Mein Kampf

Be a good son. Stay out of trouble. Do everything your parents asked of you—what your grandparents expected of you, what your siblings needed of you. But never live for yourself, because that’s selfish.

I wear scales for skin. My tongue flickers. I change colors depending on where I am and who I’m with. I punish my body for being too much, then punish it again for being too little. I go to the gym because I’m a skeleton; I hate myself because I’m not. Is there no end?

I’ve devoted my life to a cause I’m not even sure I believe in, but I at least hoped it made my mother proud. How would I know if she’s proud, though, when she’s six feet under?

I buy a lavish car that hemorrhages $1,500 a month from my bank account, and a house because “that’s just what you’re supposed to do.” I consider medical school because that’s “the next step,” right? And every “Congratulations,” every “You should be happy,” every “You should be proud,” is met with my imitation of a profound thank you—and a fraudulent smile.

When does it end?

Where is the meaning in any of it? If every milestone is met with the same deep feeling of abyss, then is any of this fulfilling—or am I only chasing empty goals because “that’s what you’re supposed to do”?

And what if it isn’t what I want?

What if I want to rot in bed and be left alone. Take a hike by the lake in the morning. Read Rilke in a café while sipping coffee. Laze in the afternoon. Why must life be so demanding of one’s time? Why must Nature be so indifferent to the nature I have been born with? And is there no one else who feels this pain—this struggle—this bleak, lifeless, unRomantic contemporary moment?

Everyone says, “You need discipline,” that “life isn’t about you, it’s about others,” and all sorts of jargon I cannot see as anything but a manner of coping—an attempt to resolve the nihilism that wretches at their souls. I cannot help but feel that at every moment, in anything I do, I will never be satisfied. That there is an abyss in me that may not be satiated.

Perhaps it is I who is the nihilist: an abyssal being of pity, awaiting an angel to descend from Heaven and save him.

But no one is coming.

And I have come to a point where it is unbearable to bear this dread while witnessing the daily circus—my contempt for contemporary society. Yet I don’t even know if I would be content in any other age. Trailblazing paths have led me, too, to melancholy.

Still, I refuse to sink into it. I refuse to become a man of pure cynicism. I feel contempt for those who live that way—because life is magical. Life is worth living. Worth preserving.

Maybe this melancholia does not stem from meaninglessness, but from realism: a recognition that the greatness I seek no longer exists—at least not in the forms I was taught to worship. I see bourgeois spectacle everywhere. I see the commodification of everything. And I do not know how to combat it.

Yet something flows through my blood like a commandment: that it is my duty to save people from the contemporary malaise. That I might have been a hero of the Greek age, or a Caesar of the Roman. That my writings might live on like the poets and philosophers.

But am I coping? Am I merely being Romantic? Does anyone understand this struggle?

Yearning for a past long gone, seeing a future approaching, and finding no satisfaction in the contemporary moment. There is no going back.

There is only the struggle for a life you would say yes to—again and again—in every lifetime.