“No more promise, no more sorrow; no longer will I follow.

Can anybody hear me? I just want to be me…”

– “Mayonaise,” Smashing Pumpkins

I don’t care what you think about me, or about my life, or what I choose to do with my relative short time in this world. I could care so much less about your judgements, or your opinions, or your beliefs that I’m doing the wrong thing, going down the wrong path, making the wrong choices in my pursuit of happiness. I live my life the way I want to because that’s the only person who will live my life for me. Not you, or you, or you; just me. I live MY life, so I’m going to do whatever I please. You think I should live my life a different way, or act in a different manner, or be someone else entirely? Great. Live your life that way and leave me the hell alone because, as I may have made clear: I don’t care what you think.

It doesn’t matter to me that you think I’ve wasted potential, or running down a dream that has virtually zero chance for triumph. I’m not living my life to make you happy, or to make you proud, or to make you feel good about your life by reflecting on your impact on me. There’s nothing I could possibly do that would make you think highly of me anyway, so there’s no point in hoping for your blessing. I’m not going to acquiesce to what you and the world want from me; I’m just going to continue down the path that is for my steps alone. That’s all I can do, because I’m the one who has to rouse myself out of bed everyday, to force myself to focus and keep going, to write or exercise or clean or do whatever else is necessary beyond indulging simple pleasures and immediate gratification.

I don’t need your approval, or your validation, or to hear you say the words, “you’re doing a good job and you’re a good person,” to know that that quoted phrase is accurate. I AM a good person and I AM doing a good job. I am doing my damnedest to keep my life afloat and rising upwards, trying damn hard to keep complacency from setting in to keep me moving forward. I’m not content with my life, and I’m not content with settling for the normal, or the obvious, or the status quo of folks my age. There’s no point in bogging myself down in a world and life I don’t want, because it won’t change the fact: I don’t care what you think, and I’m not living my life for you.

And I don’t care whether you like me or not. I’m not here to make friends, or put on a happy face (other than at work because, well, that’s the job), or make those around me want and desire to keep me in their lives. It isn’t my plan or desire or hope that you’ll like me, or be comfortable and unintimidated by my presence. My resting bitch face game is strong, and that’s not softening any time soon. I wear that mask of rejection to you all because I don’t want you to even try. I don’t want you and guess what? I don’t fucking need you. I reject YOU, not the other way around. As I mentioned last week, I’m a lone wolf and I’m happy to stay that way for as long as I live…

Or, really rather, that’s how I wish I lived. That’s how I wish I felt about those around me, about those external opinions or thoughts or judgements about me and my life. I desperately desire to dismiss your input on how I have lived, how I currently choose to live, and what I desire for myself and my life in the future. But I can’t, so I stress, every second of every day, about how you and everyone else is looking down on me. Looking down on me for everything I’m not, for everything I’ve ever said I could or would be but failed miserably at accomplishing. I’m weighed down by your negativity and your pessimism, which crushes me into the dirt until I’m little more than ash and dust. Everyone thinks I’m a god-damned fool for my life choices and goals, and all they do is sit around thinking about me and my idiocy. Right?

Of course not, because the harsh reality is no one puts any real time or effort into worrying about me, or my life, or what I’m doing, unless it’s directly impacting them. When I said I live MY life for ME because no one else will? That’s true of everyone. Life is brutal, with or without mental illness clouding your senses, and the cold hard fact is we’re all ultra-focused on ourselves, and our lives, and our efforts to keep going onward. The only people who may have had an outsized concern about what I’m doing on a day to day basis are long dead, as I’ve discussed at length, and even then, there would only be so much mental energy my mother or father could devote to their adult son.

No one will live your life for you, like no one will live my life for me. Perhaps I was a bit harsh at the beginning, but the point stands that I don’t want to care about outside perspectives on my life. I can’t get stuck inside my own head, constantly worrying about what you think or he thinks or she thinks, driving myself so crazy about how people might react to me that I forget to just live. Because when that happens, there’s very little chance of avoiding a downward spiral into a pit of despair. I’m trying to live a better life, to be a better person for my own well being and benefit, not to prove anything to anyone. But I have to keep trying, and keep my nose to the grindstone, since the only way I’ll ever get to where I want to be (if I can even imagine that place) is by focusing on me, and my life, and my efforts to live.