I think this passage from Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers pretty much exactly sums up why I’m so unhappy every day:
“Was this the case with everyone—everyone, that is, who wasn’t already a thalidomide baked-bean, or a gangrenous imbecile, or degradingly poor, or irretrievably ugly, and would therefore have pretty obvious targets for their worries? If so, the notion of ‘having problems’—or ‘having a harder life than most people’, or ‘having a harder life than you usually had’—was spurious. You don’t have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn’t change.”
I really don’t actually have any problems, I just have a tremendous ability to create them in my own head. I think that it’s really the main problem in a land fat with bread and honey. The populace gets bored. Because it is tragically (TRAGICALLY) human, it needs to strive. It begins to focus on the things that are unimportant to create conflict and excitement. Like some of what I’ve been most anxious about this week:
1. Do I hate fat people?
2. Do fat people hate me?
3. Because I write posts about fat people having sex, will I never get a professional writing job again?
4. Should I wake up earlier?
5. I should sleep at my apartment more.
6. Are there still mice in my apartment? Because then I don’t want to sleep there.
7. If I run out of money, will I have to become a whore?
8. People only tell me I’m a good writer because they know I’m a writer, not because they like my writing.
9. My forehead has burrow wrinkles, and it makes me look like an angry whore.
10. I’m not busy this week, so it must mean that I’m failing at life, and thus, I should not be enjoying myself at this party.
I mean, that’s just touching the iceberg of what I’ve already gone through in the past hour. Every day, it’s like an avalanche of insignificance, threatening to land me on my back on the living room floor, completely naked, lying on top of a towel to avoid touching the remnants of Franke’s piss on the carpet, waiting until my self disgust peaks, so that I can get on with watching the RHOBH Reunion Part III, which is exactly where I was Tuesday morning.
