I learned suffering is not something to be Romanticized.
As a modern reader, what are your thoughts about romanticizing suffering… did Dostoevsky intend that notion when he created his most notable characters, so they become down to earth and more relatable. Or he simply meant to say suffering is a source of revelation?
I mean I always come away with the impression that profound wisdom requires profound pain. As we all know he himself had quite a challenging time in his youth.
This is me personally saying: I use to believe that “suffering” steels the soul. Though slowly but surely, I’m beginning to realize reality could be a cruel mistress.
I hear everyone saying: “chase your dreams. Take the risk.”
Well, I’m not probably the first to admit that it’s not that straight forward. I will even dare to say everyday feels like the world is ending.
Maybe when you hit rock bottom there is nowhere to go. That is what keeps me going. I have long found myself in this inglorious position.
To be honest I’m currently writing this in a dark room so my land lord would think I am not in. I have actually been avoiding her for the past three and a half weeks. Some days I can hear her standing on my door way listening in before asking the tenets next door if they had seen me come in, and of course I stay as quiet as possible. If work comes by, I either sneak out very early on the morning or wait till she goes out about her day and leave.
Work has dried up recently but I use to paint houses, any labor work that doesn’t eat the whole day so can spare time for my writing. Plus when I am out I don’t socialize much, ok that’s a lie, I don’t socialize at all. I use to have a roommate but he has long been struggling with some mental issues, and had to move in with his relatives… let’s just leave it at that.
I too in fact on some days would go to my parent’s house when they aren’t there. I would raid the fridge take 2 or 3 eggs a bread and some cooking oil. Look for some things that wouldn’t be missed. When that got hard and I couldn’t find anything with much value I started to get a bit creative… about a month ago I started to takeout the fuel from the tank, it was something unsuspected and had much more value… gas is expansive and I would sell it on the black market with a reduced price.
But on this Wednesday I came back with a can to do the same thing but the car key had been moved. I remember it being at the spot for my entire life. I don’t know how they would suspect as I would take out 2 sometimes 3 liter a week. I know they can’t possibly think it’s me as they still think am at my day job as a bank tailor.
Oh and about that job I should probably mention… some 4 month ago, I clocked out on a Monday and never clocked back in again. I mean I haven’t been to that place since then.
I always said to myself that I would call back and say I had a family emergency or something, but a day turned to a week and another week then a full month and I just never went back again. The office use to call me and leave texts but just gave up eventually. My co-workers especially call me till this day but I don’t know what to say after picking up.
As I was saying at the start… a serious of inglorious decisions led me to this unenviable position that I am at now. I don’t know why I was so confident at the start, maybe I thought since I got my childhood friends in the U.S they could help me out with finding editors, I mean we in touch and they always send me pictures and videos of their cars and apartments… they have good lives there, and some even own a successful business… and that being said it was a surprise to me when I asked two of my closest friends like about a month ago for 40$ loan and that one was actually for rent, and I got a response saying they got me… and then I never heard back from them. They stopped sending all that stuff in my D.M but I still see them posting popping bottles every other weekend on a night out. (They don’t own me anything, so that’s that.)
I even tried the YouTube thing, I do book and movie reviews, even reached a 1000 subs and all is REQ to be monetized but only to find out no monetization in the location I live in. Now that depressed me a whole lot more than anything else. What’s worse is YouTube runs ads along my videos, so yesterday I unlisted all the videos even deleted the app. Well I did delete the app because I am actually scraping all my personal info from my phone as I have decided to pawn all my electronics when the pawn shop opens on Monday. got to make rent somehow plus I haven’t taken a shower close to 3 weeks now. And my land lord has cut the power that goes to my room.
At this point I had over drafted my account… I even get a text from the bank every day, reading they will take me to court if I don’t payback. (the debit keeps on pilling up by the day.)
But, but all that pressure had lit a fire under my ass and the matter of fact is I have completed my fourth draft and feel confident about it also. And mailed it to a few agents and I got a request for my full manuscript from 5 agents out of the 18. I had been biding my time till now. So in hindsight, I learned a lot about myself about the world, even read all the books I had planned to.
And every day I wake up I realize that I would have never gotten to where I’m in my writing if I had still been on the same lane I was on previously… an interview with J.k rolling found me when I was actually on my lowest and she was saying if I done anything else instead of getting up every morning and get back to my writing I wouldn’t have succeeded and that was like a moral boot for me. Not saying she is the a great writer or anything but she is a success story no matter what… any ways down to brass tacks…
I am not sure why writing this now, maybe it’s for myself… maybe it’s because I can’t fall asleep right now, plus before deleting the all the apps on my devices and since I’m going to pawn them, I guess I want to leave a thumbprint somewhere out on the internet like here on reddit.
But the moral of the story is not for anyone to feel sorry for me but say as to serve as a cautionary tale for anyone who asks the question “What if I risk it all, to chase the dream?”
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(And finally here is a shard of myself in my main character from my novel.)
I was the kind of kid who thought of starting revolutions from his bed. I used to lie awake under the covers, drafting manifestos by flashlight, convinced, so terribly and beautifully, that I was meant for something more. There was a certainty in it. Bone-deep. The sense that destiny had marked me for something seismic.
I don’t know how to explain it, only that I knew I was separate. There is an intangible urge still burning low in my stomach, prophesying: a voice insisting on importance, on becoming. It was never about delusions of grandeur or fame. I wanted to leave something scarred. I once believed I would carve my initials, however faintly, into the spine of the world.