Throughout the past year, I've wrestled with what I can only describe as what Holden Caulfield would probably experience should J.D. Salinger have written a follow-up to The Catcher in the Rye in which Holden became a 22 year old medical student.
When we're young, we're told "just be nice and people will be nice back". It's basically a blank slate that gives kids this incredible sense of possibility and innocence that people are good no matter what. If you try hard enough, success is going to come to you and people will love you and everything will be awesome.
Growing up, though, we find that, very often, this is not the case. You're not attractive enough. You're not fast enough, strong enough, smart enough. Let me just say, this is not some bullshit John Green speech that everything is going to be OK because someone is going to come into your life and make it all better. Fuck that. Life sucks sometimes. I'm 22 years old and I already know that fact.
I was an eternal optimist during my teenage years. This was due to a mixture of religion and naivety to how people behave. I earnestly believed that there was inherent goodness in everyone and that EVERY person had the want to act selflessly, despite what their current actions might suggest. I wanted to reach out to these people and help them see how life could be if they'd just let go of their pride. (I realize now, that in that way, I myself was incredibly prideful.) That's the form my Christian life took, as I've mentioned in several of my other posts.
I referenced The Catcher in the Rye earlier for a few reasons. 1: because it was a good comparison. 2: because it's a kick-ass book. And 3: that book absolutely changed my life, more-so than any other piece of literature I've yet to encounter. Maybe it's cliche, but when I was 16, I was desperate to make sense of this feeling of complacency, anger, and dissatisfaction with people. Up until that point, my English lit education had been riddled with Shakespeare, Voltaire, Homer, Bronte, Golding, etc. And while I genuinely look back on these books fondly (except for Jane Eyre), I never really experienced a definite connection with any of the themes or characters. That is, until one day, when I decided to pick up a copy of The Catcher in the Rye from the Bookstore. Most everyone in the American education system has, at the least, heard of J.D. Salinger's best known work. Most haven't read it because of how "controversial" it is.
I don't really see what's taboo about it in this day and age. It's just a whiny little kid saying "fuck" and "goddamn" a lot. (For the 50s, though, that was evidence of possession.) As I began to read about Caulfield's journey home from Prep school, I had a profound experience. I remember picking up the book around 11:30pm and not stopping until I finished it at 4am. I ate it up. Everything Holden said, I understood completely. I felt like the book had been written as a direct letter to me.
I read it 3 more times the following week.
For the first time in my life, those feelings of angst were put into perspective and I finally felt like I wasn't the only one feeling that way. I understood that feeling disconnected from the superficiality of 99.9% of human interactions was OK. In fact, I felt like it was something that made me different. (Later, I realized that every teenager with any sort of brain at all goes through the same thing. Dammit, even I was one of those douche-y little assholes that thought they were different.)
Now, as I write, 22 years old (about 6 years later), I go through the same shit, albeit in a much more cynical fashion. Again with the cliches, I lost friends that I thought I'd have for life because they didn't respect that people aren't things to be used and tossed aside, like some cheap tool. People have feelings, people have wants and needs, people have faults that make them unique, and people want so badly to belong to someone (whether it be a friend or a partner) that often they compromise what they genuinely believe just so they don't have to be lonely. That's something I still struggle with, both in friendships and relationships.
Going back to what I originally talked about, when I was a kid, I believed that people were all trying to be as good as possible. Of course, generalizing people is stupid and lame, but realistically, people are out to help themselves at the expense of others (which, if we get down to it, is what capitalism is all about, right?). The sea of superficiality that I wade through on a daily basis is vast and deep, and I don't think I'd be able to do the things I'm doing without the small group of genuine people I've become friends with at DCOM so far. People and life end up being so much less than what we were told as kids.
Five Iron Frenzy has a song called Blizzards and Bygones that really spoke to me as I began transitioning out of Christianity and kind of served a similar role that The Catcher in the Rye did when I was 16. There's a line that goes "...before what might be became what's already been....there's a flicker of desire, and a memory of youth, a faintly glowing fire for some truth." Hearing that played out is really powerful because there's a yearning in the singer's voice, a longing for a feeling he used to have in his youth of optimism and hopefulness. That line really hit home for me when I was furthering myself from Christianity and leaving undergrad in the months before medical school started.
As I write this, I think back on my experience at UT and see that I myself was incredibly selfish for the vast majority of my college career. Blah blah blah. I've said all that before. I think the biggest realization you can come to at this point in the game is that people don't really change (in general, at least). The vast majority of people are out for themselves, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I think we're all on guard, and for very good reason. Some of us have had our trust broken by the people we love most, some of us have allowed too much faith in others' motivations, some of us have just become jaded and cynical. Reading this, I can think of instances in my own life that fit those situations (if the use of "us" didn't give it away).
Recently, I let something go (really, at the time it happened, it wasn't really my decision, "I was let go" is more apropos) and it really added to stress, despite the fact that I found out about it almost a year later. My point being that everyone goes through shit like that, I'm not some unique person that has such an abnormal life. The sooner you realize that, the better off you are and the better equipped you are to deal with people that haven't clued in yet.
I always feel embarrassed about posting these things because I feel like I'm whining a lot. But fuck that.
See you soon, often, and for a very long time to come.
As always, I hope you hated it.
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