WHY STOP NOW, JUST WHEN I’M HATING IT

The meaning of life and all that

It was my 53^rd birthday this week, which makes me an ancient old lady. This is quite surprising, partly because of my youthful good looks, but mainly because when I was young, I got it into my head that I’d be dead by the time I was 33, like Jesus. This meant that I never made any particular plans for the future, such as acquiring useful skills, investing in a pension scheme, finding a life partner or working my way up a corporate ladder. My approach was along the lines of live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse. Like Jesus.

I can’t remember how I knew that Jesus was 33 when he died, but I’m pretty sure that this was the full extent of me comparing myself to the son of God, with whom I felt I had very little in common except for the fact that I also had a brother (several, in fact). I also do not know how I knew that Jesus had a brother, and upon reflection it seems to me that I didn’t know this at all. It was more that I needed him to have a brother in order to rhyme with something (or other) in my essay-in-rhyming-couplets that I wrote for my English A’ level exam, because I was an obnoxious teenager who didn’t think she was going to live for very long and should therefore be allowed to get away with all manner of ridiculous nonsense.

And here, I’d just like to point out to my critics that I never asked to be born in the first place.

I appreciate that there are people who would disagree with this. They’d argue that I did, in fact, ask to be born. That before I was born, I was hanging around in the heavens as a disembodied soul, looking down upon humans and wondering how fun it would be to get myself a life. Oh look, I said to myself, there’s an extremely dysfunctional family that will be sure to give me an unhealthy dose of childhood trauma that fucks up my entire life and makes me good for nothing except writing silly stories and drawing pictures of dogs. How fun! I’ll go and get myself conceived!

My soul is a dickhead, obviously¹.

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned (never mind my dickhead soul), I never asked to be born. So all the people showing me pictures of beautiful sunsets and telling me to be grateful I’m alive are on a hiding to nothing. Am I grateful to be alive? Well, yes, I am. But only because I have no idea what the alternative might be.

When I was a child, I used to trip myself out by trying to imagine infinity and eternity. I’d envision the night sky, travelling through the stars, beyond the stars, and out to the edges of the universe. Beyond the blackness was more blackness, so much of it that I’d fall asleep before I got anywhere near to the end. I also tried to picture void and nothingness, but all I could come up with was an image of television static—ironically, this is something else that has since gone into the void.

At the age of nine or ten, I wrote an essay on the nature of love and hate. If I recall it accurately, my thesis was along the lines that love and hate were merely two expressions of the same force of nature that flows through the whole universe. It’s all just energy that our bodies twist and shape to suit our needs, I opined, no doubt in felt-tip pen on paper that I’d torn out of the ends of books. (Nine-year-old me was like some kind of mini-Plato in pigtails, if Plato had dropped a lot of LSD and incurred a brain injury.)

Sometime after this, I went with a friend to one of those huge evangelist church services where people speak in tongues and faint and writhe around on the floor, and for about three days afterwards I became a devout and panicked Christian. I devoted my soul to Jesus and stayed up all night terrified that I was going to go to hell because of all my very many sins, such as stealing felt-tip pens and tearing the paper out of the ends of books to write my philosophical treatises on.

I emerged from this religious fervour somewhat embarrassed but generally unscathed, and after that I gave up on the meaning of life for a long time.

Now that I come to think of it, it might have been during this holy fugue that I decided I wasn’t going to live longer than 33 years, just like the big baby J. Wherever that idea came from, it stuck with me for a long, long time. Right up until my 34rd birthday, in fact, when I woke up feeling rather silly.

There is, of course, a theory that says I actually did die when I was 33, and the past two decades have merely been a deep hallucination produced by my dying brain. If this is all a hallucination then I’m very very sorry that it’s been so weird. Also, if this is all a hallucination, then you’re welcome for all the beautiful sunsets and the generally great time you’ve been having at the expense of my expiring neurons.

In case I haven’t made it completely clear yet, I have no idea what’s going on here. Absolutely not a clue. After five decades, I’ve still not managed to come up with an image of nothingness that doesn’t look like the dial got stuck between channels on a portable black and white television from 1972. I haven’t worked out if infinity means anything, or if love and hate really are two expressions of the same natural force inherent in the universe, or even whether Jesus is in fact my personal saviour.

Another thing I don’t know is how to come up with a pithy conclusion to this post. I suppose in the end I could just say life’s what you make it, everything happens for a reason, and you’ve got to trust the process. But I do know that saying those things would make me an obnoxious wanker. So I guess I have got something to show for these five decades of bullshit after all.

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What it’s like inside my head ALL THE TIME. (Image from my illustrated short story ‘Kuebiko 2’)

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1. Thanks to Maura McHugh for pointing out the assholery of souls. You should subscribe to her substack, which is far more knowledgeable and much prettier than mine.