I’m two months and a half away from my 24th birthday and I hold absolutely no weight in this world.
I pretty much gave up drugs and alcohol and partying altogether because, well, I think I outgrew that phase. The damage, I hope, is not irreversible and I can honestly say I feel a lot better off without them. I’m not going to waste anyone’s time ranting on how chemical experimentation is bad because frankly, I don’t think it is. Chem abuse, on the other hand (much like any kind of abuse) will heavily damage one’s health, mental health and especially one’s ability to cope with every single layer of reality.If you’re looking for a retrospective inventory, I’ve pretty much done them all and as far as the mind can undergo a downward spiral, I’ve pretty much been there, and by there I mean withdrawal, OD, alienation and numbing. I snorted, shot up, smoked and swallowed more chemicals than a paint factory.
The worst part about this shit isn’t the pain you feel, but rather the stuff you don’t feel. Emotional instability, self-loathing, despair and the unshakeable feeling that you don’t amount to anything and are missing out on so much. Sure, those only settle in after quite a bit, but they take a whole lot more to creep out of than it took for them to settle in.
Now I’m not saying these things should apply to everyone. I know plenty of people who can keep a balanced lifestyle while only indulging in soft drugs and social dabbles in alcohol, but I frankly can’t. I even know two or three people who have mildly succesful careers while entertaining a part-time hobby of shooting heroin, but I’m not one of them. I have an addictive personality and I’m terribly lazy. I’m the poster boy for procrastination and a common victim to my own biggest flaw: I give up on everything before it’s done. I have an incredible resistance to effort, an outstanding inertia when it comes to rolling downhill and a unique talent for misadventure.
I’ve lost a lot of friends, most of them because I was an asshole on more occasions than I care to remember. I spent a fortune I never earned on things my body consumed and believe me when I tell you only the first few experiences with each one were amazing. None were lasting and all were damaging, to some degree.
I think I smoked my first joint in the tenth grade, and by the eleventh I was stoned more than I wasn’t. But that’s not the root of the problem. No one cares how high you are or how long you’re high if you can keep up appearances and actually do something with your life. But if I step back far enough, that has nothing to do with how I spent – or, well, wasted – the last decade. Oh no. The root of my demise started in my pre-teens.
The dumbest kids are the smart kids who aren’t half as smart as they think they are.
It took a lot for me to learn we’re only as special as the things we do. Growing up, I always thought I was special. And I don’t just mean middle-class A-grade special, I mean -holy shit- I’m somekind of genius special. Looking back, I was kind of like the one-eyed douchebag in a land of blind idiots. I made the common mistake of comparing my achievements to my peers’, and about ninety eight per cent of my peers (according to Mensa, at least) were considerably slower than me in any process involving analythical thinking or creative endeavour. I was lazy, useless and not a particularly likeable kid, though, and no matter how well I scored against my overly tolerant reference system, I feel I was quite bland.
You might have had a similar upbringing. Upper middle-class parents in a predominantly working class neighbourhood. Even before my leap into a rainbow of pleasant toxins, I was inebriated with self-sufficiency and a lack of direction. Despite my dad’s best efforts to turn me into a mathemathician, I was content with proving him wrong a couple of times and letting him down a dozen. That doesn’t justify his turning his back on me, but it motivates it.
I started hating myself and being emotionally unstable long before it actually showed. I was never bullied while, conversely, I was never particularly liked, either. Most people in my final gymnasium years and all of high school mostly thought I was too weird to grasp, but that was only a facade covering up how boring it felt to try to be rebellious. I was just as annoying and unjustified as Holden from The Catcher in the Rye, which is probably why I was so annoyed with that smug little fuck when I read the book.
Moving on, I had a few crushes over the years, but my first and only love took the cake in my senior high school year. She wasn’t particularly bright but – I thought – she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. We were on and off for the next four years but she cheated on me five times. I took her back. Every. Single. Time. Really.
I did a lot of stupid things, but this one takes the cake. It’s one thing to forgive a mild adolescent indiscretion and a whole different ballpark of stupidity to succumb to the cliche of taking the early train home while your girlfriend is getting double-teamed at a New Year’s party. I’m not making this up.
That was when I pulled the trigger. Four months later I was shipping my ass away to Germany to start film courses when I picked up a nasty cocaine addiction fueled on whatever money my parents sent me for what they thought were clothes and food and videogames. Well, I didn’t let them down on the videogames part. I spent about three years doing blow off cases that read GTA IV and World of Warcraft. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.
Had they not divorced years earlier, news of that surely would have broken up a relationship that had already hung on the sole owning rights of a house too big to fill for more than a decade. Mom got it in the end, though she still struggles with the upkeep. I guess it’s true, the loneliest people live in the biggest of houses.
But I don’t blame my folks for what followed. I got an education too expensive to justify, one I certainly didn’t pay back to this day. After living abroad for what seemed to be forever, I made the incredibly bad decision to get back to one of the most uncivilised countries not torn by apartheid. And no, I didn’t get the cheating girl back. This story doesn’t have a happy ending.
The silver lining is, it’s not a tragedy either. Since I’m still alive.
What did I do next? Well, nothing to write home about. I went on with my debauchery and hedonistic tendencies, to recent times.
And while several isolated deeds I chalked down are worth remembering, my life as a whole is just as common and lowly as every loser you’ve ever met. That’s the bad news. The good news is life goes on, for better or – if it’s possible, worse. Long periods of depression intertwined with short bursts of make-believe happiness.
The good news is I’m finally putting an effort into not letting just every day go to waste. I don’t break my back working, but I have a job. I’m making rent – but I’m not getting rich either. Mostly taking it one day at a time. I learned a lot in this long, exhausting period of not learning much and though I let a lot of people down (pretty much everyone who was there to let down), I’m committed to staying on the straight and narrow just long enough to carve something of worth from this carcass. In the end, I can only make myself proud and if I manage just that, nothing else matters.
I’m sure my course through life is neither as low or as high as some people out there, but I’ve learned by now that I have only my modest dreams to chase and I have many, many flaws to patch up before I’m happy with myself. I feel like I’m taking modest steps towards what is finally a dream worth chasing, and I’m – again, finally – partaking in an endeavour that I’ll try hard to see the end of. I’m really sorry if I wasted your time ranting on the partial adventures of a sickeningly honest nobody, but it’s not an exercise in false modesty for me to say that I didn’t write this for the attention, but the cleansing value of letting it all out.
Thanks for reading.








