Sometimes, we botch things. Not on purpose and never without reason, but the crushing fallout of having to embrace one’s personal failures is a particularly hard pill to swallow.
I’ve noticed in my limited time on this earth that people choose to blame others as opposed to blaming themselves. It’s easy. It’s cheap, and morally liberating. But it’s not true. And that is what I cherish most in this weird, misshapen chrysallis I call a life.
So I screwed up. I botched a test that would have gotten me a job I would have loved, would have learned more in than any I have had before…
And I have to deal with that. I have to deal with the unknown number of questions I failed to answer correctly despite my intellect, despite that thing that I hold as my singular piece of value in this world, I failed to impress, make the grade, move on to the interview.
And I wept.
I wept like a child whose parents had taken away his favorite toy. I gnashed my teeth and cursed myself. And despite myself I tried to blame others. Blame anyone but myself because once again my hope of being able to both provide for my family and nourish my soul had been taken from me.
But I did it. I could blame the questions, blame the world, blame whatever stark and inconsistent god fatalistically decides the nature of humankind, but I can’t.
I, for lack of a better word, fucked up. Now I’m left naked, staring stalwart into a world where everything stays the same and those coworkers I consider friends reveal themselves as anything but and I’m still left staring, smiling, smearing the ashen lies of politics across my face like some subterranean warpaint.
Such is life. Instead of fighting the war of the novice vs the mountains I am fighting the war of pithy human arrogance.
I will abide. Despite myself, because of myself, because of the failure of organ that leaves me diabetic and unable to move from something that was beautiful turned caustic.
But how I wish I didn’t have to. How I wish I could simply speak to the ones that dictate monetary worth, show and betray myself as a lover of knowledge of all things and taken or forgotten as that as opposed to a name and a number out of ten.
I know things. Not all the things I should, but dammit I know some and I am willing, nay feverish, to consume more. To learn theory and practice, to have my mind blown and my values challenged. That is my value: my malleability, my consumptive drive for knowledge.
But no. There is no time, no place for the easily defined within the world as we know it.
My greatest fear is that this reality will only end up consuming the ones I love.
No I suppose that’s not true. I suppose my greatest fear is that this reality is painting me as a portrait of how we end up alone.
A Land of Rum and Writing 
You remind me of a younger me or my thoughts in my 20’s. Who know maybe your not that much younger or possibly older (beauty of the internet). The rain can be somewhat cleansing when it pours. So on those rainy days remember the refreshing smells of the pavement and ground just after a summer downpour. It only when the rain continues that you lose that sensation.
Somehow that is way deeper but f*ck it, I’m drinking and it makes sense to me now š
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The rain can be cleansing provided you have a place to hide from its gnawing cold. Looking in on the beauty that is my daughter my only thought is the regret in failing to save her from the poverty that has swallowed me.
I too have been drinking, I too have said, “fuck it.”, I too have swallowed the darkness and drank it all in.
I am melodramatic. I am intoxicated. I am grateful for your comment. Thank you. My mind here gets very little.
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And see we aren’t alone š You care and it’s okay to be melodramatic. E should have a virtual support group. I’d bet we’d both be laughing by now and would worry about it tomorrow. Sounds like your priorities are with your future and child. Your heads and tail about most people.
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How I envy the laugh. To be able to laugh without that schadenfreude of self sabotage and loathing. My child is my everything she is five months, just becoming human, just becoming that thing impressionable enough to be anything a parent sets their mind to. And yet here her father sits, sad and drunk on a Wednesday and night-dreaming of her smile and laughing. Not because it is funny, but because her’s is the only comfort I can find in those unwilling to negotiate with the incomplete hold value has on our soul.
And there I go again. Melodramatic. It is simply what it is and I cannot apologize for it. I am human, I am unhappy, and I am ever so sadly mortal. Hopefully one day the value I place in myself within the world will be shared by others and I will, even if for one moment, find happiness.
Your posts are honest and for that I thank you for them. Honesty is commodity. Under valued, under-traded, and I thank you for bringing it back home.
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Give them a call and ask if they could talk a few minutes about your answers / the questions. At least you’d find out where the problem was. š
Applying for jobs is terrible. Having to blow your own horn (but not too loudly) (but not too faintly either) and feeling completely useless (as a person) if they turn you down… You KNOW it’s got nothing to do with your value as a person but it just doesn’t FEEL that way. š For a while, anyway. š
Hugs,
A
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