I'm not okay. I am frustrated and angry and feel my work is not being fruitful. I am tired, tired beyond what I can explain. It's not a tiredness I know how to fight. There's no enemy to fight, no one to strike out at and win points against. Normally I can be angry at myself even, to find a way to punish myself into a rage to strive forward and keep wading through the growing cesspool of bullshit that piles up from all sides on every level. There is something wrong with our world, something broken. It's been broken for a long time. We all know it's wrong, everything about our world feels wrong, that we can't just be nicer, can't just be better to one another. We try, but the same abuses and toxic nonsense is repeated over and over. So I am tired, more tired than I've been. We all talk about shouting into the void, and I'm no stranger to howling into my voids desperate to be heard. This is one more time I'm raving like a madman in the darkness. But it's worse this time somehow. This time I know there is a platform for me to rave on. There are people who will listen, people who feel the same way I do, people who I think care about me, who will agree with me. You poor people are just as helpless I as I am. You feel tired too, I see it in your posts, in the cracks around your eyes in your selfies. You can feel it weighing all down on you too. We are just specks, screaming into a dark uncaring universe desperately clinging to celebrating the oncoming bleakness of our future.
In the vastness of the universe there is only one thing that cares about Life, and that is Life itself. Life must serve Life, Life must find a way, because there's nothing coming to help us. There's no cavalry, no Light coming to save us. If there are Gods of any sort they are either wrapped up in their own problems or simply do not care about us. Life as far as we know exists only on this little planet. Even if there's life teeming on other worlds, we are the only type of life of our kind. So we must preserve that life, the life on this planet. That can't come through destruction of ourselves and our environment. It can't come from torturing and punishing that life.
I am tired of this punishment. The punishment we take out on each other, the punishment we take out on the planet. I'm tired of watching people be punished simply for existing. I'm tired of people being punished for being trying to experience their life, by forcing them to live in fear, in pain, in hunger. I'm tired of division, of allowing shortsighted foolishness divide us, and put us at each other's throats.
I'm tired of feelings this all. Feeling the pain, the suffering, the constant screaming of an entire world where everyone feels broken and hurt. That's what I feel everyday, every time wake up, I know the world is suffering.
And I am powerless to stop it.
I can't make it better. The paths to take to have power would destroy my soul, tattered enough as it is, and I would loss sight of what I am trying to accomplish. I don't want to be a white knight, and I'd honestly be pretty bad at it. I've tried, sometimes I still try, but it mostly leaves me feeling drained, unaccomplished, and not having done any good. The thing is it doesn't work. Even just trying to do simple things like posting some positive thoughts and comments gets trashed and dragged down these days.
Some people have called me "Twitter Dad." Sometimes affectionately, sometimes as a jab. At first I was okay with it, but honestly I don't want to be Twitter's Dad, or the Writing Community's Dad. I don't have it in me anymore. I also think that it's frankly put some expectations on myself that I simply can't, and don't want to live up too. I am not your dad. I'm just a guy who wants you to stop hurting and see something worth living, because I want to find something worth living for too, and I'm tired of only looking at darkness.
When I say nothing is coming to save us, I mean that. A person isn't going to save the world, and it needs saving. I want to save it, hell isn't that why I write fantasy? Fantasy where some farm boy can go save the world with a bit of violence and the power of friendship? There isn't a farm boy in the real world.
I used to believe that if we could set aside our differences and worked together we could build a better tomorrow. I don't see it happening anymore. Through history humans divide, they fight, but the fighting never resolves anything. Not really. 80 years later we're still fighting the same bullshit we fought in World War 2. We're also still fighting for individual rights from...well every era. It might seem like no coincidence that I'm writing this on the 107th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania. The US used this to enter "The Great War". The War to End All Wars. At first called The European War.
How depressing that it's been 104 years since the end of that conflict. Now we just call it World War One. Because there was another war. There have been hundreds of wars since World War One. All because of issues that WWI didn't fix. All the issues it dredged up.
But that wasn't really the start of it was it?
In a college Western Civ class some of my fellow students complained that it was the war that never needed to happen, a war that was stupid and pointless. I disagreed. It wasn't the war that didn't need to happen. It was the war that was always going to happen. A thousand years of European politics assured that. All due to issues of all the conflicts that had come before that had failed to settle anything. There will never be a War that will be called "The War to End all Wars" because when that war happens, there will be nobody left to call it anything.
Joseph Cambell had his Hero with a Thousand Faces. I challenge that there's a biggest idea. There's the Story with a Thousand Faces. Each story told is about the same thing. At your base level every story, from romance, to historical, to sci-fi, to spaghetti westerns has the same story. There's a state of norm, something new is introduced to the environment, there is conflict, and then the new thing is either integrated into the environment or destroyed. This happens over and over. Rather it's a group of people moving into inhabited land, migration patterns of insects or birds. A new person in your house, a new student in a new school. Cells moving into a new configuration that changes just a tiny sequence of DNA ever so slightly over millions of years until a new species is born. That new species fight for survival, for space among the established environment. Some will survive, some will be destroyed.
Our own human consciousness does this on a daily basis. You have a set of beliefs about the world. Beliefs passed down and slightly modified from your parents and culture. As you grow up you learn new things, you either accept or reject new ideas as you need. Sometimes you reject something old, because you don't need it anymore. Your mind is a constant swirl of change from various thoughts and ideas. One day you need Santa Claus to exist. One day a God. The next day black out stupor. The next thirty years resisting the draw of a cigarette. Sometimes we need fantasy, sometimes we need a bit of erotica. Ideas come back when you need them.
The same thing happens with ideals on a broader scale. We call it society, culture, religion, ideals of government. Sometimes we get rid of a bad ideas, sometimes we have good ideas and things improve. Sometimes we introduce bad ideas and things go to shit.
On every level this is the same story. From the formation and shaping of galaxy, right down to tiny atoms bumping into each other in such ways that it causes a slight variation to produce a Sun, or the vague hallucinations of an tired intoxicated writer clacking away on a device invented to record these hallucinations.
An uncountable number of repetition of the same story over and over. "the existing norm - the introduction of something new, no matter how small, to create something slightly new and different."
The Story of a Thousand Faces.
So right now I'm having my own repetition story repeated. A new idea has entered my brain and it's rocking me down to my core. My view of life and the world are changing, and my actions resulting from this will ever so slightly effect the pattern again to somehow lead to another conflict that will effect someone else norm.
Conflict will go on forever, changing the variations, it's in the very foundation of everything the universe is made up of.
So yeah I'm tired. I am rejecting the idea that I need to be the hero. I'm rejecting the idea that I can make things better. Because that's fighting the nature of the universe itself. And now I don't know who I am without trying to make things better.
Because everything is conflict all the time. So how can there be peace?
But I don't know. Maybe, just maybe if little change can effect up the chain, it can affect down the chain too. Maybe if we stopped being in conflict with in ourselves, then with those around us, until we can cause peace on a subatomic level. Until the spreads and the universe itself is at peace. Maybe that is the ultimate function of life, was to create a life form capable of spreading peace. Maybe we're it if we had another million years. Maybe it will be the next life form. Maybe life will not prove capable and the universe will reject it for something else entirely in another galaxy.
I don't think I'm the only one who is having this sort of thought thought. If I was to compare this mental break down, drug fueled rant it would almost be like a cross between some ideas of The Good Place and Everything Everywhere All At Once. Tiny changes lead to different outcomes, until there is an enlightenment.
Maybe it's just happening on a much larger scale then for individuals.
Or maybe we'll destroy each other and nothing will ever change, another idea rejected as no longer useful.