Heart in a Headlock

"They can’t touch you. They can’t hear you. But if you can solve the mystery of your own death, then you’ll have the chance to live again."
-The Invisible

Okay, just what the heck am I doing here?  For a while there, I really lost myself.  It’s not that I ever knew who I was in the first place but there were times when I felt I at least had a grasp on this Brannon person.  It’s sometimes stunning how you can be you, be inside of yourself and live your life and never really even know who you are.  Now, I’m realizing it’s totally possible.  And it felt like just when I was making some progress, just when I was getting to know myself, I changed so drastically that everything I thought to be true turned out to be dead wrong.  I was a stranger inside of myself, therefore I felt uncomfortable and alone, shut out from the familiar and stranded in a foreign body.   

Situations in my life did not turn out how I had hoped.  I thought once I started college, everything would turn around.  I naively thought I’d make friends and be recognized for my art and caring nature and I would find love, peace and satisfaction.  Instead, I was met with heartache, regret and restlessness.  I realized my dream school wasn’t as shiny as they had projected and realized that people weren’t as good as I gave them credit for.  I graduated a bit disenchanted and it only got worse once I moved back home and found myself under the overbearing and controlling nature of my mother.  I was out of school, out of work and eating to ease the boredom and disillusionment.  I stayed inside and away from people and got fatter and fatter, undoing three years of weight loss.  Everything was spiraling out of my control and I felt helpless and powerless.

And so I turned to writing, as I always have, to deal with the mounting messes in my head.  Thus, I started the Everyday Entropy project (a side-project blog on Blogger).  In a lot of ways, it actually started itself.  Everyday Entropy is essentially about me trying to understand, explore, accept and eventually overcome my “death,” which is really just a metaphorical veil for the downward spiral of depression and the trembling transitions I find myself undergoing.  There were several reasons why I chose to write from the perspective of a dead guy.  Firstly, I’ve always been interested in the darker nature of things.  I think anyone that knows me or has read my writing for a while will know this.  And because I’m not really a fascinating person on my own, because my writing isn’t all that interesting, I thought I could try to put a slight spin on the same old boring blog by writing about my rotting.  I don’t know if it’s made things more interesting or pretentious but at least I’m trying here…

I also felt like starting Everyday Entropy fresh out of college would be a great way to chronicle that unsure time that most college graduates find themselves wading through.  You know, what do you with yourself after you’ve been in school for the majority of your life?  It’s time to find a job and possibly move and leave behind your friends and family and try to start a new life for yourself and that’s a huge change and a lot of pressure.  I thought it might be interesting to write about how my post-graduate “afterlife” goes.  I always thought it would be great if my story started out tragically and ended up having a happy ending.  Wouldn’t that be a wonderful read, to see me go from some dead dude to somehow finding all of my decomposing dreams come to life?  How gratifying would that be for the reader, and for me as the author of the story?

You can’t get much more alienated than being dead and I’ve always felt pretty alienated from the rest of humanity.  I don’t think that’s necessarily a terrible thing.  Sure, it’s quite lonely but it’s also given me incredible insights.  I’ve always felt on the edge of people, always felt like I’ve never been so involved in anyone that I’ve been able to allow myself to take a few steps back to see the big picture.  As emotional as I am, I’ve always felt I’ve been able to be objective when needed, not afraid to dish out advice that people might not want to hear but would ultimately be beneficial for them.  I’ve never took a friend’s side just because I liked them or blindly agreed with an opinion that I thought was outright wrong.  I’ve always tried to be analytical and see things from both sides.  I’ve been able to put my feelings aside for rationale.  It’s always seemed that things that make the utmost sense to me are completely lost on others.  This has always made me feel different, slightly outcast.  And who’s more outcast than the dead?  I felt like I could explain my thinking better by just saying I was dead.  It gave me a reason for being different, for understanding the things that “living” people could not comprehend.  I was outside of the world, no longer attached and thus able to see things from a different perspective.  I was now on the outside looking in.

Another inspiration for this blog concept is the amazing show, Dead Like Me.  I really liked how the undead character of George saw the world from a different perspective after she died.  It seemed like she understood more about life after she didn’t have one anymore.  It fit my situation perfectly and I adapted that style to my writing.   

