Life is so boring that many times I want to scream.
I don’t dare to share how I really feel with other people, but I find life profoundly boring. I’ve always wanted to figure out what exactly is wrong with me.
I’m actually a very alive person. I love people, exercise, sex, traveling, doing things. I’m very expressive with my emotions. I actively try to make the people around me happy. I get excited easily, and I can become intensely passionate about a person or an idea very quickly.
But I don’t have a particularly strong desire to stay alive. I don’t really care that much about whether my body is healthy or whether I’m sick. I don’t care that much about whether I’ll still be alive tomorrow. I have very little desire to maintain a normal, stable, respectable life, and I don’t have much interest in extending my life for as long as possible.
I noticed this about myself when I was very young. If I went to sleep tonight and simply never woke up tomorrow, I think I would be completely okay with that. The thought has never made me panic. When I think about death, what I feel most of the time is just calm.
But when I’m alive, I’m constantly bored. When I’m with ordinary friends, I get bored very easily. A lot of the time, I don’t want to invest any part of my consciousness in socializing at all. I don’t care what someone wore today. I don’t care who isn’t getting along with whom. I don’t care what someone did last week. Sometimes everyone is sitting around talking, and I’m laughing too, asking questions, looking completely engaged, while inside my head I’m already screaming.
And this actually makes me feel ashamed. Because when I’m with my friends, I always seem to care deeply. I listen carefully. I comfort them. I remember the things they tell me. And I genuinely want them to be happy when they’re with me. But once the connection is broken, I often realize that I simply can’t make myself continue caring about those things. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them, and it’s not that I dislike them. I just can’t make myself care.
But being around people who are supposedly “not ordinary” doesn’t make things any better. At first, I’m usually extremely interested. I love getting to know a stranger, but once that initial period of discovery is over, I become impatient again very quickly. I can’t help thinking: You don’t know what the meaning of life is either. Why are you performing as if you’ve figured it out? All those narratives about careers, ideals, success, self-actualization… all those attempts to explain one’s life as some kind of special story, often feel deeply performative to me. I know that’s a harsh way to think. And I know perfectly well that these people haven’t done anything wrong. They’re simply living their lives in their own way.
I just can’t get past it. I don’t want to say what I actually think, but I also don’t want to play along with the performance.
So I feel like I’ve never really found my place in this world. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with the people around me. It’s that no matter which direction I go, somehow I eventually find a way to dismantle that world.
Because of this contradiction in myself, I’ve questioned myself many times. I’ve wondered whether I have some serious mental illness. I’ve wondered whether I’m normal at all? I have so many desires, so much curiosity, so many emotions, so much physical energy, and such a strong desire to connect with other people. And yet most of life feels like a container that’s simply too small for me. The everyday world gives me too little, and everything left over inside me has nowhere to go.
And then I get bored, so bored that I want to scream.
(There were actually a few weeks in my life when I didn’t feel this way. When DL was with me, it was the first time in my life that I felt very strongly that I wanted to stay alive. Every night, I didn’t want to fall asleep because I was afraid I might not wake up. And every morning when I woke up, my first thought was that I wanted to know what was going to happen that day. I wanted to keep talking to him. I wanted to keep getting to know him, and I wanted him to keep getting to know me. Then DL left my world and stopped talking to me. And my world lost its color again.)