Self-Hate, Jealousy And Feeling Stuck

I was stuck. I was stuck in something that was moving and that’s the worst part. As I sat waiting for a specific moment I watched friends and family and shallow acquaintances find themselves comforted by their jobs or their significant others and I became angry. I became jealous. I became apathetic to my plight and nearly altogether gave it in. I would call myself shit and would get drunk and behave like an ass because I wasn’t able to express this feeling of immobility in a river. It seemed that everybody else was doing something while I waited. And we come to say that we hate ourselves. And we are convinced that that’s the truth and the reason we are not where we want to be is because we aren’t good enough.

We don’t hate ourselves. No. This can’t be true. This isn’t true. We’ve come to describe the mood swings synthesized within ourselves as a representation of self-hatred. We’ve become creatures that say we are merely an amalgam of symptoms, all signs pointing towards internal disgust. No. That’s too easy. We are not the clichés we pretend to be. We are a new generation; a community and society of people born in a transition and forced to understand our state. We are drifters and meanderers because that’s what we saw when light first hit our eyes. And that’s okay.

We can stay up late at night, and we can drink a bottle of bourbon, puke out our poison, and struggle to our minimum wage job because we convince ourselves it matters. And maybe it does. We know this isn’t the end. We know what we want to be and we’re angry as hell that we aren’t there yet. It takes time. And that’s okay.

I’m not attempting to edge on epiphany here. These are things I think we all understand. Our 20s begin halfway to the end. Where we find ourselves locked at dead ends and looking back on the different routes we could’ve taken. We do not lack nor did we lose the passion that drove us to this point, so why can’t we start again? Because it’s hard? Because it’s confusing? Because if we try and we fail and we find ourselves in the same place ten years later we’ll have no choice but to cuddle up next to the rest of our fellow soldiers and brave the winter winds? It is scary. And that’s why we become stuck. We’re scared of trying in light of failure because we just want to mean something to ourselves above all else. And that’s okay.

We sit up and watch reruns of Malcolm in the Middle because it’s safe. We do this because what lingers in our minds is too great a force to face with only subconscious protection. Those images that scatter across our internal universe have meaning and ideas that we couldn’t fathom to reality. And that’s scary. It’s scary because we want the ability to harness that energy. And we sit in front of our computers and our notebooks and our canvases silently crying on the inside of our minds wondering how it could come so easy to other people. Maybe it doesn’t. We are all lost and we’re all trying to find meaning. We’re all trying to find the right word for our existence and that is no easy task. And it freezes us and we become stuck and we say that we haven’t published or made something of any worth because we’re not of any worth. But the simple fact will always exist that even the attempt at creation is a beautiful task and proves you are worth everything. And that’s okay.

We don’t hate ourselves. We hate that we haven’t reached our potential. And that’s okay.