how to lose yourself, a tutorial
enduring pain by savouring in my tongue
Prelude
Life has the tendency to emulate comedies in a way that only resembles a Shakespearean tragedy. Hope is probably the principal and only antagonist that we, as main characters, encounter. This, of course, only if we are brave enough to accept the solipsistic nature of our human experience. I, in my best intentions, try to deny any self-centred principle when thriving through life, but it comes to a point where there is no way to avoid what the humble may deem as vile. We are the only thing we know. The only thing we can be sure exists; therefore, the only thing that matters. The latter statement could sound a little bit radical, but please bear with me. We, as I, are the beginning and the end of what we know exists — if everything else is a constant haze of doubts and half-told truth, how could they matter? The answer is that they don’t, and if we ever deem them important, their prestige won’t be sufficient in itself, but in what we consider them to be. We give things meaning, and Hope, like the villain in an enemies-to-lovers bad romance, tries to convince us they are more than what we are, but they aren’t.
how to lose yourself (a tutorial):
You can only be for the people so long before you become the people’s and not your own person. It is the denial and diminishment of the self, the first step towards the abandonment of it, but this isn’t about being condescending or about wanting to please. Well, maybe it is, but not in the fashion you have already bought in many self-help media. This is about deciding to make something, rather, someone, your beginning and your end for the experience of it. This is about taking the worst actions for the pleasure of seeing the red of the fire that is or will incinerate your mental state. This is not about flirting with evil. No. This is about finding evil in baggy eyes and kissing the lips of the face those eyes belong to until you no longer feel your tongue, until you think it is going to fall, until you are the one falling, convinced this must be as beautiful as flying. But it isn’t. Or maybe it is. Once again, life is a comedy that stands solely in its ability to be tragic. It is so fucking awful, but doesn’t it give you a big, fat laugh?
Step 1: Be
In order to lose yourself, you have to first have a sense of self. I had it. I knew what I wanted and who I was, or that is what I like to brag now that the lines of action are blurry and my present is a riddle I got tired of figuring out. There’s nothing better than to miss the past as if we weren’t as confused back then, right? Anyway, have something to lose, that’s the first rule. I had my hobbies and, more importantly, my craft. Writing. I love my writing, and before this whole self-annihilating affair, I lived for it. To a certain extent, I still do. Writing this piece and a couple of poems that also have this topic, or a bastard child of it, is proof. I am nothing if not an accumulation of words, unspoken, unwritten, yet to be considered. This is what I do, and for a couple of weeks, this is what I lost.
The tale starts with the writer getting a job in a call centre where she is immure to a computer and a desk for nine hours, using only common words and being the most condescending person on the site. Fifteen minutes for break because a cry never gets old. Thirty-five for lunch, but not actual nourishment like literature or essays. Instead, it is material food because you are paid to have a functional body, not a soul. Another fifteen minutes before leaving, because why not.
Step 2: Become Orpheus without Euridice.
Once you are detached by external forces from what you love to do, you have two choices. You can create time and organise your passion with your work and social life, or you can take a drink of the fountain of Entropy and laugh at how everything falls apart.
I tried to choose the first alternative in my earlier days at work. I was balance incarnated, but I wanted more, or maybe I wanted less. Less noise, less thinking, less acknowledgement of being alive. So I became a white canvas because I couldn’t stand the pressure of being something. This didn’t last much because I am naturally an obsessive maven. I need a muse. I need something to be proficient in. I needed a god, and the sky was empty, like Plath once said: the sky was empty, and my minutes were taken. So I made my own. Rather, I searched for it.
I became Orpheus and went to hell because there must be something worth taking there. Something that won’t judge me. Something to feed my creativity with, my vitality. A muse, a lover, a boy with baggy eyes and lips I want to kiss until my tongue feels like falling out. I didn’t look back when I was coming out, and he didn’t have much of a choice but to follow me. Boredom can make you fall in love in a minute. Sorry, he hates that word. Boredom can make you yearn for a strange woman’s touch in less than a second.
Step 3: Make a religion out of it and taste the bittersweetness of sainthood
I want to please above anything else. I believe it is sort of my love language. This mortification of the self, this complete destruction of reality, this collage of broken personalities morphed together by the string of wanting to fulfil someone else’s hunger. I want to be missed more than I want to be loved — that is, I want to be needed — and so I made myself a constant that could be lost. You do this by becoming everything: the lover, the friend, the pupil, the whore and the girl who is lesser for them to be more. It’s not a good idea. There is not a single bad habit that could be perceived as a good idea, but it’s fun. Now, with reality destroyed, everything could be deemed as fun if you count it by the number of heartbeats your heart dances to in a minute. I want my heartbeats to be a constant melody, a single sound. I like when it beats so quickly I cannot tell if it is about to stop or calm down.
Dye away your brunette hair and watch what remains burn in blonde. Buy him the sweets, buy him what he wants and what he doesn’t ask for. Touch him, and let yourself be touched. Let yourself be gone in a hand that doesn’t feed you but that may if you become good enough. Learn you are never going to be enough and throw away that fear, too. Your time, devote it to the studies of your lover, find the likeness of his face in the vertices of this planet and forget you had a face once.
'Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls — which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? (…) And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.'
- The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Step 4: Feel insanity crawl inside your skin. Get drunk on it.
I welcomed the weekend knowing I was going to make a mistake. I remember waking up on Friday, earlier, so I could go to the doctor and pretend I was sick so he could get me an incapacity for work. I remember texting one of my only friends who knew the whole context: "It's today. It's today. I can feel insanity crawling inside my skin." I wasn't lying. I was able to feel how my desires for carnal euphoria and my appetite for disorder were in their own coitus. At this point, half of this piece had been written, and I had waited because I knew I could get worse, and I thought—no, I believed—I was going to be beautiful. Unfortunately, all I was was hollow.
