Most of you are not aware, but I am not married, I have never been married. I do not have any children, I always felt it was best to bring a child into this world with a young lady whom I loved more than life itself (insert Gomez and Morticia meme here). Money, as it was played a roll as well. I never want my children to live in a place where they can have anything they want at the instant they want it, I want them to appreciate what it is to work and save for their desires. I find the feeling of achievement from working hard for the things you want to be equal to the enjoyment of the item. This is important for what is to follow.
I am a throw away person. I am an outcast. I am nobody. My opinions do not matter to people, outside of those who I seem to agree with. When I step forward with a hand out, saying I need help, I am shamed, I am spat upon, I am insulted and ridiculed, and I am not alone. There are millions of people like me, and we are all islands to ourselves, we are alone in our suffering.
For years, I would struggle against this status, this crappy lot I was given in life, since the farm went under. You know, when I was younger, all I cared about was more. I wanted to earn more, so I could help people more, so I could have decent things, a stable environment for the young lady that I would fall in love with, and eventually have children with. I spent half of my life towards that goal, and the end result is this. Disheartening isn't it? If asked when I graduated from high school, if I thought I would be here today, in this state, I would have laughed at you like a mad man.
But things change, and here I sit, like so many other people, struggling to survive, while being shamed for it. What if's, and what could have been, plague me constantly these days. What if, I had held out for something more than a job working security? What if I had gone to college sooner? What if I had decided to by a Chevy or Nissan rather than a Ford, would it have lasted longer? What if I had decided to buy used rather than new when I had more money than I do now? What if I had decided to never move to West Virginia, or Pineville? What if?
Those things are all in the past, nothing can change that. All there is now is move forward, and many years ago, I honestly believed that moving forward was simple enough. You put your head down and push, and you kept pushing until the pile moved forward. How naive I was. What I didn't realize was, when you push, it pushes back. The weight of your life is carried in your arms while you push, and at some point, without assistance, it becomes too heavy to carry, and you become to tired to push, so you rest. While you rest you are pushed back in a never ending cycle, until you get lucky (which never really happens), or people come along to help push you when you are too tired to continue.
So, what is the point of this? Some people do get that push, they get that help to pull themselves up. They get the support of friends and family (or they win the freakin lotto). Many more of us, eventually get somewhere in life where we can rest without getting pushed back, and fight another day. The rest of us end up where I am. Shamed and insulted because of some imagined or possibly real short comings that are totally out of our control. We are constantly told to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, that we are lazy, or stupid, that we do not deserve anything better than what we have.
It instills in some of us a great depression, our own Winter of Discontent. No matter how much we initially do not care, it finds a crack in our armor, it grows roots, and eventually it blooms. The insults come faster and louder, until we have been utterly ruined. We are left as a throw away person, a nobody, worthless, lazy and stupid. But we can take solace in one thing. It might not be today, it might not be next month, it might not even be next year, but at some point everyone will be equally worthless, lazy, and stupid. But in the meantime, its time to try and rebuild again, to start pushing forward to make up the lost ground again. Until the weight of it all becomes too much to bare again. Time to shut out the poor shaming, the calls to do more to better myself.
The endless cycle of this life for so many. This was not the cycle of life advertised by Disney, this is the cycle of life in America. Created by corporations in tandem with the ignorant masses of people, who side with the people they are less likely to be with.
No comments:
Post a Comment