GOING CRAZY

Crazy is a pretty relative term, isn’t it? There are things that I see as completely crazy while everyone else seems to think they are perfectly normal. Like being completely content in existing within marked-out parameters, never questioning anything about why they are there in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that kind of life is bad – sometimes I really wish I could be like that. Living within my own little garden of possibilities, never wondering what lies on the other side of the fence. The problem is, I can’t. My whole life I felt like this is just the beginning of something. Like there is this whole other world to explore somewhere. I just haven’t found it yet. The problem with wanting something so much you can almost taste it on your tongue but never quite finding it, is that after a while it will make you very unhappy.

Every motivation-trainer, therapist, self-proclaimed mental health guru – hell even the Dalai Lama – will tell you the same thing: That true happiness only comes from living in the moment. My main problem is that I usually don’t really like the present. In the present, I am stuck in a life I don’t want to live. In the present I am a failure that is too ill to even go to work. In the present I don’t like myself very much. The problem is that I really need to change my present if I can ever hope to change my future. It took me a very long time to understand that.

After that I started to take a real hard look at all the things I don’t like about my present. There is my job: It’s okay but very stressful and most importantly, I actually want to do something very different. That something is risky though and I might fail really badly at it. Then there is my present location: I have lived here for four years and not made a single friend, just a few colleagues that I’m okay with. When I am not a work, I am home alone with my cats most of the time, talking to people I play online games with. And that brings me to the worst part: I am alone, and very lonely, and I really don’t want to feel like that anymore.

So, where do I go from here then? I don’t have a success story for you (yet) – I am not a motivation-writer or anything, I still am very much stuck. With my life. With my depression and anxiety. With my loneliness. But I realized that it doesn’t really matter what everybody else has accomplished, or what somebody expects of me. It’s not about others. It shouldn’t matter if they think what I’m doing is crazy, or stupid, or reckless, or immature. It’s not their life, it’s mine. And that’s what I really – really – realized now. Nobody can tell you what’s right or wrong for you. You need to find out for yourself. And maybe doing so requires you to go a little crazy first.