A Dose Of Negativity

Life often feels like difficult crud.

Let’s face it. During almost every single period of your existence there is probably going to be something in your life that is honestly just not that much fun. Maybe a lover cheats, maybe your bank balance is only in the double digits, or maybe Netflix is being shaky because your Internet provider lies about the quality of their service. Nevertheless, it is statistically probable that something in your life is wrong. Something should be fairly unideal.

Quite frankly, if nothing in your life is suckishly going down the drain, no matter how menial that thing may be, something should probably feel severely off. In a cosmopolitan, universal sense, there has to be some aspect of your life that isn’t going right. Perhaps it’s the collection of aggressive clouds hovering claustrophobically above you. Or rather, it might be the absence of those very clouds and the sheer annoyance of sunlight. Or even more realistically, it could be the irrefutable fact that you will never know what the weather is going to be like in the first place, since meteorologists can’t seem to do their jobs. Nevertheless, perfection, the complete dissipation of annoyances, mistakes, flaws, etc., is creepily unnatural.

That very perfection is usually formed through the excessive wrong-doing of overly optimistic viewpoints. Things can look like they’re going places, life can seem positive, and hope can wholeheartedly feel graspable. Maybe, but life still is difficult and cruddy.

So switch it up.

Look at the negative. No matter how positive that negativity may seem, it still lurks in your shadows, the corners of your eyes, and the little crevices and fleshy areas of your body that you rarely check for malignant birthmarks or tumors. Something is negative; sometimes you only have to look hard enough to find it. Imagine the possibilities for the negativity; oftentimes it helps.

You might cross the street and get hit by some automobile. You might get cancer of the [insert body part]. Or even more incredibly, you might get fatally struck by an atmospherically miniaturized asteroid. Anything negative could happen. And more importantly, anything negative could be happening – for after all, life is difficult and cruddy.

Yet what’s frequently most difficult, is the misconception of calm, the utter, unadulterated uppercut from life into that seemingly beautiful, yet oh-so-ignorant, pearly smile you don. For you could be having the best day of your existence: your enemy on Game of Thrones could become poisoned; you could win the largest lottery in recorded history; or you could finally break that Kit Kat so that it satisfactorily mimics the impossible crunch caught on those melodic commercials. But then, as if you were unjustly awarded with an excess of positivity, your lover cheats, your bank balance drops to the double digits, and your Netflix stream stutters. And thus, equilibrium is universally achieved and the unfortunate thematic concept of your existence floats along your storyline as life, once more, is awfully difficult and cruddy.

Yet astonishingly, something doesn't even need to strike you with the overbearing sense of hopelessness and universal betrayal for your life to feel difficult and cruddy. Things could be happening to the lives of your family members, your friends, your coworkers, or even those children in Africa you are so often ignorantly reminded of for the overbearing difficulty of life to knock on your door once more.

And oh how it will knock. At times, the knocking may seem like the usual beat that accompanies you as life quickly, yet somehow uneventfully passes you by. While other times, the knock will incapacitate you with such an alarming degree, magnitude, and velocity, that you yourself will no longer feel your own life feeling difficult. And so, you numb. You crystalize and harden, blocking helping hands yet also paradoxically stagnating the very cause of your dazed paralysis.

Smack yourself and wake up. Wake up and smell the proverbial difficult crud, because yes, your life reeks of it, and so do ours. However, after you wake up, don’t continue your pre-established, cyclical storyline. As Khaleesi from GOT would demand, “Break the wheel.”

Instead of putting on your tough face, your happy face, your everyday face, stop. Get down, deep, and dirty, take off your mask, and analyze the crud out of your difficult, cruddy life. After all, you might just notice that that very difficult crud, when all is said and done, is merely the ingested and digested parts of your life. Your difficult crud is you.

So yes, life often feels like difficult crud. It should.

     - J. A. Kind