Trying to Feel Less Alone: A Diary Entry on Life.
You just can’t undo life.
When you were a kid, you likely asked anyone in the neighborhood to come over. You wanted to be friends with everybody. There was no self-consciousness. There was only pure excitement to hang out, play games, hug everyone, to eat chocolate cake and to share it with all of your friends.
Then the questioner arrives at the door. He makes it impossible to follow your whims, to follow your joy. Kids begin to make fun of you. The first guy you have a crush on calls you fat, he also says that you smell bad. You start starving yourself to death and stealing perfumes from the mall. Before you know it, you don’t ask anyone to be friends anymore. It doesn’t sound fun.
All the excitement you had was shriveled by over-attentiveness to guys who didn’t like you, and massive consumption of drugs and alcohol. It feels much easier to have excitement now every time you reach for a drink. At this point, you are overly health-conscious, and you need to work the following day, so even drinking and drugs are out of the question.
The only thing that is left to experience is a remarkable amount of self-determination and triumph over adversity. To actively decide to act like a kid, follow your impulses, ask people to be friends with you again, and say Fuck it. It feels like this tremendous effort because it’s so vastly different from the cage you find yourself in now.
The outside world, the kid-like attitude feel completely alien, and you wonder if you can maintain it long enough to build a neurological pathway. The idea is to make this new way of being a part of you before the world just comes back to destroy your compassion, and make you feel judged again, before somebody comes along and starts ordering you around.
So you leave home and search the world for other people and places that make you feel less alone. Places where people don’t know you, where it’s easier to exercise your new way of being. If the usual judgment sets in, you’ll just leave, or maybe other cultures truly have a greater value of joy than yours does.
Either way, you pray, you search, you die inside depressed 1000 times, then triumph again, following a timeline that isn’t yours. You find yourself desperate to regain your youth. And then, while walking through the catacombs of your own mind, you feel a cold hand upon your shoulder. You turn around to see the Grim Reaper. He has come to inform you that you are definitely not young anymore.
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Jenna Rubin was born a freedom fighter. A rebel to society, she dropped out of high school and deemed herself a philosopher. Questioning society all of her life, she became drawn to the comfort of nature. The sound of the ocean, a place to lay her head, and a lack of hunger are all she needs to be happy. She has found this lifestyle in San Diego, CA where she spends her time wandering, moving, and revolting against social norms such as marriage, makeup, technology and employment. She believes living simply, and connecting with others through love, is the only way to beat the system.