There was a unique resignation in me that I couldn’t quite articulate. No matter what happened to me, I could always find a way to chalk it up to how I got into the situation in the first place. I could boil it down to my last action, and how everything that’s wrong spiralled from that first step, my first step.
It was a personal hell, if nothing else. If I had gotten into an accident in the morning, I’d have already convinced myself of my errors and what I had to do differently by the time I unlocked my door in the evening. I had caused all my heartbreaks; all my disappointments were my own doing.
I lived that way for years, absorbing the blame as a proxy for everything everyone ever did to me. I had to learn how to let life happen to myself again; and even in that, I somehow found a fault of my own, of how wrong I had been, of how I had been torturing myself for years.
Even in my liberation from the prison I had made for myself, I had the absurd resignation I could never properly put into words. I had a habit of convincing myself I was wrong, even when I had been right, absolutely right countless times before.
I wonder where I found it—this habit of mine; I wonder who gave it to me, who I stole it from. I reckon, at some point, I must’ve picked it up myself. Ah, you see, this was how my life echoed inside my head. Everything boiled down to a fault of my own, eventually. It was how it had always been.
I had to learn to be like a child grazing his knee while playing outside and never sitting down to analyse how to walk correctly the next time around, never thinking about it, never having the thought tiptoe around his mind.
At twenty-five years of age, I had to learn to laugh it off. I had been terribly slow to learn some things in life, but I had to start somewhere, and I had to start someday.
Today felt as good a day as any, and so today, I let it all be.