life, that I would get there. Now, I can’t seem to figure out whatever I saw that motivated me to do all that work in the first place. Truth be told, I find it harder and harder to care about much of anything these days.

Life is just whatever it is...and then you are gone. Pretty absurd really. Working all the time; we are living trying to live up to something that once you actually achieve some measure of it, you just feel completely empty inside.

I know not the cheeriest post...but this is where I am today.

I think that I am tired. Like at 53, I am really ready to be done with all this acquiring, working, striving, and struggling. I find it feeling more and more like life is just asking too much from me. After 53 years of being a “thank you sir may I have another” or a “of course, I would love to help you do that...” kind of person, I find myself more often these days just underwhelmed by pretty much everything.

I feel like that edge is gone. That place that I lived close to before is now just gone...I don’t want to struggle and grind, I just want to take long walks in wooded hills, alone, communing with the passing hawk or itinerant crow. Some of my best conversations these days are with dogs and cats. They are often the only ones that I think really listen to me...or really notice if I am ok. My children may not notice if I have had a hard day, but my dog certainly does...every fucking time.

So whatever.

That is what life feels like right now. No up, no down. Just whatever...it just isn’t worth getting all bent out of shape about.

Things that bring me joy are getting smaller but deeper. Things like reading, writing, walking, cleaning. Those things bring me comfort and happiness.

Things that vex me and wear me out seem to be multiplying at a rate that is way past alarming: paying bills, answering emails, returning phone calls, social events...these things feel like they might kill me dead each damn time.

Am I depressed? Not really.

Am I angry? Not really.

Am I just kind of over it? Absofuckinglutely!

I am, in a word, whatever. I just don’t seem to be able to care about the final outcome or if it works out or if I am happy or if he loves me or if I love him or if I make fabulous tons of money or if I have none. The things that I have stressed about and worried about and worked so hard at the whole of my life, now feel almost meaningless. This is not to say that the people who remain in my life or even those people I have had to move on from, are meaningless. Not in the slightest. People mean a great deal to me, often more than I mean to myself. And that I think is the crux of my issue.

I have lived this other centered life. I have historically cared more about what you thought, than what I thought. What you did and felt more than what I did and felt. I lived my life to make you happy and to a large degree, that made me happy too. Except now, I find it all so grossly lagging.

I find myself asking myself these amazingly hard questions:

Why don’t you value yourself?

Why do you let others not value you?

Why won’t you show up for your own damn life?

What the fuck do you even want?

Why are you so capable of seeing where you are wrong and so not good at seeing where others are?

I have no answers. Just a lot of questions that plague me, dog my footsteps and call me to the present moment where, in a word, all is ok. Right now I have been fed, I am dry and warm and relatively safe. Right now all of that existential crap doesn’t mean a damn thing. And yet...and yet...it is all I can think about.

I have heard a great number of older people say that they feel like they outlived their drive to live...and I think I am beginning to feel what that might feel like. Can I be all done with all this life stuff at 53? What is on the other side waiting for me?

Now before any of you call me thinking I am ready to off myself, let me say emphatically, I am not going to off myself nor do I feel especially depressed or upset. I feel whatever which feels like some intoxicating mix of “I just don’t give a fuck anymore and isn’t there something else? There just has to be...”

What I find, more and more, as I live through the what-the-fuck-ever is that there just may not be anything else. This may be as good as it ever gets, which believe me, I can see even from my somewhat childish view point of “WHATEVER” that I have it really good. What I feel most overwhelmed with is how the fuck am I to fill up the rest of my life, and with what do I fill it?

I have excessed all the excesses: food, sex, shopping, drugs, alcohol, exercise. And they all brought me joy and happiness and ruin all at the very same time. What I feel like now, more than ever before, is how much my life doesn’t feel like mine...like I live for others and while that was quite satisfactory for awhile, it no longer does it for me...

So what the fuck now?

I do not know. Really. I haven’t a clue and for a person who has known everything or at least been totally certain that what I was doing was what I SHOULD be doing, being cast adrift is a feeling that I have little to no familiarity with...and it is really fucking up my shit.

I have never known exactly where I am going to land, but I have always been absolutely sure that whatever I was doing was what I was supposed to be doing...until now. Now, I have no idea and I do not even begin to pretend that I even know how to figure out what comes next...

Except, there is this tiny, vague, little inkling that my life is supposed to be mine. All mine. I just don’t know how to do it. I do not know how to shake all this out and where that lands me.

So, at least for today, I shall remain as ok as I can be with all this whatever the fuck this WHATEVER is...and be grateful that I still can form sentences that somewhat resemble what my heart feels, pried apart from all the shit that my head tosses about. Life is just whatever right now. Hang time...trying to figure out who the fuck I am and what I am supposed to do next...