I somehow felt like I was being cheated, that life wasn’t fair.  I felt like I had been slapped in the face by the universe.  I’m just a small town boy trying to find happiness, taking a chance on doing what I thought I loved, blindly and naively pushing forward with confidence that it would all work out, that my decisions would be worth it in the end.  How many times do you hear people telling us to follow our dreams?  If you do, you’ll succeed!  So, I did.  I followed my dreams but I didn’t succeed.  I failed.  And I realized that not everyone can do what they love.  It just doesn’t work out that way.  You can love something all day long, have a strong passion for it but if you aren’t good at what you love, you won’t get anywhere.  And even if you’re good, that’s not good enough.  You have to be the best, stand out from the crowd, be marketable.  That happy ending you hear about is mostly crap.  And I found that out the hard way.  I was so traumatized, so hurt, so disappointed and so rejected that I didn’t want to deal anymore.  And because my feelings were in the toilet, I found it a lot easier to just pretend I had no feelings at all, to just be dead so I wouldn’t have to deal.  I chose to reject all emotions and put up a wall of rot, a macabre mask in which I could justify my negativity.  I mean, I’m dead so I have the right to complain, right?  Who wouldn’t be a little upset about that.

And over these few months, I learned that it takes a lot of energy to be dead.  I wonder if that’s why I’m always tired.  Or maybe death doesn’t have anything to do with it at all.  Maybe harboring onto all of this bitterness is what makes me so exhausted.  I think the cranky sadness that I carry in my shriveled heart is probably what keeps me anchored to atrophy.  How can I ascend with all this weary weighing me down?

Sometimes, there are days when I feel I catch a glimpse of life, of a hope for happiness.  It’s ever so brief and fleeting but it temporarily floods my capillaries and makes me twitch.  I have this vision of letting all the hurt go, of tearing it out of me and chucking it as far away from myself as possible.  I fantasize about living.  I fantasize about breathing again, allowing the air to flow through my lungs so as to clear out the cobwebs.  I dream about the blood rushing back into my body.  I dream about my heart being filled.  I dream about the day when I don’t have to act like I’m dead so I can make sense of my life and myself. 

I never meant to stay dead.  I had hoped that one day, things might work out for me, that I would find a good job and move out of my stagnant home life and pull myself out of this hellhole.  I very much wanted to create a life for myself, to become independent and stable.  Then, I’d be able to crawl out of my death shell and rejoin the living, all the while writing about it, chronicling the changes from rolling around in my grave to walking on air.  And with this new job prospect, it seems like I might be able to do that.  Of course, I don’t want to count my corpses before they hatch but I’m hopeful…for the first time in a long time, I’m hopeful.

Even before I received the job offer, there were times when I was tired of being troubled.  I’ve come across a couple of positive people in the last few months and a part of me was inspired to be like them, to be like I used to be.  I wasn’t always so cynical, you know.  In fact, I used to be a really positive person.  Life managed to beat that out of me, though.  But there are days when I miss it, when I miss being hopeful and a good influence on people.  I miss encouraging others.  Now, I can’t find it within myself to be positive for anyone because I just don’t believe in giving people false hopes.  I believed in false hopes and ended up being screwed over royally because of it.  I don’t want to do that to anyone else.  And when I look at these shiny, happy people, there’s another part of me that’s disgusted with them.  How can they be so happy when there’s such misery?  How can they sit there and smile and believe in a future when the future is so foul?  Maybe I’m not so much disgusted with them, but with myself and just jealous that they can still remain positive through everything and I’ve given up so easily.  In reality, I’m not dead.  I’m just weak. 

And so I don’t know where I am right now.  I found a sort of comfort in my coffin but sometimes I do yearn for the light.  There are times when I can remember myself, the way I used to be, the young man that yearned for love and warmth and wanted to touch people through his words and his message, before that message became muddled and tainted.  Is he still somewhere inside, resting underneath the rotting?  If so, how do I reach him?  I’m torn because there’s a part of me that feels like this new version of myself is just a natural progression of what I’m becoming, which is a monster.  And I’m okay with that.  Yet, there’s another part of me that wants to return to romance, to love and life, a part of me that wants to be that kind soul that I once used to be.  I suppose the ultimate question is, which one is my true self?  Although I’m “dead,” I’m still trying to find out who I am, still trying to figure out if I should be a complacent cadaver or reach out for resuscitation.  Who am I?  What am I?  A man or a monster? 

And why does either choice sound so equally terrifying?