LIFE SUCKS

Lost

This is a stream of consciousness so apologies for the movement from thing to thing. I'm a 27 year old male from Ireland.

My family has always told me I think too much. When I was a kid I'd hastily reply that there isn't such a thing. I think I was very wrong. I always had a lively mind and it served me well. It served me to navigate my way through a childhood marred by incessant criticism and expected failure from my father. Luckily my mother was very loving but she's had MS for much of my life and lacked the energy she would have needed to arbitrate in my turbulent relationship with him. My 3 siblings were grown up and living elsewhere when I was a teenager and I have a lot of the traits of an only child but with the fortunate understanding of people and affection that I think you get from having siblings.

I always hated school. I never tried in any significant way but managed to get through it. I've always been an outsider sort of person but have made a lot of friends. I was never very good with girls although I'm good looking (or so my sisters, friends' girlfriends and other unavailable women like to tell me!). My escape from the mundane while at school became my obsession with music. During that time I started playing in a band of my closest friends. We prided ourselves on being different and experimentation and were pretty good at it. I believed I could do anything despite my father's lack of encouragement and my disinterest in school.

I didn't kiss anyone til I was 13 and have kissed a total 10 girls. Of them I slept with 5 who were colleagues or girlfriends. I have never had a one night stand or sex before having a personal relationship with the person. I am very sexual and wish to but it is as though women smell my darkness no matter how much I cover it! After school I went to college and got a degree in English literature and Philosophy but instead of drinking and learning to be better with women I had a 2 year relationship with a girl I had gone to school with. In retrospect that was a mistake, not just because I should have been experimenting but because she was boring and not good for me. I was blinded by the chemistry.

College was the only education I feel I've had but also part of my downfall. During first year in I was that guy over in the corner of the lecture on his own looking like he didn't want you to speak to him. I didn't want you to speak to me then, and it was fine. I had a feeling better things were waiting for me. I was right in a way as every couple of months I would play a gig with the band. In second year I became more social and made close friends. Music and philosophy were all I cared about. I learned to play guitar, piano and drums and talked philosophy.

After college I worked in a boring sales job. The only thing remarkable about that is that I quit it the week before the recession was announced on the news, which is kind of amusing really. After myself and my girlfriend broke up I became very anxious about not being being capable of attracting women. This was compounded by her moving on very easily. I didn't miss her but I felt I should have been in charge of my own destiny and wasn't. I had a sporadic sexual relationship with a colleague that was just a crutch to both of us. This false consolation stopped and I went on a very deep downward spiral. I think because of my history of unhappiness I normalise and can endure a high level of anxiety. I would go to sleep every night going through the same pattern of negative thoughts about my intelligence, my sociability, my sexlessness etc. This went on for about a year.

I snapped out of this eventually and as I began project me, as I saw it, I desperately wanted to make it a period to change things and remove the pattern but before I could while I was dancing the only one dancing in a club one night a very special person tipped me on the shoulder. Having kissed a stranger for the first time (I know its a ridiculous thing to be excited about)I thought "This is the night I stop". You might say problem solved but deep and meaningful wasn't what I needed. I quickly forgot about my project and pursued a relationship with this girl. I mean pursued. She was home for Christmas but lived in Thailand. I went for 2 holidays to her, one for a week, the other for a month. 6 months later she came home to study Irish, something she'd always wanted to do and I joined her in the Connemara Gaeltacht (remote area where Irish is spoken) with a band mate to record an album. My friend left a few months into our stay because he couldn't handle the remoteness and I stayed on for my girlfriend to finish her course. Even though we loved each other the relationship strained. It's difficult to know the reasons but you could choose from these. The isolation (we couldn't afford to socialise much and trips home were a bimonthly weekend affair), her criticism/my waning confidence, decline in sex/her waning confidence, my waning mental health/her loneliness.

The mental health loss was due to my slow realisation of the madness of modern civilization. I was reading the news as an outsider in the middle of nowhere. I began to see through the stupification that mass media has over us. When I say 'us' I think I can at least speak for everyone in the EU and US as I keep up with both. I began to see that what we have access to is as controlled by the most powerful people in the world who make it their business to have us told what most conveniences them. We live in a China that pretends to be democracy. Which is worse? You can know this but you can't escape it because the alternative source of information is a flurry of crazies who want to blame religious prophesies or aliens. If you're earning money from your skill of journalism you are bought.

Sorry, I'm boring myself too. We moved back to civilization last September and I began a masters in music technology (computer music composition/engineering). It's been extremely difficult, not only because the intensity of the course but because of my continued learning about economics, media and history as a procrastination tool from the course I hate and the fact that my relationship ended in February without me having an opportunity to process it.

I'm now a week from handing in my thesis and my repression mechanism that I subconsciously hoped would last until the end of August is failing. I can't focus on anything because I suddenly find myself dealing with the breakup for the first time. And I know it's going to be ok but I fear I'll never relate to people again. My fear of not being able to attract people has now extended to where I can't relate to my friends because they can't face that most of us are living a lie and I can't help but be honest. I don't discuss media, political or economic matters unless they're brought up but everything else feels so irrelevant now. People talk about the last youtube video they saw or the last book they read and I just nod. I want to grab them by the shoulders and tell them that we need to change things now before it's too late.

I feel like Winston in 1984, except I'm not scribbling "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER", I'm wrestling with our decline into a dark age in my mind. Meanwhile I can't attract anyone to just get some relief. I'm not even shy any more, I just can't think of what people would want to talk about and it must be written all over my face. I can't relate to people any more, my close relationships are a shadow of what they were and so am I as a person. I have been broken by a failed love, a course that beat me into submission, my failures as a human and a world of wonderful people heading for inevitable collapse at the hands of a greedy few. I sleep to these thoughts every night.

I hope it'll end if I can complete this worthless thesis but I fear that afterwards I'll still be left with the same reality I can't deny, and the social consequences of recognising it. I'm empty, bored and anxious all at once. I had an episode of what I think was disassociation a few weeks ago followed by a fit I became so anxious. Luckily someone was around. I've contemplated the convenience of a traffic accident to stop this because I could never do the horror of killing myself to those that I love.

I'm sorry if you read this and it makes you miserable. Although it'll probably just make you think I'm a spoilt asshole. I'm not, I'm a caring creative person who just needs a break for even a few seconds.