Dealing With the Pain of Being Normal

A am almost thirty years old today. I'm actually turning twenty seven and the thought leaves a hole in my chest that feels like it should have been filled by now but actually gets a little bigger with every year. Its almost like I never expected to actually get old. And now that I am I feel like life is useless in so many ways. Every day that goes by, every month, year, seems to teach me the truth that, life is really nothing special. It is the same for everyone and it will always be the same for me.

I realize that there are good times. There were moments. There will be moments again. But for those of us with any kind of imagination, always at the fore-front of ones mind are all the good times that never were. That never will be. All the dreams that can't be achieved because well, peoples lives are normal and boring, and the opportunity has long since passed. In real life, things don't actually happen to people.

"TV taught me how to feel. Now real life has no appeal." - Marina and the Diamonds

In the book "The Four Loves" C. S. Lewis talks about how people might assume that, because he speaks so intelligently of religion, he must be a pretty righteous man. He says that this is a myth.

"Those like myself whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine conditions far higher than anything we have really reached."

Tonight I feel this way about my first twenty-seven years of life. The good times, the accomplishments, are swallowed whole by the monster of imagining what might have been. What was not to be. And there is a true sense of loss that comes with those thoughts. It seems that the thing to do would be to say, forget the past, it cannot be changed. Move forward and look to the promise that is to come. However, with the knowledge that nothing will ever be as good as you can imagine, then what's the point of moving on at all? It seems that the future, with all its promise is really no more then a promise of disappointment, because the truth is that life is just normal. Regaurdless of love, fame, money, or time I will never be anything but little old me. Perfectly normal, faulty, often disappointing and painfully ordinary me. How horrible it is to learn we are simply simple.

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. Billy Collins