Guess you better go and get your armor

I have this mentor that I may or may not have mentioned at some point on this site. He was one of my teachers in high school and though we related well then, now that I no longer define the end of the world as a fight with my 15 year old boyfriend our thought processes are so in tune that it’s like we were born from the same emo cesspool of baby tears and Converse All Stars.

Nowadays we maintain a pretty tight friendship via e-mail, and when I have a problem or just need to decompress with someone who tolerates my whacked emotions I pull the pen pal card and we have a virtual, life altering conversation. Here’s a bit of the last message he sent:

“I was thinking about ants yesterday. I almost stepped on an ant river crossing a sidewalk. A big one. I would have killed like hundreds at once. They would have scurried around manically for a minute, but would have quickly reestablished their lines and got on with it. They live in an incredibly hostile world. It's the kind of world that would leave most humans curled up in the fetal position. They can't predict when disaster will strike, but it must strike like every day. Hurricane Katrina every day. But, they reestablish their lines and keep going. And, they build amazing things.”

This obvious metaphor was part of his reply to the OH-EM-GEE-WTF-IS-MY-LIFE message I sent towards the end of last month. Basically, since arriving in Japan I’ve been gangbanged by life. That’s right, “gangbanged.” Tokyo has been witness to an influx of various life aspects screwing me in quick succession.

When I first tried to sort out what was going on with my brain it was mid August and my friends from California had just left. It was like 200 degrees and getting up to brush my teeth caused me to sweat so profusely that I considered never brushing my teeth again. Or even moving at all. Honestly, I think I was probably suffering from legit heat stroke and I felt crazy and tired and mean. After being prompted to recheck my attitude I started sifting through photos of my friends’ visit, considered my current sitch, and wondered why I wasn’t as happy as anyone in my position should be. You know, the whole I work online, can go anywhere I want, am spending a ludicrous amount of time in a foreign country rent free thing. Add the fact that I have friends who love me enough to fly halfway around to world just to chill, and I think most would conclude that I should be shitting glitter and rainbows.

Realizing that I wasn’t even close to that really struck me. And when I became aware that my negativity and general dissatisfaction stemmed from sadness rather than what most would pinpoint as anger, I sent a flurry of e-mails to said mentor. Most of them went something like, “DID YOU KNOW, DID YOU KNOW? I’M A SAD PERSON. I’M FULL OF SADNESS. SADDY SAD SAD.”

And do you know what he said? He said, “I know.” It was like a punch to the head:

“I know. You have been for a very long time. I've been waiting for you to recognize this, instead of deflecting your adversity with cynicism, apathy, and anger.”

(Sidenote: I think maybe this is part of what makes a true friend. Someone who sometimes knows you better than you know yourself; someone who will do what they can to help figure out who you are, even if all that means is being around to listen to your crazy thought process; someone who wouldn’t try to force you to understand something before you’re ready for it, or make you someone you’re not.)

I deemed this state “The Sadness” and for 48 hours all I could think about was how I was going to get rid of it. I questioned all of my closest friends, one of whom suggested I was depressed. Admittedly, it would be easy for me to classify my issues as depression, pop a xanax in my nightcap and call it a day, but fuck that. I don’t mean to downplay depression because chemical imbalances are very real and deserve medical assistance when the situation calls for it, but at the same time I think too many people these days confuse depression with plain old consciousness. I have no idea when society added continuous emotional placidity to their definition of happiness, but I think it’s fuckin’ lazy and unrealistic. If I never felt sad or angry or impassioned by anything, life would be stupid.

There is of course, the other extreme, which is just as damaging. Living in a perpetual state of unhappiness is taxing and dangerous, and probably closer to where I’ve been for the last couple of years. Now, in trying to find a balance, there are two pieces of advice from close friends (including mentor dude) that I want to tape to the insides of my eyelids:

• That you care about this at all is a demonstration that you're not embittered; you're critical, and being critical at a moderate level is extremely useful and productive
• I've tried to identify my sad times and mine them and ride them a bit. I find much of the richest parts of my soul are rooted in sadness. I don't want to prevent getting sad anymore because now I recognize its value in my life. However, I don't want to stay there either

They've helped me to established that my poor soul isn't in the shitter and that crapping rainbows and glitter every day isn't necessarily the level of happiness I want to live in. These are the things I contemplate while being gangbanged by The Sadness squad, and though they are extremely comforting and helpful words, they certainly don’t lighten the load. The gangs of bangers keep coming and in fact they’re here as I type this, banging away (I can’t even imagine what kind of mental images this is causing you, but they’re probably fantastic). Their forms have changed; they’ve morphed from mental states to friendships to career decisions to affairs of both the financial and love variety, but they all serve the same purpose of fucking me mentally until I reach the point I did yesterday, which is where I’m so exhausted from tossing my life around in my head that all I can manage to do before I fall into a 17 hour nap is drink sake and watch  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

[originally this space was full of crazy talk about love, but I took it out because it invited way too much no goodity.]

My final conclusion in this big ranty rant is that I think I’m on my way to a better place than the one I’m in now. It’s like the ants story: after a hurricane of—get ready—GANGBANGERS! I’m quickly trying to realign my insides. At the same time though, I've realized I want to keep things kinda wacky. Remember, that 24/7 emotional placidity thing is just lame. I’m sure whatever I build will be even more amazing if it’s saturated in my own brand of crazy. So I hope you understand me when I say that even though I want it sorted, I hope to never feel like my life is totally “fixed.” In examining my issues and letting others offer their own advice things don’t become better, but they do become clearer. And in being able to see what the fuck is going on I think I’m closer to knowing both what I want and what I don’t want, and how I'm going to get there. Most importantly (and I hope made very evident through drawn out discussions like this one), my drive to move forward is alive and totally drooling. I guess that’s a good start.