i'm a realist and an optimist(?)

September 2024 - from the drafts

I would have never considered myself optimistic in the slightest, until now. I’m really not sure when “now” started, because even on the absolute sickest, saddest days, I still knew deep down that I WOULD feel better someday. At some indeterminate time in the future, the stress and adrenaline flooding my body the second I woke up WOULD go away, and I WOULD feel normal again. I have a couple date markers in journal entries, but not many.

Most of those journal entries are just as phony as they are genuine - I would sit in Barnes & Noble across the street from my first apartment, in my childhood bedroom on the same bed I’d had since I was 5 years old, in my car in a parking garage waiting for a covert first meeting, and I would write all about how it was such a good day or week, and how it all was going to be fine, and how I had laughed and felt relief for any reason, and how I didn’t care about all the things that created acid waves in my stomach every morning as soon as I regained consciousness.

And I did believe all of that, at least in that moment, or at least halfway. But everything still turned my stomach the same way, and I still had to skip all the same songs, and I still couldn’t see any of the same names on my screen, and no matter how good I felt some days, it would always come back.

It really may have just been a survival mechanism, and if that’s all it was, it worked. Even if I felt like a liar, I wrote with a cramped hand so many times, “I will have new experiences and I will not feel sad forever, and eventually this will all be behind me.” And maybe it got just a little bit more true each time.

I truly used to live everything was the end of the world, that I was a born and bred pessimist, and the worst case scenario was the only thing I was prepared for. There was no hope, there was no bargaining, there was only thick, black fog hanging over every emotion or aspiration or dream or plan. It was exhausting and unexplainable to anyone else and made me nothing but the enemy.

Living through every worst case scenario all at once, though, I guess activated my primal optimism, the survival instinct, the fighting will, the will to fight. And so, here I still am.