Sometimes, I am stuck in the middle of something important. I am close to finishing something I have started and then things click into place. Some people know where I’m coming from. It’s not the same as throwing the event away and flipping back your cape while screaming about how you don’t give a fuck. Fuck. That’s just entirely too theatrical for me. I’m in the middle of doing something and all of a sudden, it occurs to me that I don’t know why I am here. I don’t know what purpose I serve in the grand scheme of things and I guess that scares me. If I was any less confident of myself, I’d decide that there is nothing to my being. I am a space taker. I am a person who robs other people of their opportunities. I hate when it happens because I’m just as likely to forget about it a couple of minutes but remain as scared as ever from when the thought popped into my head. Now, instead of being productive, I have to sit here in cold sweats and questions that threaten to unravel into an answer that no one wants to hear. More than anything, I don’t want to be expendable. I want for my impact in life to be meaningful, I want people to teach my name in a class, it doesn’t matter what class it actually is. But I want people to ask me to respond to their fan mail, I want people to ask me about my opinions, and I want people to come up to me and maybe try to get to know me. I mean, I feel like the only way that I feel a little bit comfortable with answering the question when it comes up is if I have people who want to be a part of me. Right now, there is loneliness because I realize that there ISN’T anyone who really sees me as a person with feelings and thoughts. I know that people kind of see me as this kid who walks around with a bug up his ass. I can hear their whispers. I can hear them as they mouth to their mothers, and their friends, or their significant others. They whisper hurtful everythings. They look at me with half of my face buried in a scarf and they already have this conception of who I am. Worse yet are the people who have talked to me and are positive that I’m not long for this earth. I don’t know if they’re right. I do know that I’m not BRAVE enough to actually end my own life. This is part to do with the fact that as certain as I pretend to be about there not being an afterlife, I’m not totally convinced with the whole thing. Part of me hates the part of me that desires to live on and hates others that want to live on too. The other part of it is that I am afraid of the darkness of death when it comes. I want to continue living and I realize that changes need to be made if I hope to continue living the way I do.
Which brings me to the introduction or maybe the foreword of the autobiography or whatever it is you want to call it. I prefer, “a collection of thoughts, daydreams, and nightmares,” but it is what it is. And what it is whatever you consider it to be. I’m not going to go around and promote everyone to think the same way about the sordid life the narrator bitches about because that would be awfully hypocritical of me. But maybe I can give an explanation of what it is that’s in front of you. I don’t want people to grow frustrated at the stream of consciousness, the constant griping, the bleak day that precedes bleaker days that are to come. Beyond that, I don’t want anyone to become disenchanted with the world because I am.
My professors tell me I need an audience. And for a while I thought that I didn’t need to isolate a certain target group and demand that they read this because it was intended for them. That’s not true. The book is for me. It is an achievement, it is a way of looking through it as an honest individual after years of lying and becoming a monster. It is intended for kids who feel like I do and what to change. It is for parents who are worried about how their children act. It is for the Wall Street Stockbroker who is unconvinced that is role in the World is relevant. It is for the college student who has spent his semester wasted because with the waste is the delusion of having an interesting life. It is for the girl who promises she will remain innocent but feels pressured to have sex. It is for the girl who I no longer talk to today. It is for her friends. It is for my mother and my father and my brother. It is for West Point. It is for all of these things and yet it means the most when I declare that it is for me. I am proud to say that the writing in here is barely filtered. At the most, it is something that guides me to be someone better as opposed to same old me.
It is also a chance to be artistic and different and show that people ought to give ME a chance.
A Full Day is broken into three parts which was not the original plan. The original draft of the book was only Nights Like This. But rereading everything that was written I realized something important. No one is 100 percent depressed and regressed and dark and empty and lonely. We survive by adapting and assuming that things will get better. We look into ourselves and we extract happiness and internal strife. Then we decide which one we went to dwell on. Most of us like to drown in our own miseries, as I did when I was still in High School, experimenting with drugs, and at the Academy.
But given a full day to live, I wish to expand all of these ideas into a triage of experiences and that idea caused the birth of Days Like That and On Afternoons Off.
It begins with Nights Like This, which is the dark, it is the night. The night is dark and perverse. It is unexpected and a good benchmark for what my depression feels like. By the time I got home from my West Point experience, I was suffering with acute insomnia induced by stress. I feared the dark because I would stay awake through all of it. And because I had failed, I constantly thought about my fears. It took me near to a month to overcome the insomnia and maybe 3 months to get out of the depression without the use of medication. As a result, the night was when I did a lot of the typing and formulating. There was anger and shame inside because I could only focus on the evil inside of me. The night helped stem the flow of fuel that evolved into the beginning of the book. As expected, the night is hard to read, it is filled with dread, anger, suicidal contemplations, hurt, and negativity. I would say it is not for the lighthearted but more than that, it is not for overly pessimistic people.
The book moves onto Days Like That which describes the end of the insomnia and moves inward as a source of the solution. It still holds a lot of the feelings that I had struggled with and find myself returning to often. But more than that, it directs the attention internally showing that I am the source of my own conflict. And I believe that this is the source of all of our depressions. First I bought into the idea that depression attacks surprisingly and that someone could be impossibly happy before they drift into evil. But that’s not the case and now Days Like That takes an active role in the rehabilitation phase. The day shines light and allows things to be seen. It allows little details to take shape and more than that, it provides clarity of the mind. Mild traces of humor and sadness juxtapose together to blend in the middle.
The book concludes with On Afternoons Off which is intended to be the final phase, the halfway house freshly out of rehab and into society again. They are broken with minutes of humor and comedy because I want to show that you can make a recovery back into a functioning human being. On Afternoons Off isn’t necessarily comic relief although it’s OK to look at it like that. It is more on the level of a return to normalcy. The afternoon is lazy and slow and enjoyable and I wanted to make the most of it.
There is gratuitous use of foul language. I think it is because nothing conveys a message fully enough for me than a well placed: Fuck.
There are references to a hatred of God to which I apologize but it would be lying if I didn’t admit I hate the higher power concept.
There is mentioning of girls and one girl in particular. It would be wrong to tell you that I’m not still hurt over the events that lead me and her to this place we’re at right now. But it’s too far to go back and I’m not going back. It might be rude too, but I cannot apologize for the way I feel or the things I’ve said because those are all the things I feel. If she cries I couldn’t care enough and if she calls me after reading all of this, I can’t pretend that I wouldn’t listen. But I will do my hardest to remain me and tell her as it is. And her friends too.
Please enjoy A Full Day as much as I enjoyed it becoming me.
