When Nothing Makes Sense

Sometimes you go to bed and wake up the next morning and everything is different and you don’t know why. You are elated one day and paralyzed with anxiety the next. All of a sudden you love green olives or don’t care about your bad highlights or hate your boyfriend. Sometimes nothing makes sense.

Sometimes you are madly in love and you put yourself through medieval-style emotional torture on the tiny little slim chance you’ll get some measure of reciprocity and everyone you know tells you to move on, to leave it behind, to assert yourself and demand what you deserve. And you can’t and you can’t and you can’t and you can’t and then all of a sudden one day you can and it’s block — defriend — unfollow — delete — exit — the end.

Sometimes the only future you can see is a certain way. Eggs at brunch and comfortable sex and Bed Bath and Beyond forever. And the loss of that vision is like a death. You have to mourn it and say goodbye and start to think, “This can never be,” instead of “If only.” And then you’re faced with the awful, magical, existentially dreadful indefinite future where you have a world of possibility available to you yet nothing is for certain. No guarantees. No security. But no f-cking toxicity.

And nothing makes sense but nothing is confusing either. You’re floundering without an inner tube but you’re in six inches of water. The second you’re left alone and your flailing isn’t drawing poo-poos and omgareyouoks from everybody around you, you realize that things aren’t so bad, really. Unfamiliar, but not bad.

And you get used to it. You float on your back and wrap yourself in the comfortable blanket known as the exhale and then the not-making-sense part becomes the status-quo part. It feels good. Lovely even, like an over-poured glass of whiskey in the middle of the day.

Then there will be the times when you think the part that makes sense doesn’t make sense and the not-making-sense part does. It’s like getting knocked off your feet in the ocean and being unsure where the surface is as you get tossed and trashed around by the erratic, unthinking current. Given the choice, would you rather be tortured but feel deep and meaningful or happy but complacent? Is it better to have a healthy relationship in the present tense or the hope of a happier, longer one in the hypothetical future? Do you even know what you want? Do you cry because you miss him or because you hate him?

It doesn’t make sense and it might not ever again. But maybe if you try really hard or relax in the recognition that it doesn’t, you can make a little sense of the nonsense.

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