I always felt like everyone else in the world had a “thing” you know that specific tangible thing about them that defines who they are. Maybe they were voted prom king or queen, got that superlative in the high school yearbook, was just so breathtakingly handsome or gorgeous that they would always be socially coveted by a court of reverent and pious peers. Maybe it was the career they just said until they were blue in the face, this is what I’m going to do, or the fact that they bought their first house due to tremendous fortune and hard work. Everyone has a “thing”, and everyone believes that everyone else has a “thing.” I was not one of these people, at least not until recently.
This is of course, if you don’t count a stoner once referring to me as “that creepy Kurt Cobain kid” to a group of my friends who were getting stoned with him, or the “he looks like Screech with AIDS” comment left on someone’s Facebook page after a picture of us flexing was posted (he was a physical anomaly and I look like what happens when Cancer is killing you, it was meant to be comical). Eddie Brophy and a “thing” were not synonymous with each other unless of course that thing was negative or cautionary. After marriage and children? I gave up on wanting a thing. At this stage in my life? I just hope that I am not a shitty parent, and at some point eventually maybe (if I’m lucky) my college education will help me get a job rather than turn the job search into a glorified effort in futility. I tried, I tried REALLY hard my whole life to have something. I had to. I have buck teeth, I’m 130lbs, I have duck feet (that required me to wear leg braces as a kid), I don’t have a lot of discernible life skills, I’m mentally ill, I have a learning disability, Jesus Christ if you wanted a list of shit that would make me an ineligible member of the human race and the least likely to be deemed a commodity? I could rattle off things for days. I just really hold onto the hope that I won’t be a shit parent. That’s really all I have. I’m sure I will. Parenting is REALLY fucking difficult. I try, but at the end of the day? I make a million mistakes. Hell, I stopped trying to think I could be the best husband YEARS ago when my wife realized how remarkably annoying and flawed I am. Publishing a book is a VERY big deal. If you’re a writer and you publish a book? That is, that is a success very few can take claim for. However, I am also me so that sort of logic doesn’t cut it. My immediately ideology publishing a book? Fuck, this is going to fail. No one is going to read it, or fucking care about it. WHO DOES THAT?!? Jesus Christ, even now I am still thinking…how the fuck can you see something you created in photos or on the shelf of a book store you grew up in and still downplay the importance of that? So what if not every single person in the world knows who you are…the ones that do, do! That was when it fucking hit me, and hit me hard. I have been very fortunate in the past two months to receive private messages on Instagram from people who honestly? Would not believe would waste their time on my sorry ass if I was on fire. Here they are, congratulating me. Telling me they bought a copy. Sharing things from our past. In some cases? Asking if I remember them. What?! Do I remember you? I am pretty sure I didn’t exist in my hometown. A few of these experiences have made me think about how much depression stole from me growing up. The fact that I was too scared, too anxious, too quick to think everyone hated me to even try to initiate conversation or strike up friendships with these people. So much of my life has either been hiding behind long hair and a somber disposition or trying to numb myself from the fear that no one gives a shit about me and I am going to die without a “thing.” So there I am, driving around in my SUV after dropping off a copy to a woman who reached out to me last night asking where she could get it. I have known her since second grade, I can literally remember one encounter with her at the Boys and Girls Club. Like so many others? I just assumed I wasn’t on her radar and if my name came up it would either make her break out in hives from her disgust of me or she would say “Who?” And she reached out to me to tell me that she had failed to pick up a copy at Barnes and Nobel after telling her husband that’s what she wanted for her birthday. This woman wanted MY book for HER birthday. Fucking…WHAT?!? Of ALL things to want? Why my book? In high school? I was the kid who became a recluse because he didn’t want to upset his parents by getting into trouble. I would fill notebooks up with narratives about just wanting to be somebody else, someone who was attractive, smart, funny, worth loving. I wanted prom night, the superlative, the friends, the ability to not feel so uncomfortable with the idea of girls that I avoided them completely or found myself in relationships where I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing because my only knowledge of being a person was informed by television or film characters. There was one summer when I was trying to make my neighborhood friends laugh outside of a gas station, the clerk was smoking a cigarette and was getting a kick out of my Chris Farley self-loathing throw myself into things to make people laugh and said “If this kid did drugs? He could be a star. He would be funnier than he is now.” That fall? I was into drugs. I was so tired of climbing through windows my sisters climbed out of to run away and my dad shoving me in their room to unlock their doors. I was sick of sitting in a cold basement by myself watching VH1 specials about rock stars who were train wrecks, but people loved them for it. I was so sick of not being remarkable or worth talking to. I tried to become a dead guy so people would think I had some iota of character to me…and listening to this 2001 hits Pandora list…that made me so FUCKING angry. Why couldn’t I have just been me? Then I thought about how a few people had been messaging me and telling me their stories or expressing interest in my book. Maybe this whole journey from lunacy, neglect, pain, regret, manic episodes, and bottoming out…what if this is what finally helped me create my “thing” what if I finally found it…now what? Well, that mere thought made me pull my car into a parking lot and sob. All I have wanted my whole life was a fucking thing, and maybe this is it. That both filled me with pride and scared me. If this is my thing? Is this my only thing, and can I live with that? Can I live with being the guy who wrote this book and have that be all I get out of all that emotional fatigue and rueful affirmation? Time will tell I guess, in the meantime. Jesus Christ. A gentleman had messaged me and complimented me on the book…. last time this guy saw me? He was exiting an elevator in the nursing home where I was scrubbing toilets. He is in politics, he looked like a juggernaut as he casually walked by me. We exchanged pleasantries and my first thought? I am such a fucking loser, and he knows it. I felt vindicated when he wrote his message to me, not because I was comparing myself to him…but because I respect him so much and it felt like he might respect me. I don’t know where I am going with this blog…I am just working out a feeling. It felt amazing, too amazing, like I don’t deserve to feel it. Then it was followed by…a sadness, not a bad or hurtful sadness. A sadness because I just miss people. I wish before COVID and in high school I did more to show people how much I appreciated them. If I can be honest with you? I love the conversations I am having more than being a published author. If this book was what it took to get to have them? Then all the pain in my life was worth it. I just fucking love getting to know people.
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