I remember being quite emotionally disturbed as a young teenager, and at about 14, I can vividly recall a phone call with my dad in which I begged for answers.
“How do people do it?”
“Do what?”
“All of this”
I was facing merely standard woes of a teenager — troubles with love, facing indecision of my future, and yet even then I could see past my surface level experience into the deeper, blacker abyss below, and realized what this means. I really was, more than anything, baffled at how everyone was not in a constant whirlwind of freaking the fuck out at the state of the world.
My dad reassured me that every generation has its issues, that he had wars and bomb drills to cope with as a child, and that yet somehow against all odds, we cope, survive, thrive.
Then adulthood came and with it, the sweet escapism of busyness. Occupations of the mind helped to lessen the amount of free time I had to simply let the wheels churn and churn and produce nothing but increasing levels of panic. I constantly distracted myself — I dove into drugs of course, sex, relationships, school for a time, and most of all the ever elusive yellow brick road of financial freedom. That has been the most wonderful distraction by far, and although I’ve morphed into a hamster on a…
