A Normal Life

One time when I was having coffee with a friend, and we were talking about life and its beauties and misfortunes, as one does, I told her that I want to live a normal life. That the life that I envision for myself isn’t even something that I want to use the word ‘envision’ for because that makes it out to seem a big dazzling thing. Which it is not, which is something that I don’t want. But the life that I want for myself in both the near and far future is a normal life.

I just want a 9 to 5 job that provides enough and an apartment with my partner. There’s nothing more important to me than the people around me: my family, my friends, my community; and my creative outlets. Nothing. Nothingnothingnothing.

I’ve grown to care just enough to get what I need to do done. I’ve grown to be barely efficient but good enough at any work presented. I’ve grown but in the odd way that plants in questionable conditions do.

I have no conviction left. I just want to do good, be good, in this universe.

She said you’re just tired, and honestly, even before the sentence was out of her mouth I was saying, ‘Maybe it’s because I’m just tired.’ And we had a good, tired chuckle about it.

Because I am tired. I am just tired. It kills me to know that I’ve always been like this. Not tired, but like this. Like, sick. Like, collapsing under the weight of my emotions and everybody else’s. Like, small. Like, doing everything I could since I had a conscious to hide it. And in doing so, losing myself. Like, repressing so many memories that tell just how not okay I am, or rather how not okay I have been and came to be.

So, I’d kill to leave. I’d kill to have a normal, bland life. Because my normal days are my happier days. There’s no relapsing on my normal days. The days where I don’t need to ruin everything around me to feel good. Where I don’t feel like hurting myself and the people around me. Where I have control over my mind.

These thoughts, these feelings, that was over a year ago. What I want is still the same but its for different reasons. The rage inside of me has quietened and I am the most okay I have been in a long while. I have nothing but vicious kindness for the world, being kind as an act of defiance. I have empathy for my past selves, all the women I have been, and all the women I’m going to become throughout my life.

One of my favourite ever art pieces is one by Margot Terc. It says, ‘Take care of myself and my own, as an act of resistance and love.’ It became a solid agenda in my life: resistance and love.

There is good in this world. You’re it.