This is the first blog post that will be written (or half-written, as I assume) that is being surveilled. My sister is going to sleep, closing her eyes, watching me on FaceTime as I type this. We both have a strange form of separation anxiety or emotional dependence because we don’t say much while we are supposed to be talking, but when it is time to hang up, neither of us ever want to. However, we occasionally go for long stretches without talking, and also, we are better over technology rather than in person (she hits).
The reason my sister is watching me write this is because she is going through a breakup. Break ups, as they tend to go, give us a lot of insight into our station in life and life itself. My sister has done, very, very well out of us four children, and I revere her and have great hope in her that she can do or be most anything she wants to be in life.
Oh yes, how everyone used to say thing about me – Mr. Benjamin Bonkoske or “Ben Bon.”
I think that life crises happen in response to the amount one has accomplished. I know a poet who had a small crisis somewhere around the age of thirty, being that he was unpublished or something of that nature. And there is a man named Henry Rollins, who coasted through a midlife crisis while he was in his forty and fifties, being that he was very musically inclined – making many albums – as well as a prolific writer of some 18 books; but be that as it may, I am under the supposition that at sixty something, Mr. Rollins is going through late onset midlife crisis, because let’s all be serious, age and expectations will catch up with us no matter who we are.
Perhaps I had a quarter-life crisis at the age of 20 when I dropped everything and walked to New York. Personally, I think college was a bad experience; people were mean to me, and I thought I deserved better. (so aha, yes, an acute crisis assuredly.)
And maybe the end result of a mid/quarter-life crisis is that we walk away feeling much better about ourselves with that brand-new car or momentous experience. I did in a way, but I walked right back to a life I deemed insufficient and fell back into a depression that lasted five more years after that. But my step-brother was a lot nicer to me with all that clout – don’t think I forgot about that.
While I was at the Evanston (my hometown) YMCA today, I ran into one of my old teachers named David Feeley, and we struck up a conversation. Apart from the fact that I’m fifteen pounds overweight, even he couldn’t hide the fact that there was a subtle amount of concern about my standing in life as a substitute teacher.
I think that I appear as a great let-down. Or, as my supervising teacher would say about one of her students, “a fuck-up.” Even my therapist is telling me that I ought to reassess my prerogatives in life as they seem to not be bearing much fruit.
But that is the great irony. I am so confounded by the fact that despite this American expectation of me to be a part of some great machine, some thankless expenditure of all my energy for a paycheck, serving something beyond me, yet not knowing who reaps the greatest benefit, without a dash of thought of my own sense of self, without any respect or dignity for me greater than a slave, an underdog uphill with just as much likelihood of success as the lottery itself to do what you love, that by doing the contrary of this atrocious “dream”, I truly am finally content.
That is, with myself; Others being content with you is slightly different; Being content about what others think of you is a tricky thing to navigate. Sure, content is a little different than happy; but miserable is also a. little different than happy.
I feel like a loser. I appear to be a loser. But I’m not. I don’t know why I am not other than the line at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. And sure, it is great that I’ve got friends and family – boy do I have friends and family bursting at the seams and coming out of my wazoo; it’d be nice to have a little money.
But it’ll come, and it’ll go. Just like when I am happy, I know it will pass, and when I am sad, I know it will pass. But I walk the line. I walk with God. And maybe, just maybe, I am enough, happy, and still have a future in spite of my life looking like a failure.
Ben Bonkoske 