Some facts about me: I think I am a broken person.  I seriously question the road my life has taken and I endlessly rehash the pompromises I have made in my life.  I have an unsecure and vaguely crappy job with an amoral corporation so that I don't have to worry about money.  I put up with halfway relationships so as not to have to worry about loneliness.  I have lost the ability to recapture the purer feelings of my younger years in exchange for a streamlined narrow-mindedness that I assumed would propel me to "the top."  What a joke.

Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me: the little yellow pills, the lost sleep.  But I don't think this is anything new in the world.

This is not to say my life is bad.  I know it isnt... but my life is not what I expected it might have been when I was younger.  Maybe you yourself deal with this issue better than me.  Maybe you have been lucky enough to never have inner voices question you about your own path - or maybe you answered the questioning and came out on the other side.  I don't feel sorry for myself in any way.  I am merely coming to grops with what I know the world is truly like.

Other thoughts: sometimes I wonder if it is too late to feel the same things that other people seem to be feeling.  Sometimes I want to go up to people and say to them, "What is it you are feeling that I am not?  Please - that's all I want to know."

Perhaps you think I simply need to fall in love and that maybe I've just never met the right person.  Or perhaps I've just never figured out exactly what it was I wanted to do with life while the clock ticked away.  Whatever.

Like most people, I've botomed out a few times; in motel rooms, say - alongside naked bodies close by in cities I can't recall - looking at phones with nobody to dial.  And I've been hooked on a few things, too, and lost months and years there, but I think I came out of it with my brains intact.  And how much would this matter, anyway?

Sometimes I want to go to sleep and merge with the foggy world of dreams and not return to this, our real world.  Sometimes I look back on my life and am surprised at the lack of kind things I have done.  Sometimes I just feel that there must be another road that can be walked - away from this person I became - either against my will or by default.
 
 
 
 
 

Douglas Coupland
Life After God: 1000 Years (Life After God)

In case you didn't previously notice, I love Douglas Coupland's work.  Get into it ASAP.