Life is complicated. Life is messy. And more often than not, it is also utterly frustrating. Because life always goes on. No matter how much you mess up, no matter how much the past haunts and no matter how much you regret everything you didn’t do. Until it doesn’t. And then it is too late to change.
I have spent all my life trying to change. To become a better person – I tried to become happy, then content and now I am only aiming towards not being miserable. Just like ten minutes of every day in which I am awake and don’t utterly despise myself. Mostly, I only reach one minute – two on a good day and sometimes even three.
I don’t write this because I want your sympathy, but because it is the truth. I feel like everything I ever did and keep doing is a failure. It’s pointless and time consuming and it doesn’t get me anywhere. Because though the times or the world might change, I still stay the same. The weird one. The one that never fits in. The one that spends most of her time regretting all the things she did or did not do. But it’s pointless really. Every minute I get a little older and no one really cares. Life is meant for winners not whiners.
There is a word for what I feel apparently, and it’s called depression. But to be honest, if that is true I have been depressed all my life. Yes, it got worse every year, but it’s the same familiar misery that accompanies me since I was maybe six years old and realized that I don’t think the way the other kids do. “Because I said so” never was an adequate answer for me and groups of people, where everybody is supposed to behave a certain way make me uncomfortable. I didn’t see why girls can’t like blue as much as pink or want to be Batman instead of a princess for carnival. Why only the boys can build treehouses while the girls play with dolls.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not about feminism. It is about viewing the world differently. People can’t really deal with someone who sees things differently. Especially not when “everyone is doing it” or “it has always been done like that”. People might admire heroes or revolutionaries from afar, but they don’t want to deal with them. They get annoyed and impatient with someone who keeps asking why and doesn’t behave the way it is expected. No, I am not saying that I am either a hero or a revolutionary. I am just different – not better or worse, just different. But different is often seen as a thread so people told me to stop being like that.
I don’t remember a time in my life when there was not someone who told me to change. Be quieter, behave more like others, be thinner, be louder – essentially be different. But I already was. Just not the kind of different that makes people like you. When I was younger my greatest superpower was to disappear. Become so quiet nobody even realizes that you are there. Until it doesn’t even matter if you are there. Unfortunately, that ended with people walking all over me, so I decided to become louder. Angrier. Scarier. And that also worked for a time.
The great joke about it is, that I don’t want to be different. I don’t want to stick out – but I always do. I am taller than the average German woman, I am bigger than the average German woman and unfortunately, I never learned to keep quiet. I can’t agree just to agree and keep people happy. I can’t swallow insults without retaliating. And I can’t stop wishing for things to be different. All it does though, is alienate me and that gets me back to where I started: Miserable. Because I wish I could be just a tiny bit less different. Just a little bit more like anyone else.