This is do or die

I’m this close to writing a piece about Jewel. For now, you’re all spared...

A few years ago my mom told me that soon it will be really hard for me. That I will need to scratch and burn to find myself in life and that if once I’ve done that, it’ll be an easy ride. Back then I thought it’s no big deal, I can handle it, nothing really hard in my life. Now? Now I’m beginning to understand what she was talking about. Now I’m starting to see how very complex everything is and now I’ve arrived at the time where I question most things I see and hear and feel. And boy is it hard….

Most of my confusion turns into anger. Anger at my own immobility. At my own unwillingness to act rather than just write. Everyone can write but I was not taught to act. If there is a drowning man, I would not be able to help him. I was not given the skills to be a passionate advocate of any deed. If there was a drowning man, all I could do is describe the water. All I have is words and words make me lazy. I don’t act. I don’t follow pursuit. Does it seem like I'm refusing to take the blame? I am probably trying to divert the responsability, but what I desire most vividly is for you to point and stare at me, name and shame so everyone knows: I'm the one who won't act. Why? Because there is nothing and has been nothing and most probably will be nothing in my life that can shake me to the core. The nearest was one foolish love affair, and that would have been better left untouched as well. I fall into routines, pointless, meaningless, bagatelle routines. I don’t aim to alter the path of anything: I just exist. I take up space and produce toxins and kill brain cells and provide nothing. I’m like my friends who choose never to give, only to receive. This is why every day is a struggle. A struggle I can either take part in or watch from the sidelines. But this should really be my struggle.

Sometimes I wish I was forced to fight for something. God make me a Nepalese Maoist so I can fight the king’s army far away in the mountains! Or make me a resistant activist in Byelorussia who gets beaten and jailed for saying the one party state is wrong. Make me feel that what I think and say and do: all ALL have major consequences, because like this, complacency is what I drive myself into. Make me transcend time so I can be a suffragette or a Mexican Zapatista, a FARC freedom fighter or join that generation who has the revolution. Like this, without ideals, without a cause to fight for, I’m a generation without direction. I’m a lost child of a world that gives me nothing to hold onto. I’m, at the tender age of 24, starting to think there isn’t that much greatness in this world.

This is where I start to think, it’s completely silly and self obsessed of Jewel to put out a record purely about her. This is where I start to think that as soon as I can, I have to stop the self from existing. But still, I write with the “I” as the most central ornament of my sentences. Thoughts all begin with the “I” and every experience is jotted down in my head, distorted by my own dubious world vision. Filtered through my interpretations, which are based on pompous ideas about the importance of literature, music, art, the intelligentsia in a world where this comprises only the minority. Will it be a long slow slide down from now? This is where I can start to begin to understand those desperate enough to want to do something, anything. This is where a promise of a paradise now can start to seem attractive.

I can write pages and pages and not a thing will change. I have only words. I lack the desire for the deeds. I will analyse and over analyse and dissect and magnify but even scrutiny by an electron microscope won’t be powerful enough to make me shift my matter from one end to the other. But it’s hard. My mom was right, like most times. I ran a great big circle and now I’m back to where I started from. Tomorrow I will continue to live solely for me. I will embark on much the same routines and care only about what is good for me. This is where tomorrow again I will fail the world. I will fail people who cannot be free. I will fail the women of Iran. I will fail the forgotten Hmong people of Laos. I will fail the ones disposed of on the Killing Fields. I will fail all the victims of wars and still act like I have no care in the world.

And the worst is that only with time will I see what I could have done to alter the path of my reality.

And I’m afraid that even walking silently with Bartók can’t ever be enough.