For as long as I can remember I have made the following assumption about myself: that, deep down, I am an interesting person.
Now I've come to realise that that just isn't true.
Whenever you leave where you are used to you are forced to meet new, and unusual, people. I've done that over the past month, and my previous arrogant assumption that I could compare myself to these people has been shattered. These people are people who have opted out of society, people who have said 'fuck that' to everything their culture holds to be conventional. That, evidently, is not me.
Like, I've met people on this trip who have no fixed address, who surrendered that months, or even years ago, in order to just drift around the world, completely devoid of any kind of support, just... them, on their own... against the world.
Fuck sake, that's just not me. I thought, nay, hoped, it may have been - but no. I'm just weak. And like, yeah, I bet people are reading this thinking 'blah blah blah, another self-pitying blog, but I don't even mean this in a self-pitious way, I mean this in a revelatory way. I am revealing to you, my audience, that I, Tom Deery, am weak. I cannot handle things on my own. Like, I thought this month away from everyone and everything I'm familiar with what let me discover an inner strength that I had all along, but what its showed me instead is that I just can't handle any of this; that I need to have people around me, for support and shit. Because otherwise, what? I sit around on my own all day. I make token efforts to socialise but my constant fear that other people despise my company stops that from ever really working, (while normal people experience emotional rewards from relating to people, more often than not it just leaves me feeling miserable). Like, I've spent a depressing amount of time either in front of a computer or over a bottle of booze.
So yeah, that's me. Apparently.
I've decided to cancel all of my other travel plans, fuck all that, I'm never leaving on my own again, I can't handle it. I'm settling down. I'm embracing the dark side, the dark side of proper work and social conformity, because I don't have the courage or the character to be a social opt-out.
You're interesting Tom, as much as any of the other people in the world.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely.
ReplyDeleteThere's a phrase in a book I read a while back, "Snow Crash" which said something along the lines of: "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world."
It's so true, is the thing. One thing I've tried to think over the past few years is to try and not to begrudge anyone else their life, because it's just beyond pointless. You just have to try to enjoy being whatever the hell it is you are.
Anyways, interesting is relative. A lot of the stuff I find interesting would be nigh-on incomprehensible & boring to most people: "It's awesome! You can prove using the fundamental theorem of arithmetic that there exists a bijective map between N and NxN!"
Anyways, clearly people like you for who you are, so stop being silly.