In My Misery, I Started Hating Every One Around Me
For most of the past decade or so, I’ve been on auto-pilot — school, early morning and late night commutes, losing and coping, workplace trauma and politics, dealing with grief and the living on and wondering what’s the point in all of this, relationships, fights, breakups, hurting, forgiving and distancing myself, and trying to find home again.
My early 20s were spent navigating the workforce — someone who speaks out of turn, is too honest, wayward, and does things her way. And on some really sad weeks, grieving the death of my father. And even now, I still don’t get the construed work politics around cronyism.
Sometimes, when I look back, I wonder if I made any positive impact or if I was the one they remember as “thinks they know everything,” “know-it-all,” “too brave,” “too outspoken,” “wants to change everything,” or maybe even “someone who doesn’t have it in her to survive in the real world” as has been echoed by some of my closest friends.
When I turned 25, I became even firmer in my stance, and that’s when I quit my job and started to follow a different path.
Looking back, what I really ran away from is the idea of “going to school, getting a job, performing well, getting promoted, earning your merits and getting higher positions, then finally getting to retire with money for when you’re 60 and over.”
And I think this is a wonderful option. It’s just that it wasn’t for me. And I hated it when everyone implied, “this is all your life is going to be about because this is all you can be.” I don’t blame them.
To be honest, it’s also more of my inner critic saying some of these. But my inner critic wasn’t birthed solely by my lack of confidence, candor, or ability to articulate well to persuade or to present myself. She was also born from trying to please everyone while looking for support and love in places where they couldn’t be found.
The people around me didn’t help me make sense of the world in shades of optimism. They made me see the world in shades of hope faded into muted tones. I’ve been let down a lot of times as a kid and as an adult more than I’m a disappointment to my parents. And I think it’s just how the world is and that life kind of owes us a lot.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, “You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery, you began to hate everything around you.”
So, my mid-20s were spent hating a lot of things and making my traumas and disappointments in life a huge part of my identity. If you can relate, it’s okay. This is a big part of the healing journey.
Jack Kerouac describes the older generation as the beat generation. In some sense, aside from starting a great movement of rejecting conventional norms, a lot of them also did beat their kids growing up — some emotionally, some physically, some both.
And in relation to that, we’re the “just getting through generation.” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m right. Or maybe this isn’t anything that has to do with right or wrong. But within my social circles, a lot of us are just happy to get by day to day. And on social media, a lot of millennials and elder Gen Zs are quickly retiring to “old people hobbies and lifestyle.”
Still, we’re the generation that you can rely on when the going gets tough. We put resilience in resiliency. And while we’re trying to make sense of everything, we’re also here giving the world its space with the hope that everything will be alright.
Oddly enough, whatever we’re going through, time passes, and we do get through them, even if we’re not the same people as we were.
I didn’t even realise how miserable I was until one cloudy afternoon on a cold October day. I was walking home and it was as if the people on the park, the recently pruned trees and the white skies have never been beautiful.
Do you know the feeling of reading a piece of literature for the first time and it’s so moving you feel it on every part of your being? That’s how it felt on that day.
From then on, I was able to become a bit more happier each day.
Reader, what I’m really trying to say is when you feel all alone, with the weight of the world on your shoulders (because I know we all will feel this at certain points in our lives), try zooming out. You’ll see that a lot of us carry a portion of the hurt and the pain that collectively weighs us down. And if we look at the bigger picture, we’ll realise there’s more to look forward to.
Because life isn’t all negative, or black and white, or all about surviving and resilience.
Some days, you’ll thrive, heal, overcome, and become a better version of yourself.
Give yourself grace as you go through all that you might be going through.
Afterall, the grace we really need isn’t the grace that comes from the outside, but from within us.
