X factor

Life is getting away from me. I am trapped in a tiny bubble through which I can watch others live but can’t join them. I have no passions anymore, only obsessions. Things that should inspire me to embrace them and grab them by the horns only nag at me and remind me how far behind I am at everything. Nothing I am doing is enough, or even close.

            What the hell am I here for? Such a stupid question, like something right out of the script of some godawful “outreach” effort to Reach Troubled Youth For Christ, those horribly misguided attempts of shiny happy evangelicals to make sense of the flutter they’d gotten their tits in over “Generation X.” I hail from that generation, but I’m not a troubled youth anymore. I’m forty-one years old and completely bereft of anything to offer God or the world He claims to love. I still believe His claim. I just have nothing to lend to its proof.

            I looked over my Facebook page at all the things I’ve been “liking” and posting lately, and I realized that they came from fear. Fear of having been found too lazy to stand for the things I have made so much noise about claiming to believe in, however pathetic and inconsequential any “stand” via social media may be. Fear of having nothing to bring to the party. I have to bring something, to be something, right? I know people who will call that a lie. Why can’t I believe them? Not like I haven’t tried. God, I’ve tried. I can’t do this. There is no true face. There is only a pile of masks that I have run out of ways to shuffle.

            So goddamned self-obsessed, pretentious, unreal. But it’s not unreal. It’s honest, and I should be punished for that. But I probably won’t learn, no matter how much I try. I wish they could have known how I envied them on Wednesday night, so blithely singing the praises of failure, sagaciously expounding on the human propensity to respond to pain with learning and change, as though it was some particularly engaging novel or movie plot. Yet I know they say those things because they learned them the hard way. They have earned the right to pontificate. They have come through, and I have not. So I envy them, and wish I could join them, even while their words kick and punch and shave slices off whatever I have that passes for a soul. Failure and pain, perhaps the two things I despise and fear the most, yet so familiar, constant, and defining that you’d think I’d have learned some. Fucking. Thing. By now.