House of Cards

What is it recently with this dictation the modern world seems so obsessed by? Maybe it’s something i’ve always felt but never been able to effectively put into words but its like we spend so long obsessing how we are supposed to feel. Maybe it’s television, the endless media tirade on joy, even other people, our supposed friends, family or even social rivals. We are always so busy watching everyone else, the most hateful form of social suicide feels almost inevitable.

We all think we know what we are supposed to be doing. We all have a plan. A general jist of what path you feel like you should be taking. You may have set goals for yourself- “by 20 i’ll have done this…by 23 i’ll have made it to that position…by 30 i’ll own my own house.” and so on. Make no mistake goals are important but when they are YOUR goals, not what the world has you convinced you should be aiming at.

If you have a goal and truly believe it’s yours, then nothing and nobody has the right to take it away from you. Yet, as we build towards this idea, the walls of life seem to close in. Then, it’s very easy to find your continuing life, the seemably endless day to day nothing more than a prison to lock your dreams, your hopes and loves into so you can carry on finding something to do with your time.

You know those days- maybe just like the one you had today. You’re maybe sat on your phone or looking at this through the familiar blue screen of your laptop. I wander, do your knees hurt from where you’ve been standing all day, do your eyes hurt from continuously sitting under the same light fitting thats been flickering for nearly a week now and even though you must have called maintenance 8 times- it persists? A timely reminder of your continuous existence while feeling like your unable to live?

Imagine on one of these days, nobody was around and you found yourself with an empty desk and a pack of standard playing cards. Naturally, you’re going to find yourself building that house of cards, where your mind is looking to just achieve something with the day. It seems like who we are and even who we want to be is built in a very similar way. Seemably fragile and delicate and something as simple as a gentle breeze able to bring about our untimely destruction, because it somehow seemed “impossible” to reach those heights- “so whats the point?”

Just like the house of cards, the smallest misstep, the smallest conflict or junction where you aren’t a hundred percent sure the way you go will lead to the certainty of success within your soul, the life blood you think you carry you to heights unknown- and it can all fall.

So. So. Fast.

What now? There you lie, sprawled out on the ground after having fallen so far. Your beliefs, your dreams, your loves having fallen around you, forming a neat pile of everything that once was. What do you do from here? What do you do- when you don’t know what to do?

Heres the thing about people- we are notoriously bad at saying the following phrase with any genuine meaning a lot of the time- “I don’t know.”

Not knowing is scary, because then you can’t be sure about what you’re doing or where you’re going and that means you can plan for it or know how to handle whatever emotions are presented to you. We fear the emotions we don’t know we are going to have- its why dreams fail, why people don’t go to the places they’ve always wanted to, why we find intimacy so difficult and why saying “i love you” to someone is the biggest cause of mental anguish this side of saying “leave me alone.”

What do you do when you don’t know? Well- we ask people, our friends, co workers, family. They all think they know what you should do, they simply want for you to feel better so they tell you what they would do. Empathy creates this environment where we think “well if it would work for me…”

Thing is, our situations and subsequent mental states are a result of us and the way we feel- in that they are unique. So we turn to what the world tells us to- to therapy, to pills, to something not to fix the problem, but to sedate the problem away. Maybe we don’t look that way, maybe we go down a more recreational route, maybe we do other drugs, go out and party, turn the music up so loud that the thrum of the bass and the ever increasing drum beat hopefully dulls out the pain in your soul and fear in your heart.

We believe this is the key to happiness, but all its doing is keeping us just ignorant enough to be able to “survive” being alive. I’ve said this before but it remains as relevant as ever- “living is a choice- existence is inevitable.”

All existence is doing is creating billions upon billions of people who feel so little through fear of hate or confusion. We follow crowds in some hope we will find something we lost as our house of cards collapsed to the ground, that maybe we could fill our lives with pale imitations of what we once were, rebuilding that house of cards but never to the same extent that we know we could, if we wanted to.

Because whether we like it or not the most important thing in life is to listen to yourself. To make yourself feel everything, even the things you don’t want to. To accept it as the house of cards falls and rather than rushing for the glue carry on building- for as we carry on building and as it carries on falling again and again, we will learn more about what we are facing and the balance required to do it.

Then, you will become a master of construction and understand that you and only you are in control of your own fate,

Now. Get to building.

Yours, with love as always.

DR x