You Will Run Out of Time
A pep talk, of sorts.
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The first thing to go was my dignity. It’s Summer ’16, and I had gotten drunk at a Fourth of July BBQ and embarrassed the hell out of myself and the woman I was dating at the time, and I don’t believe she ever looked at me the same way again. That was a warmup.
Days later, I’d tweeted something that’s only grown more true with time but something I really shouldn’t have. I lost my gig writing for the magazine I’d always wanted to write for.
I’d lose more: My 32" waist, a vast majority of my friends, and then — finally and spectacularly — I lost my partner.
It started gingerly, with her subtle sitdowns saying, “Honey, you’ve changed.” She said it a lot. She watched my mood deteriorate from anxious to depressed, to catatonic, to apoplectic. Then she was gone. April 2017.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I started drinking even more than I already did. A lot. Alone. On weeknights. Just to fall asleep faster and get on to the next day. This wasn’t like me. I lost my self-control, becoming exponentially more unhinged, more hurt, more directionless, more eccentric, more of everything except great.
I spent a long time killing myself. A long time idling in the driveway. These were the dark days; back when the world was a bit more amenable to exploration and there I was wasting my potential all the way through it. That was before just about everything you’ve read here. That was before life got really, really fucking good.
Flash forward to now, and we’ve reached a complete inversion. Rather than being a giant waste, I feel like my life’s being wasted. It’s just hard to trust what exists out there and I am in no shape to meet it. Everything sucks, but at least I’m fine. That’s what I tell other people, anyway.
I’ve spent a lot of time here talking about how happiness isn’t a game you can hunt, how success is a mirage, how goals are largely worthless, or how results are just means to an unforeseeable end. I’ve spent a lot of time here first writing self-help diatribes, then railing about self-help diatribes, then eschewing self-help diatribes to wallow in the perpetual bliss of knowing the world’s more fucked than you or I will ever be. Every time I did any of it, I felt a smug…