More than hollow. Hollowness was a girl making an idol out of a promise never uttered, therefore a dream I never admitted to having dreamt. Hollowness was looking beauty in the eyes and believing the eyes looking back resembled my own. I wanted. I didn't know what I wanted, and I thought—no, I believed—that I was wanted, even if only on the superficial level, I was wanted. Proof. I searched for proofs because I wasn't crazy. I was wanted. I was desired. I could have been a good lover if I was given the chance. I wanted to prove it. I wanted to be wanted, and he was very beautiful, and I felt so deserted by any hope to get my life moving again. I was stagnancy in a girl, and he was a darkness I convinced myself could enlighten me.
This is insanity. Get drunk in a house far away from your home—that is, if you ever had one; nothing is sure anymore. This is insanity: getting high in a different city with people you barely know, who barely know you, who think you are sickly obsessed with a man who couldn't care less. This is insanity: sleeping with the man and crying the next day because everything you ever wanted has the marks of your molars engraved on it. Because everything you ever wanted had to unlock your jaw from their rib cage. This is insanity: wanting to make something bleed, wanting to drink the sea, wanting to drown because you weren't reciprocated in your madness. This is insanity.
This is the absolute obliteration of the self. This is how you lose yourself.
Are you laughing?
Postlude
I lay on the floor as I type the following. I haven't spoken to or seen the object of my desires, impulses, and whatever synonym you can think of to describe an unhinged urge to see a man wanting you back, in days now. It's as boring as ever. I was thinking something else, you know? I mean, the dramatisation, my tears, his apathy, the whole performance was something that even the most average and sane person would have enjoyed. I am so sorry you weren't there. And I am the most sorry if you were.
In the days after the funeral of my ego, the police investigated and asked questions to everybody. He, the guy with baggy eyes and harlot’s lips, was free without any questions because it seemed obvious that everybody could be the one to blame but him. He didn't even realise a homicide had taken place. I didn't bother to send him the invitation to the post-funeral party, but I'll admit my gaze stayed on the open door the most. I wanted him to cross it, even after all the humiliations. I was expecting the punchline, the joke. I wasn't thinking of a romantic gesture. Obviously not. I am a whore for the cynical and self-destructive, not for mere delusions. I wanted him to cross the door of the place where my ego rested in a bone-coloured coffin and ask for something vain. Any favour, some change, an inquiry not yet answered by anyone else, even sex. I wanted the joke to fall on the platform, and I wanted everybody surrounding it to laugh. I wanted to laugh at my own self-prophesied misfortune. This is where the comedy would become the most tragic and therefore the funniest. The idolised lover returns, and it's not for the female counterpart, but just because.
Finale
You know that quote that has been gravitating around the internet for a while now? The: “If he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. If he writes her a few hundred sonnets, he loves sonnets.” That’s how my brain works, I realise. I didn't incinerate and dig the ground beneath me once I touched rock bottom because I loved the guy. No. It was never about him, not really. He was the medium, like the pencil is to the poet, or the melody to the singer, or the beer to the alcoholic.
Do you think drunkards are going to be fixed if all the alcoholic beverages in the world ceased to exist? No, because it isn't about the beer, or the wine, or the boy with baggy eyes. It is about the methods, the routes people take when faced with something they cannot face. Life, as a comedy that stands solely in its tragedy, is terrifying, and so we stick to what we know. You know this. You have heard this before. This is what has maintained our species alive, and this is what has doomed some of us.
I wanted to be wanted, as I already mentioned, and he appeared as a challenge. I was tired of sudoku and letter soups; I wanted something new. I wanted to prove to myself that I was lovable. I wanted him to love me because I wanted to leave him and have my fun. It's not something I am proud of, but as I ruminate on what I have written and on what I keep to myself, it is something that makes me smile. The bashful ignorance, the chimera of it all coming out as the lovechild between Hope and me. I told you before, Hope is against us, but to kiss it feels like kissing God. Principally because it was out of Hope I made this religion of mine that lasted two months.
To feel something, even if painful, is better than to have your nervous system doused by the monotony of reality, by the inexorable truth that even when all that veridically matters in your life is yourself, in the great scope of the universe you are lesser than the dust swept by the hairs of a broom. To curtail my existence and purpose to the affection I would have gained if I had played my cards with the proper intelligence was a masochistic and palliative exploit, made not out of plain self-hate, but ennui.
And it wasn’t the slaughter of the self that made my heart go the fastest, that made me have the most fun. If something, it was the prelude for ecstasy so often found in the minutes prior to losing consciousness when getting drunk. No, it wasn’t death that motivated me the most, I see that now. It wasn’t the fated end that erected itself on the horizon like something bound to fall upon me, like a promise vowing final rest. Instead, it was what wasn’t promised, but confirmed by the patterns of the world, that made me continue in the deed of getting my ego burnt. An end is the start of a beginning, and I have died a thousand times, to wake up the morning after with a new set of rules, a new set of morals, a new set of personality traits, and an emptiness that doesn’t bring desolation but excitement—a happy hunger I want to feed. I love to die because I love to resurrect. I love to learn, and I love when it leaves you scars with lessons beneath them.
I didn’t lose myself because of a boy. I lost myself because the pleasure of finding me is too great to not go for it on my own. Plus, the girl I was before was already dying; this dramatic departure was only her favourite manner of howling. There’s nothing she loved more than a good performance and a Shakespearean tragedy.
What can I say? I love a good martyr
Such an experience is that of carnal love — instant and devouring. Real love is marked by patience but all yearning is selfish
"Boredom can make you yearn for a strange woman’s touch in less than a second."
That`s good, realy good and feels like goosrbumps