Anyone remember that movie from 1992?
But this is no movie.
This is my life.
I’m afraid that death is becoming me. No, not as in I’m looking for eternal youth like in the movie. If anything, I’ve accepted that we all get old and die. Well, for the lucky ones, at least they get the privilege of getting old first.
I am afraid though that I think about death too much. It creeps into everything I think and everything I do, like it’s trying to become my identity.
Death becomes my life.
Even while doing something as mundane as eating my usual dinnertime salad.
I stare at the forkful of healthy greens and say to myself why am I eating this again? Why am I doing the same things again, week in and week out?
What is the point of it all?
What the fuck am I doing with my life?
Same salad, different day. Same existential crisis, every day.
The Scream – Edvard Munch
Hey, I accept what the characters in this movie didn’t–that there is a finality to this human life we are living.
But even in that acceptance, the back of my mind is always going round and round contemplating the meaning of life, my place in it and the eventual end of it. A giant mental Globe of Death that I can’t escape.
Photo: https://travsd.wordpress.com/2024/06/21/for-world-motorcycle-day-moments-in-midway-daredeviltry/
Yeah, I think about that stuff a lot. Like a lot, a lot.
My over-thinking, existentially-plagued brain is constantly running a sub-program geared towards ontology.
What the fuck does ontology mean? I just learned it myself through a google wormhole. Essentially it means “the study of existence”.
Well call me an ontologist!
Who also eats salads.
Why do I ontologize a lot?
Why do I eat salads a lot?
Conditioning I suppose. All to stave off the Grim Reaper from knocking on my door like a Jehovah’s Witness while I draw the blinds and hide under a giant pile of kale.
Really, it’s just healthy habits that were ingrained in me since I was little. Drilled in me is more like it. The red carpet was laid out when you ate an apple, but you were shunned like an unmarried, pregnant Amish women when you ate not one but TWO Tastycakes. 😮
Oh the dietary horror.
But who cares if I eat salads to live longer and to supposedly feel good? So the fuck what? While these healthy greens are helping my body, what is all this existential rumination doing for my mind?
About as much as good as two Tastycakes would do for my cholesterol.
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I think about death a lot. A lot of death’ll do that to you. Especially sudden, unexpected death to people I knew who were a lot younger than me when they died.
Too many of them.
I’m lucky to have lived this long as it is. A lot of people don’t make it to 52 years old. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful as shit for that. I’m even grateful for all the suffering that brought me to this point. Weird, I know.
But there is a flipside to all the suffering: learning, appreciation and awareness.
I think about doing everything that I can to live longer (besides that bottle of wine that taunts me most nights). I exercise, eat right, go to all the doctor appointments, journal, go to therapy.
I…do…all…the…things…right.
So why do I feel so defeated while eating my healthy salad?
Why do I feel so…empty?
I see why even in a sea of good hope, people contemplate suicide.
I’m not one of those people.
But I get it.
Even when your life seems to be going alright, that doesn’t cancel out the wrongs of having had to deal with so much pain and death.
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It’s exhausting to think about death all the time. The relationships with people who have left us, relationships with the ones still here, the relationship with ourselves, our mind, body and soul.
These thoughts bluntly stab my soul everyday.
This is not the microneedling I was looking for.
Photo by Earl Wilcox on Unsplash
I don’t talk about this kind of stuff everyday, hardly any day actually.
I bottle that shit up. The living don’t necessarily want their ears jack-hammered with glum thoughts on mortality while they’re blissfully catching up on the latest episode of Bridgerton. Me included. (Bridgerton is the rom-non-com I didn’t plan on getting sucked into until my late boyfriend’s doppelganger appeared on screen.)
So there’s that.
Death staring me in the face for 8 straight episodes.
I did it to myself. I watched it.
I watched the story of love blossoming, love lost and love then so irritatingly, beautifully, predictably, reconciled.
I got annoyed. Not even annoyed.
I got infuriated.
Infuriated at a tv show.
Because that’s not how life fucking works!
Fuck these happy endings. (That’s what she said.)
The ending usually looks more like someone sitting alone on their couch eating a bowl of wilted salad greens on a Friday night.
Photo by Freepik (What is this random free-internet-image-guy so freakin happy about?)
So I think, what is the point of even eating this salad? Why not eat a cheeseburger? Why not eat all the cheeseburgers? Everyday. Cheeseburgers everywhere. All day everyday.
Why don’t I just do that?
And while I’m at it why don’t I just smoke those emergency cigs I still have in my kitchen drawer? (Hey, you never know). Why don’t I just take those cigs, go to Atlantic City, have all the drinks and just put my life savings all on red?
Why don’t I just do that?
Clearly this salad shit isn’t working.
Why don’t I just do whatever the fuck I want from here on out? Who the fuck cares?
In the end, I guess I do.
I care about life too much to just say fuck it all, though part of me wants to at times.
The times when I feel that death has become me, part of my identity.
I know we aren’t fully defined by the things that have happened to us, but my brain seems to have other ideas.
Be present! Today is a new day! Life is full of so many possibilities!
Photo by Khamkeo on Unsplash
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hard to embrace all those cozy mantras about living when you’re too busy thinking about dying.
Hard but not impossible.
Like everything though, it just takes perseverance and practice.
So I’ll keep practicing towards presence. Towards cultivating a mindset that becomes more fitting of the me I want to be. The me that existed before it was covered with a wet blanket from the pain of life.
So for today at least, I say death to over-thinking! For a little while anyway.
Now I think it’s time for that second Tastykake.
❤️
CM
