(I wrote this blog last night but was unable to post it, just so the tenses and commentary make sense to you)
I planned on going to sleep awhile ago. I'm pretty tired, but I just feel like writing--even though I kind of posted a blog this morning. I've had a fairly good day and I've been really happy. But I'm convinced there's something in us that just wants to be sad. I see it all the time: people living good lives who just wallow in soap-opera-melodrama emotionally. I think that's why we do it--we want our lives to be more interesting, more passionate--like a TV show. It's the cause for some whiskey rampages and for a lot of shallow romances. It's probably the reason I'm depriving myself of sleep and listening to sad music and reminiscing (while also making run-on sentences, apparently). And objectively, I wonder if my attachments to people have been quite as strong as they seemed or if it's just the out-of-work actress in me looking for some attention. "The heart is desperately wicked, who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9) I think I know what I feel and have felt, but I think a lot of us are deceived by our own hearts.
I can have everything in the world going for me and still sit down at night, head in hands, and wonder about the past. But I've found that one of the best things I can do is try to watch myself, the way an outsider would, and try to determine the cause. It's rarely just what you think it is. We manufacture reasons to be dissatisfied all the time. Honestly, I think I hunger for trouble. There's an urgency I've always had that seems wasted on my mundane life. I think I was built for life-and-death, stormy situations. It's kind of messed up, I guess, but I thrive on them. I want to fight and run and come to the brink of breaking until I do something worthwhile and then find a new adventure. I want to laugh and weep and scream and dance and save lives. Maybe I'm just rambling now, courtesy of my jumbly, tangly-tired thoughts. In any case, I guess it's been kind of an epiphany figuring out that these things I've felt weren't great love and loss and tragedy. They were just vanilla inconveniences in a kid's life. That's why I always bounced back quickly, sans one situation. Even so, we're all full of tantrums and pity-parties when nothing is really amiss.
One of my favorite things about sad music is that it makes you feel like you've taken part in some great, dramatic story. You've truly loved or found something wonderful and then had it ripped away. Maybe I get all teary-eyed at weird times like this because I'm subconsciously just trying to emulate "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" by Frank Sinatra. Or there are epic, dynamic songs like "Cosmic Love" by Florence and the Machine that make me feel untamed in my sorrow. I would take wild grief over a stagnant life any day, I think. Is that crazy? I just feel like without experiencing incandescent happiness, fierce anger, and gut-wrenching anguish, we can't say that we have truly lived. But most of us never do anything important enough to get those extremes. So we counterfeit it in music and movies and terribly dull life situations which we pretend are much more vital to our lives than they actually are. We claim to need things that we absolutely do not--like a relationship or alcohol--simply because there's an inherent yearning for real, passionate, lay-it-on-the-line living in each of us.
I hope one of these days I get the real thing. For now, I've got my sad songs and fairytales.
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